ENGL101:9:Online English Composition I

Reading and Discussion – Online Attacks

Read the article and then answer the questions:

From Subtweets to Sarcastic Put-downs, Online Culture is Giving Adults a Taste for Bullying

1) Do you agree that adult online bullying is a problem? How do you know?

2) How do you think people should talk to each other online?

Public Argument Writing

Read the article on cyber-bullying:

From Subtweets to Sarcastic Put-downs, Online Culture is Giving Adults a Taste for Bullying

Then write a response, answering this question: What is one solution to stop online bullying and attacks? In your opinion, why is this an effective solution? (While you may have more than one idea here, focus your essay on just ONE specific solution that you can discuss).

  -about 4 paragraphs or 2 double-spaced pages (organized with an introduction and clear main idea / thesis statement).

  -Write for a general audience. Imagine you will post your ideas in a blog or on social media. 

  -Use personal examples and first person (I, me, my)  if needed. Additional research is not necessary. This is an informal public writing.

From Subtweets to Sarcastic Put-downs, Online Culture is Giving Adults a Taste for Bullying

Neo-Nazis often tell me to kill myself–but it was Danny who made me cry. A complete stranger, Danny disagreed with something I wrote on Twitter and wanted to let me know. “Sorry you feel that way,” I replied to his abrasive comment, going on politely to argue my point. “Why are you sorry?” he replied. “I don’t feel bad.”

I have long assumed that people online stop abusing you when they remember there is a real human behind the screen. Danny didn’t, which upset me more than the explicit abuse I receive from neo-Nazis after I write about the alt-right. Because I had treated Danny with respect and he hadn’t responded in kind, I felt dehumanised.

But had Danny actually meant to upset me? Our exchange is emblematic of a wider online trend. More often than not, nasty comments only feel like abuse when you’re receiving them, not when you’re giving them out. It’s easy to throw out a hateful message without thinking, but the recipient will often agonise over its meaning.

In July 2016, this happened to Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire. A student tweeted to tell her to “get in the sea”–a popular online phrase that denotes distaste for something. The MP, unaware of the joke, construed it as a death threat, reporting the comment to the student’s university. And this January, the Green Party’s deputy leader, Amelia Womack, was branded a liar by thousands of men who thought she had made up a tweet in which she attributed a feminist comment to her 11-year-old nephew. The men who tweeted at Womack defended their actions (which included Photoshop ping her face on to naked women) as “banter”, but she didn’t see the joke. “Branding trolling as ‘banter’ or ‘just a joke’ attempts to excuse abuse. It is irresponsible and it is time it stopped,” she says now.

The government-funded website Stop Online Abuse says that “it’s not always clear where the boundary falls between expressing a point of view and being abusive”. These kinds of comments are not something you can–or would want to–legislate against. But when a thousand people calling you a liar can feel as damaging as one “Kill yourself, bitch”, we must think critically about the internet’s propensity for cruelty. After all, cyberbullying can have catastrophic consequences.

This January, two 12-year-old American girls were charged with cyberstalking after their classmate took her own life. In 2011, mental health campaigner Carney Bonner described how abusive comments he initially brushed off as “a joke” resulted in him self-harming. But abuse doesn’t only qualify as such if it results in tragedy. A 2014 report from the Pew Research Center, a US think tank, found that 40 per cent of adults had been victims of online abuse–a statistic we should consider alongside the fact that one in four adults in the UK experiences a mental health problem each year.

“Sometimes you need hard policies–no racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia–but the rest of the time you need the ability to empathise with those on the receiving end of a comment,” says David Kitchen, a Londoner who has moderated more than 350 online forums in the last 20 years. When he first created anti-bullying policies, he found that some users would try to “game” the rules. “A small minority of people are just bullies, and among them a smaller number still are incredibly skilled,” he says. In response, he developed zero-tolerance policies, “which sounds draconian but it isn’t … it’s liberating to have an online space be embracing and feel safe”.

