There are two schools of thought about how to treat sexting and its more broadly defined cousin, cyber-bullying, which covers everything from hate e-mail to nasty MySpace postings. One is that it's a mistake to focus on the technology at issue, because the hype about it obscures the underlying, long-term trouble: Kids can be incredibly cruel to each other in all kinds of ways. The Internet and the cell phone are just their latest tools. The tactics for addressing cyber-bullying should be the same as the tactics for reducing bullying of all kinds: teach kids to empathize and make sure they have a trustworthy adult to talk to if trouble is brewing.This makes sense to me. But it's also clear that e-mails and texts and social media have some traits of their own, as the writer Danah Boyd explains. The bar for becoming a cyber-bully, or even a cyber-bully's accomplice, is much lower than the bar for becoming an actual bully. To torment a girl with a nude photo via sexting, you don't have to Xerox her photo and pass it around, or yell a taunt in the cafeteria, or even whisper about it over the phone, explains Robert King, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center. You can just press one button and forward the message to lots of other kids. And then those kids, one more step removed from the human being at the center of the flaying, can catch the contagion and spread it.
In other words, it's both the social context <i>and</i> the physical properties of the technology that matter.
