Cyberbullying via Chatrooms and Online Forums

Thinking back on the chatrooms I used when I was younger I can instantly remember AIM and how all my little middle school friends would get on there and pretty much just gossip and start problems and drama with other people. I remember this one fight I got in that was pretty bad, I got picked on a lot in middle school and she would call me fat and ugly and tell me I had no friends almost daily on these chatrooms as well as an online discussion forum that was used at my old school to talk crap about people, then when I would see these people in school the next day they wouldn't say a word to me, they would barely even glance in my direction. So as you can imagine I used to loathe signing on to these instant messengers and chatrooms and began only wanting ftf interaction because I knew these people wouldn't have anything mean to my face they like to hide behind their screens. I think there's a hype with instant messengers because you can pretty much talk to people instantly, as long as they were around their computer, however I think that a telephone pretty much did the same thing except it didn't provide the hidden cover that instant messaging/chatrooms could, you also couldn't make up an anonymous screen name in ftf or even telephone calls sometimes. When we began learning about socializing online and hyperpersonal potential I thought of cyberbullying as a potential consequence. Maybe people have committed suicide or become depressed after some form of cyberbullying takes place, the fact that this occurs online allows these concepts to spread all over the world. I found an article about a teenage female in Korea, in all parts of the world these types of negative socialization are happening and it's becoming a more and more widespread problem that I think chatrooms just feed into, and even though chatrooms are becoming more obsolete this problem still occurs extremely often on Facebook and Twitter with subtweeting and calling people out in statuses. While there is a hype about online communication right now I think that it can be just as negative and people are starting to see that, there have been movies made about it and there's one that comes to mind immediately that I think really captures how much of an impact it can make below is a link to the IMDb page about the movie.

Korean Teen Suicide after Cyberbullying

Cyberbully the Movie