Reality vs Internet: Someone has to lose
Bullying is not a new concept; in fact it has been around since the beginning of mankind. Those who have been bullied know of not only of the physical but psychological damage that it causes. Today the internet has created a new type of torment, cyber bullying, where people are being attacked online by people who don’t even know them from the other side of the world. We teach our kids that it is not acceptable to bully someone else but to treat others in the way we want to be treated. Yet, we all know that this is not acceptable behaviour and that we would never want this to ever happen to us or our children, but why do we think it is acceptable for celebrities to receive this treatment on-line?
Social networks, blogs, chat rooms and forums have made it very easy for our opinions to be heard. The internet has shown a light on all the secrets, rumours, hurtful comments and hatred directs towards celebrities which until now were previously hidden. All you have to do is jump onto Twitter and type “I hate you” and there are thousands of posts targeting the rich and famous. Whilst everyone gets frustrated when your favourite sports star isn’t performing to their usual standard or a character in your favourite show is annoying you it doesn’t give you the right to then send abusive hate messages to them. You just have to watch a segment of Jimmy Kimmel’s skit “Celebrities read mean tweets” to find out how hurtful these messages are affecting these celebrities.
Celebrities are people too, they have feelings, they take pride in their work and accomplishments and when someone criticise them, insults their appearance or tells them to go and die, it affects them just as it would you and me. But in our culture we seem to think because they chose a life in the spotlight that it is fine to bully and harass them. Yes they did chose a career which involved making entertainment products, but did they choose to be told that they are fat or ugly, and that they are a waste of air from the press or public. No, they did not; they wanted to entertain us, not be insulted by us.
Anna Gunn from the hit AMC television show Breaking Bad was a victim of this torment. Gunn’s character Skyler White is the wife of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned drug dealer, who highly disagrees with her husband’s chosen career path. In the show Skyler isn’t portrayed in an unfavourable light and fans of the show took to the internet to show their disgust not only to the character but the actor. There were numerous forums and Facebook pages dedicated to the hate towards Skyler White, but somewhere along the way the hate transferred from the character to the actor. One person commented on a thread stating “Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?”
The fact that people cannot distinguish a fictional character from a real person is bizarre but not surprising. Since the early days of cinema during World War I Theda Bara Hollywood’s first vampire, would scare people and would be refused service in restaurants as people could not distinguish fiction and reality. Bara stated that “Audiences thought the stars were the way they saw them. Once on the streets of New York a woman called the police because her child spoke to me.”
The term trolling emerged in 2004 and boomed in popularity around 2010. Trolling is the new form of cyberbullying but the troll is more concerned with deceiving their victim. Trolling is defined as making your victim either believe what your saying is true, or giving them malicious information is the guise of help. Yet trolls have this perception that what you’re say on the internet doesn’t matter and that you act as two different persona’s, the real life you and the viral you. Ian Cameron iterates this distinction between the real and virtual: “There’s real life you and internet you, I think, I gain a little bit more confidence on the internet”. Nakamura coined this sort of reasoning as ‘greater Internet fuckwad theory’: “the rather deterministic idea that pseudonymity as a feature of online environments somehow generates offensive behaviour.”
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Internet Fuckwad Theory[/caption]
Trolling is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In cases like Charlotte Dawson’s, a judge on the television show Australia Next Top Model, it can lead to her suicide in February 2014. Dawson was the target of Trolls back in 2012 which resulted in an attempted suicide at the time from the sheer torment combined with a history of depression. After years of constant death threats and harassment Dawson took her own life, allowing the cyber bullies (trolls) to win. Stories like this happen every day all over world not only with celebrities but with children who can’t escape their bullies or trolls.
Whilst some of us like to hide behind the internet versions of ourselves being keyboard warriors and trolls, we often forget that our actions have consequences. We forget that there is someone on the other side who is receiving our deceptions, lies, abuse and torment. When it comes to celebrities we think that they signed up for this and that they don’t read these comments their publicist does. Although celebrities try to put up a strong exterior what they read and hear still hurts them.
