Monday, December 16, 2013

Digital Etiquette and Cyberbullying

                Digital etiquette is being kind to others online. An example of digital etiquette is when you don’t say anything rude to others online like hateful posts or comments on social networking sites. Using digital etiquette online isn’t difficult to do, if you have nothing nice to say don’t say it at all. When you say something mean to or about a person, you’re intentionally trying to offend or hurt them. Nowadays you see meanness happening more and more on social networking sites such as facebook and twitter.

                To not be mean online you should not say anything to intentionally hurt someone’s feelings. When you’re online you need to be more careful of what you say to other people. Things that you say online can easily be taken the wrong way than how you originally meant to say it. If you’re on twitter and you tweet your friend something sarcastic they could take it as something else. Anything you say online can be misunderstood because when you’re not talking face to face things can be lost in translation because you don’t have the other person’s voice to base it off of. When you talk to someone you can usually tell when someone’s sarcastic because you hear the way they say it or how they look when they say it. Being mean online is when you’re trying to hurt someone’s feelings. Being mean online is called cyberbullying, which is when you use electronics like cell phones or computers to bully people.

(picture from google images)

When you witness Cyberbullying you are either an upstander or a bystander. An upstander is when you stand up for the person being bullied and a bystander is when you just watch the bullying happen and don’t do anything to stop it. So when you see someone being bullied online you can either tell the bully to stop and defend the person being bullied, or you can not do anything and not help the person being bullied. To stop online meanness more people can become upstanders instead of bystanders. To be an upstander when you see cyberbullying you step in and defend the person being bullied.

(picture from google images)