It would arguably be impossible for similar policies to be implemented by social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, because of their sheer size, but not all solutions to the problems created by technology need to be top-down. Children and adults must be educated about the real-world consequences of online acts.

“It’s a silly little thing that can probably do a lot of harm,” says a media professional who was recently “subtweeted”. This means tweeting something–usually critical or mocking–about someone without directly naming them, so that only a few people, including the target, understand to whom the comment refers. This can give bullies plausible deniability.

“That modicum of doubt is what makes it all the sadder,” says my interviewee, who wanted to remain anonymous. The subtweet–by someone he respected in his industry–made him feel worried and unsure how to react. “Because what can you do, exactly? Respond directly to the tweet and they could simply feign ignorance or make light of it … subtweet their subtweet and you essentially lower yourself to their level of digital cowardice.”

By now, your sympathy may have run out. Crying about online meanies? Why not grow up? But the same psychological phenomena that motivate us to be mean online also make it difficult to ignore this bullying.

“Unlike in an offline situation, abusers don’t have to physically face their victim’s reaction,” says Dawn Branley, a cyberpsychologist at Northumbria University. That leads to repeat offending. In turn, because the abused can’t see the other person’s facial expression or hear their tone, they often assume the worst. “Sometimes people do not intend to be mean in their comments; emotion, humour and sarcasm can easily be lost,” adds Branley. So, yes, we should try to develop thicker skins. But we should also give more thought to our online interactions. Harmful behaviours aren’t restricted to basement-dwelling trolls or cyberbullying children. The digital landscape is giving grown adults a taste for cruelty. “A joke can be just a joke, but a moderator should possess the imagination and emotion to empathise with the subject,” says Kitchen. “If it feels too harsh, then it probably is.”

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.

Source Citation

Source Citation   

· MLA 9th Edition

· APA 7th Edition

· Chicago 17th Edition

· Harvard

Tait, Amelia. “From subtweets to sarcastic put-downs, online culture is giving adults a taste for bullying.” 
New Statesman, vol. 147, no. 5403, 26 Jan. 2018, p. 38. 
Gale College Collection, link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=tihsho_b&sid=lms-GCCO&xid=eb510109. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.

ENGL101:7:Online English Composition I

Discussion 7.2

Comparison-Contrast Essay

In last week’s lecture, we studied the following passage from 
Life on the Mississippi in which Mark Twain writes in comparison-contrast style, contrasting his two ways of viewing the river:

       Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.  But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: “This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?”

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

Now write a paragraph of at least six sentences on the following topic, including a topic sentence and a concluding sentence:

Have you ever had an experience where your opinion of something changed once you

     learned about it from a more technically informed point of view?  Did a starry night

     have a different appeal after your astronomy course?  Did your admiration of a story or

     poem diminish or increase after you studied its craft?

Discussion 7.1

Comparison-Contrast Composition

     Rock Crystal         Story by A. Stifter

 
                         Pictured above:  Albert Bierstadt, 
Strom Among the Alps.

      Long, long ago — perhaps maybe some time in the seventeenth century somewhere in the Alps, two valleys with a village each  – Gschaid and Millsdorf – lay next to each other, ringed by high mountains and linked by a sole, lonely path.  Due to this separation, the inhabitants considered each other as strangers. Yet it came to pass that the shoemaker from Gschaid married the Millsdorf dyer’s daughter, and the couple had two children, Conrad and Sanna.

    One unusually warm Christmas Eve, the two children set out on the path from the northward valley, through pine forest and over the pass, to visit their grandmother in the valley to the south.  Their mother had sent Conrad and Sanna to their grandparents in Millsdorf to give them Christmas greetings and presents. Conrad and little Sanna set out early, arrived in time for lunch, and were kissed and showered with gifts by their adoring grandmother. Yet she insisted that they start for home early. The temperature was dropping, and ice was forming on the puddles in the road. As Conrad and Sanna climbed the path back toward home, a significant snowfall began. It was a snowfall the villagers later called once in a century: “unprecedented, unwearying, and voracious.” The children climbed and climbed, but their path never descended as it should; they never find their familiar landmark.   

