Although winter break offers a respite from their work at school, it also allows our students to spend even more time on social networking sites. Unfortunately, this can lead to poor decision making as they engage in dialogue with one another or socialize without the benefit of seeing their friends and acquaintances face-to-face. Two weeks can fly by if students are having fun and enjoying themselves; however, 17 days can also be very painful if students interact with one another in a unkind and mean-spirited manner or have no opportunity to talk in person with others.
With this in mind, I share an article from The New York Times by Nick Bilton entitled, “Meet Facebook’s Mr. Nice: At Facebook, Creating Empathy Among Cyberbullying.” Bilton describes the work of Arturo Bejar, Director of Engineering for the Facebook Protect and Care team. Bejar’s role is to help people, including teens, learn how to interact with other individuals or groups of people online in a way that reflects their best selves. According to Bejar, often people are not intentionally saying cruel things; however, jokes and/or sarcastic comments lack nuance and context. As a result, their meaning is often exaggerated or misinterpreted. When people realize the pain they have inadvertently caused, they often wish to rescind their comments.
As Bilton says in his article, “Interestingly, more often than not, the posts were not meant to hurt, but were jokes lost in digital translation. When Facebook asked people why they shared a post that hurt someone else, around 90 percent of respondents said they thought their friends would like the post or would think it was funny. Only 2 percent of users wanted to provoke or alarm someone else. ‘Believe it or not, most of the time people do mean well,’ said Dacher Keltner, a director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also working with Facebook’s empathy team.”
We wish our students a relaxing and joyful winter break, and we hope that they consider the full impact of the things they are saying in person and online—to ponder how their words can be interpreted or misinterpreted by others. We also hope that they resist the urge to always respond to something someone has said (not every comment warrants a response and sometimes the most powerful thing a person can do is to turn the technology off).
