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Not long after Mother’s Day passed, a mother passed away, which made people sad.
On June 2, after losing her 6-year-old only son, a mother in Wuhan committed suicide by jumping from the height of the 24th floor after allegedly being raped by the Internet. In the time when there was no news, this incident ignited the attention of almost the whole people. What do you think?
This is undoubtedly a tragedy. A 6-year-old child was run over to death by a teacher driving on campus, while the mother finally chose to commit suicide while seeking justice. A series of tragedies naturally lead to a question, who killed this mother? According to current reports, most people believe that the reason is cyber violence, but as far as the current disclosure materials are concerned, the logic between cyber violence and suicide actually requires more information. But starting from this case, we might as well explore the formation mechanism of cyberbullying.
Human nature: Ordinary people can do evil
When it comes to cyberbullying, many people will be filled with righteous indignation. It seems that cyberbullyers are a group of people who do all kinds of evil. In fact, cyberbullyers are often just ordinary people. Even among those who criticize this cyberbullying, there are many people who turn around and go away. Internet violence other people other things.
Why is cyberbullying so common? It is so common that many people don’t even think that their behavior is cyberbullying. According to the broadest definition of cyber violence, abuse, attacks, insults, and slander are also counted, as long as the behavior that threatens the right to privacy, the right to personal safety and normal life or has some kind of adverse impact is cyber violence.
The birth mechanism of cyberbullying is closely related to the characteristics of the network. A major feature of the Internet is anonymity, which makes most people seem to have no psychological burden when doing evil. Many studies have shown that many people are more inclined to break the rules when they are anonymous. Another major feature of the Internet is its group nature. Any part of it is filled with a vast ocean of people. This makes cyberbullyers often not think that they are cyberbullying, but stand on the side of justice or power. , It’s just throwing a stone secretly—but maybe if there is such a possibility, a post will become the straw for the emotional breakdown of the person concerned. After all, when an avalanche occurs, every snowflake is not innocent.
In addition to the fueling of social media, behind the cyberbullying is the embodiment of the evil of human nature. Human nature has a lot of shadows in it, but it can’t stand the test. In extraordinary circumstances such as war, it can be said that it will do evil under authoritative orders, but in a non-war state, it will actually do evil. There used to be a famous experiment in psychology called the Stanford Prison Experiment, which simulated a prison and asked a group of college student volunteers to serve as prisoners and prison guards. The experiment lasted for two weeks. During this period, prison guards must maintain order and have the right to do anything. Prisoners and prison guards are college student volunteers. It can be said that they know each other well that everyone is here to conduct experiments. They thought there were not many accidents, it was just a game and a dream. But in the experiment, things turned out to be quite unexpected, that is, the prison guards did a lot of things “hard work”, punishments such as confinement and torture of prisoners were staged in turn, and incidents of abuse emerged one after another. practice. In this way, within a week, the experiment was forced to terminate, because the situation would get out of control if it continued.
Although the Stanford Prison Experiment was in the pre-Internet era, it vividly revealed how unfettered power is addictive, and ordinary people are willing to do evil without restraint. In the age of social media, the evil of human nature is superimposed on the characteristics of the Internet, making it even more difficult to contain Internet violence.
Social Media: An Amplifier of Emotions
Of course, it is easy to criticize cyberbullying, but it is very difficult to put an end to cyberbullying, especially before the truth is fully restored.
Instead of criticizing cyberbullying with one word, it is better to reflect on why cyberbullying occurs repeatedly? It can be said that there must be some kind of mechanism behind this repetition—that is, social media is actually based on consumption emotions. To put it at an extreme point, whether this emotion is an entertainment-style carnival during cyberbullying, or a sense of justice that criticizes cyberbullying, it is essentially an emotion. Anger, anxiety, desire, etc., are the dark side of human emotions. The algorithm of social media absorbs and amplifies these emotions, which is its survival rule. Not to mention cyberbullying, most occupations exposed to social media often need to sacrifice part of their emotions. For example, the hottest live broadcast now seems to be easy to make money by talking about buying, buying, and buying in front of the camera. In fact, it also requires the anchor to provide a lot. emotional value. According to industry standards, the life cycle of an anchor with goods is only a few months, and there are very few people who can persist beyond this cycle, and often pay a high price behind it.
Taking it a step further, the problem is not just social media that consumes emotions, but its singularity. For example, why can only such negative emotions be infinitely magnified? Why is the correction function of different opinions exhausted? In other words, how is the mechanism of cyberbullying magnified? These issues have gone beyond the scope of cyberbullying and pointed to the survival dilemma of our era.
Empathy: How to face cyberbullying
When many people talk about other people’s cyberbullying, they always say that it is nothing more than gossip on the Internet, but this kind of speech actually ignores the powerful lethality behind cyberbullying—when thousands of people’s emotions accumulate on one person, the destructiveness exceeds Not all suicidal people are expected to be vulnerable.
In this, it has to be said that stereotyped cognition plays a certain role. Tragedy similar to the loss of a single child in Wuhan also exists abroad. When such a tragedy occurs, the public actually has some psychological expectations. In this way, this is in line with everyone’s stereotyped perception of tragic characters, and it can also allow the public to show their sympathy. On the other hand, family members behaved rationally and legitimately defending their rights, which does not conform to the stereotyped perception of victimized family members in the public impression, and often arouses boundless doubts, whether it is motive or other. But in fact, for the family members, it is actually more difficult to choose to restrain their grief to defend their rights after encountering a tragedy, but it is also a more correct thing-it can be said that the previous performance of this mother in Wuhan was very restrained and decent. But it is likely that it is this restraint that stimulates the audience who are looking forward to seeing tears and breakdowns. The problem is that families do not exist to satisfy the cheap sympathy of the masses. The primary goal is to pursue justice, even if this justice often takes the form of compensation.
When it comes to cyberbullying, from the perspective of governance, it is imperative to improve the network environment, and it is more important to establish a tolerant public opinion environment than measures such as banning accounts. A tolerant environment can encourage more rational and kind voices to emerge. On every social hotspot, you can expect these rational and kind voices to win in the end and play a role in eliminating and correcting deviations.
Under the current environment, it is difficult to achieve macro improvement overnight. For individuals, micro improvement may be more meaningful. The Internet always has memories, and social media invades our lives all the time, so it is very necessary to cultivate a healthy social media habit. Understanding the characteristics and risks of social media, guarding against leakage of personal privacy and information, and preventing addiction to mobile phones are suggestions for many parents to their children, but in fact, parents themselves should follow these suggestions.
More importantly, don’t think that we are far away from cyberbullying, because sometimes we accidentally become a member or helper of “cyberbullying”. When a mature media and information environment can be encountered but not sought, more can only be sought from ourselves. For the protagonists of various news, we might as well spend a few more seconds and try to think about it. If we are in the position of the other party, can we really do better than the other party? This is similar to a group of people throwing stones at a woman more than two thousand years ago, intending to beat the “bad woman” to death. At this time, an outsider stepped forward, “Whoever is innocent among you, you can throw a stone at her first.”
You may know who this outsider is, but in reality, you don’t necessarily need to be so great to stand up. Sometimes greatness may lie in doing nothing and being more empathetic. Human nature is malicious, but most of the time human nature is also kind. A benign society needs cooperation and trust beyond the society of acquaintances. This is what writers call “the compassion of strangers”.Note: This article only represents the author’s own opinion. Xu Jin is the manager of the WeChat public account “The most important thing is the economy”, and the reader is WeChat ashes-18