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“My Own Bully”
The Internet is amazing at separating words from their actual meanings. It feels like every week, there is a new buzzword floating around the online world, a word that has been co-opted by a community of sorts to describe something that bears no resemblance to the original definition. Over the years as I have worked on this project and analyzed online discourse, I have noticed that ‘bullying’ and all of its variants are a regular victim of such behavior, and for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain at this point, I find issue with that.
One particularly infuriating version of this appropriation of the word is Internet users describing themselves as “their own bullies”.
“Sometimes, Bullying Is Okay”
The Internet is a fascinating place: it’s where nuance goes to die, and black-and-white thinking is celebrated like the second coming of Christ. It is the perfect breeding ground for polarized thinking that is inherently dangerous, no matter what end of the spectrum you happen to be on. One of the ways this pandemic of lack of nuance is affecting us in the online world is how we fight to justify abuse of any kind by coming up with roundabout arguments that very often have something to do with what kind of person the target of the abusive behavior happens to be. There is one very topical example of this phenomenon that I decided to make commentary on around two weeks ago, and it continues to be the point of reference for this article as well.
The normalized usage of generative AI programs.
“Cyberbullying Is Not Real”
Perhaps one of the most universal arguments people have for discrediting cyberbullying is the one where they deny its existence altogether and encourage you to do something that isn’t really even a thing in today’s digitalized world.
“Just log off.”
Emotional Disconnect
The Internet allows people to do things without any consequences — or at least that’s what they try to make you believe. Even though we have been using the Internet on a regular, everyday basis for several decades at this point, we still fail to realize that what you put on the World Wide Web will have its implications on the real-life you as well. The screen grants us the possibility to feel protected and unseen in our actions, no matter the ways we exploit the system. This is one of the biggest issues we deal with in regards to online abuse and cyberbullying.
The Internet & Its Double Standards
Over the years I’ve been posting my art online and worked to become a worthy advocate for bullying trauma and abuse, I have encountered countless ways the internet likes to turn its back to victims of bullying, making them feel like they are the problem. This is obviously true for all victims of any abuse, but there are aspects to this issue that make bullying victims a unique target of such demeaning treatment. For this particular instance of poor online behavior, I want to explore the concept of “the perfect victim” and the insane standards it places onto victims of bullying.
“I’m Fine, So You Should Be Too”
Over the years, I have become exhaustingly aware of the reasons people at large have for not viewing bullying as a particularly traumatizing experience. It’s been well over three years that I have been working on the art project, and in those three years, I have learned more about trauma invalidation from total strangers online than I ever had in the years that came before that. One of these tired arguments that have been used against me on a personal level as well as other victims of bullying I have had the pleasure of meeting has been the following:
“I was bullied too, and I’m not ‘traumatized’, ‘chronically ill’, or ‘disabled’ like you claim to be. You need to get over it.”
Sickness in Joy
People find pleasure in a lot of different things: there are as many sources of joy in this world as there are individual human beings. For me, my main sources of pleasure are being creative, spending time with my friends, having coffee with my dad, watching TV with my girlfriend, going to anime conventions with my best friend, petting our two kitties with my mom, and losing myself in the music I love. Most of the things I adore in this life have something to do with the people who are the closest to me, and most of the things I despise have something to do with me being by myself. I think that says a lot about the sort of relationships I cultivate with those I love versus the fractured relationship I am forced to have with myself.
But when it comes to the ways other people in this world find their pleasure, there are a few that have never made any sense to me. One of them is being a proud, self-proclaimed abuser online.
Question: Advocacy
You can’t deny the fact that social media has changed a lot of things in our everyday lives, even if you personally don’t use it all that much. Social media has changed the way we communicate with each other, what we deem as appropriate to share with our loved ones – and total strangers. It is merely a matter of perspective how you see the change in relation to what used to be, to pre-social media times: is it a good or a bad thing to you can vary a lot based on your personal life experiences, such as the generation you were born into. Gen Z’ers tend to see social media in a more positive light than baby boomers, and the reasons for that are pretty self-explanatory.
Mental Health Aesthetics
One of the greatest things about the internet is the community factor. No matter how cliched it sounds, I’ve never been part of a community of like-minded individuals – or at the very least I’ve never felt particularly welcomed in these spaces. So as is the case for a lot of people with similar background to mine, I’ve found community in the online world. Born in the first year of the new millennium, some of my earliest memories of being on the internet include chatting with my friends on Windows MSN and playing various games that typically had message forums attached to them. These MMOG’s were my second home as a Kid, as from there I found some resemblance of a group I could feel a type of connection to.
Your Skin, Our Guidelines
It didn’t take long for me to start having problems with the social media platforms I was posting my art on. During the first few months of working on the project, I was struggling immensely with posting and KEEPING my illustrations up on Instagram, because of one specific thing.
Community Guidelines.