Ever since the Internet’s stock bubble burst at the end of the 90’s and some of the most powerful companies on Wall Street were reduced to pennies a share, the internet was reborn as a place were any 12-year-old with his dad’s modem can pour his fresh, and often misguided opinions into a enormous sea made of similar opinions. A new era where an imagination and some knowledge algorithms can make you millions of dollars or at least get you recognition across the globe. YouTube, MySpace, Digg are just a few examples of college students putting their math classes to work and making a bit of cash.

But there is an underworld of the Internet that most either don’t know about or avoid. Anonymous message boards, such as the channels and Somethingawful.com. Where administrators block and ban people at a whim and hackers hold ultimate power. Where the adage “normal person + anonymity + audience = complete F***tard”. Usually, these things stay buried far below where your average midwestern mom will stumble across it. But every once an a while, things come bubbling to the service and explode, if only for a moment, into the mainstream. www.4chan.org (DISCLAIMER: visiting this website is not advised!)is the most notorious example, with such controversies as the Fox News special report on their harassment of a number of MySpace accounts, or their successful hacking of Sarah Palin’s email account, and when this happens, your average american mother does what she does best, gets mad.

There is a growing campaign on the Internet to stop “cyberbullying”, or harassment of people through the Internet, social networking sites especially. I do believe that this is a problem, as there have been instances where people being driven to suicide by Internet harassment, but this is definitely not the way to combat it. Trying to stop bullying on the Internet is like trying to dam the Amazon, it’s just not going to happen. If you want to stop the EFFECTS of internet harassment, we need to spread the word to people that there is a rift between reality and the web. That way, people can know that if they are being bullied on the Internet, they can simply disconnect and be safe, with no need for them to harm themselves or go as far as to taking their own lives.
—Will Hawk