    On the way home, they “fell into” heavy snowfall which became so dense that they could see only the very nearest trees.  They looked for their usual signpost.

   “Shall we see the post today?” asked the girl. “The snow will fall on it and the red color will be white.”

   “We shall be able to see it,” replied the boy; “even if the snow falls upon it and makes it white all over we are bound to see it, because it is a thick post, and because it has the black iron cross on its top will surely stick out.”

   “Yes, Conrad.”

    Yet they did not see the signpost, and instead of going down into the valley, the children wound up wandering up into the bare rock and ice region. The big brother who made a little roof out of the shawl that his sister was wearing to keep the snow off her face; meanwhile, the sister, maintained her brother’s courage simply by how much she trusted him.  Meanwhile, it had been growing dark.  At last they climbed into a stone cave to spend the night there.  To shield themselves against the cold, they drink from the coffee their grandmother had packed for their parents. The exceedingly strong extract took effect at once and all the more powerfully as the children had never in their lives tasted coffee.  Despite the dangers, Conrad, the elder of the siblings, was overwhelmed by the great canvas of nature before them. They saw a northern light wafting in the night sky, and the stars gleamed and shone and twinkled.  Only an occasional shooting star traversed them.. At dawn, Konrad and Sanna set off to find a way down the valley. At last the boy thought he saw a flame skipping over a far-away snow-slope. It bobbed up and dipped down again. Now they saw it, and then again they did not. They remained standing and steadfastly gazed in that direction. The flame kept on skipping up and down and seemed to be approaching, for they saw it grow bigger and skipping more plainly. It did not disappear so often and for so long a time as before. After awhile they heard in the still blue air faintly, very faintly, something like the long note of a shepherd’s horn. As if from instinct, both children shouted aloud. A little while, and they heard the sound again. They shouted again and remained standing on the same spot. The flame also came nearer. The sound was heard for the third time, and this time more plainly. The children answered again by shouting loudly. After some time, they also recognized that it was no flame they had seen but a red flag which was being swung. At the same time, the shepherd’s horn resounded closer to them and the children made reply.

    “Sanna,” cried Conrad, “there come people from Gschaid. I know the flag.”

    Then the children saw on the snow-slope opposite them several men with the flag of Millsdorf.    

    During the night, men had set out  from both villages, Gschaid and Millsdorf, to look for the children. When they were now at last found, they were driven home on a sledge. In the parents’ house, all friends and neighbors were gathered — even the grandmother from Millsdorf has arrived.

    The common salvation of the children became a topic of conversation in the inn. The inhabitants of the two mountain villages, who had previously regarded each other as strangers and treated each other accordingly, reconciled themselves due to this joint rescue operation. From that day on, the children became the property of the village, and were viewed as natives of both villages who had miraculously been delivered from the mountain. Even the mother from Millsdorf was now considered a true native of Gschaid.   

           Comparison – Contrast Composition Directions:  

            You may have followed the story in the news a couple of years ago about the 12 boys on a soccer team and coach from Thailand who were trapped in a cave for two weeks. Countless people around the world were captivated by the rescue of the young Thai soccer team from a flooded cave. (Locate an article on the Internet and read about this event and how it ended.)

The  news about the Thai soccer team was recent fact; the account of the two children lost in the snow and rescued by the men of the two villages is a story from 1845 – “Rock Crystal.”  Yet there are some common points between the two narratives.

     Write a composition of two paragraphs of five sentences each comparing and contrasting the fictional story of the two children lost in the mountains and their rescue with what happened to the Thai soccer team.  Use specific examples from both narratives.   

MGMT210:7:Online Introduction to Project Management

Discussion 8.1

Throughout the past 7 weeks, you have been introduced to various topics regarding critical thinking and decision making. What topic was of most interest to you? Why?