Actually, Brenda Power's article is more serious than my post below would lead you to believe. I think it's an excellent commentary on the coarsening of our society, its effect on children and the way people blame the technology whenever these sorts of incidents - bullying children via the web or mobile phone - make headlines.
In some ways, the issues surrounding the web site and phone text bullying are similar to the uproar over ratemyteacher.ie, which was such a hot topic last spring. Technology may be facilitating new techniques for the bully to employ, but the essence of bullying as described by Power in this article sounds pretty familiar to me. I doubt there's much that's new, although I'm willing to believe that the language is coarser and more sexually explicit than it would have been a generation ago. Snobbery and bullying are, unfortunately, familiar to anyone who's ever been a teenager.
