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In reply to the discussion: Florida girl, 12, commits suicide after she was bullied online: sheriff [View all]Posteritatis
(18,807 posts)I'm (just) old enough that I could get away from it if I was in my house. If I was five years younger, that wouldn't have been an option unless I cut myself off from all contact other than my parents, which would cause its own set of problems.
A lot of the older generation on DU will just blow that off with "Well, don't go online then," but the world stopped working that way most of a decade ago, and doing so is even harder on an age group that has a real problem being even implicitly isolated in the first place.
The generation as a whole? I certainly don't think they're worse. I had my issues with the generation I'm in, and the one coming up is somewhere between "no better, no worse," and "actually starting to Get It on things I wish mine got at the time." The members of that generation who are all about being vile motherfuckers towards others, though, have much greater scope for aggression and cruelty than my own assailants would have had back in the day. I don't think tossing blanket statements at the generation as a whole, or even technology as a whole, is terribly useful there, but it is a significant change that people need to be aware of while they work on trying to figure out what, after generations of just shrugging it off, we're going to do about it.