MTV Launches "Unity" to Fight Cyber Bullying
MTV has launched its most recent weapon against cyber bullying, an interactive visualization tool called “Draw Your Line” to help kids band together to fight online abuse.
It is a kind of interactive map where kids can post their own fight against abuse and find resources others are using to fight bullies.
In other words, this is an effort to unify the world of bullied kids.
Remember kids…united we stand.
In our cyber age, its just natural that bullying will turn cyber.
Bullies have always been there in society. And everything man has invented till today have been used by the Bad Ones to trouble others. But that does not make technology bad. The problem is that, with improved technology, the fight has become tougher.
A black eye or stolen lunch has been replaced by emotional bullying. We don’t realize that though it may seem quite innocent, modern technology and the careless way we are using it is actually putting us in dangerous situations. And blind as we are, we don’t realize it unless we are in the danger itself.
Shall we put the steering wheels of our car in our children’s hands? No.
But we will easily give them a new gear, like the iPhone and the net and let them use it on their own. There’s no going back. It's not easy to undo what’s been done. So we will have to find out ways to protect our kids in this age of cyber bullying by being more cyber smart ourselves and creating cyber weapons to fight these bullies.
Earlier this month, MTV launched an iPhone app called "Over the Line," which lets teens submit stories of abuse and harassment to be read and rated by their peers. Kids can weigh in on whether the bully in question went “over the line” in any given situation.
After the tragic death of the college student,Tyler Clementi, who killed himself after a roommate posted footage of his romantic life online, Facebook and other social networking sites have teamed up with social work groups to give the bullies a good fight.
I hope this new tool will give a solid boost to this fight. If the troubled people can get across to each other on a platform they will no longer feel alone and exposed. It is this feeling that leads them to go to the extreme. As always, information is the key. And well-informed and well-connected, we will surely thrive.
What do you think?
Follow Technorati