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Cyber Bullying: Protecting Kids and Adults from Online Bullies

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Technology is evolving so quickly, it is difficult to discuss. What can you write in a book today which will still be relevant a year or even a month from now? Cyber Bullying does not promote a product, endorse websites, or recommend specific protection software. If you want to believe you can buy bullying protection, Cyber Bullying explains why easy answers are inadequate. However, the book uses recent history, surveys, and specific real life dilemmas to present a complex overview of the darker side of our electronically linked society.

Anyone raised with "tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them" will recognize the organizational structure of these chapters. It does not take more than a paragraph of reading from the first page of each chapter to understand exactly what the chapter will examine in detail. However, these traditionally structured chapters contain shaded pages of specific stories relevant to the issues being discussed in a larger context. If you wanted an anecdotal picture of how cyber bullying has affected us, you could simply read the shaded material. This format makes it easy for the reader to quickly locate the information he or she finds most useful. If you remembered an important idea but did not know where you read it, this book is so clearly structured that you could find the page with that idea within minutes.

For me, one of the most useful ideas in the book was that Americans born after 1990 grew up in a world so completely immersed in technology, it is for them a native language. Those of us born earlier, even if we are highly adept, see technology through the filter of what life was once like without it. So parents trying to talk with their children about what should and should not be done in cyber space can appear to their children as American immigrants did whose values were shaped by the old country. I can't think of a better explanation of why communication about technology is so difficult for parents.

Cyber Bullying maintains that communication is the key to successfully protecting our children and ourselves in this brave, new cyber world. It does not underestimate the difficulty involved but it helps you see this problem clearly in its full complexity.

The collaborative project of Samuel C. McQuade III, James P. Colt and Nancy B.B. Meyer, "Cyber Bullying: Protecting Kids & Adults from Online Bullies" deserves repeated, ongoing mention as the definitive text on the topic. It will reach high school to college-level students in social issues and computer subjects alike, covering the fundamentals of cyber bullying processes, protections, and how to identify and prevent Internet aggression. Any library serious about the social impact of computer use needs this in-depth coverage.