Real time mean girls

I was having lunch with my friend Shauna this week, who was visiting London from California, and we got talking about real time - my current obsession. Shauna is not only a technological sophisticate, she's a mom, specifically, the mom of my god-daughter.

Her daughter came home recently with a story about a girl who was being bullied at school. Bullying certainly and sadly isn't new, but the tools that tweens now deploy are changing the game. Mobile cameraphone plus MySpace plus Mean Girls plus awkward naked lockerroom photo... you do the math. Nasty. Not only for the victim, but for everyone. Which of course is why my god-daughter came home and talked about it. She was horrified.

Shauna went on to describe other bullying "use cases." For example, bully uses the anonymity of digital media to generate fake 3rd party admission of true love ("jose has a crush on u") thus eliciting a confession from the supposed crush-ee ("omg jose is so hot") which then gets published schoolwide, and the victim of the crush scam is subsequently bombarded with SMS ridicule, all of which ends up costing her not only her dignity, but clogs her mobile account. And, if her misunderstanding parents monitor her mobile and scan her texts, there's yet more shame to be had at home.

Ouch. Makes me glad to be forty.

I can't stop thinking about the ambiguous and broad implications of hyperconnected, location-aware, personal mobile technology. Kids in developed countries are already utterly fluent in using it. They've integrated it into the most basic adolescent rituals: the first crush, gossiping, friendship, discovering music, popularity contests, ostracizing, forming cliques, and as above, bullying.

And it seems to me that these base human instincts become somehow amplified through real-time technology. Bullying is more intense, easier to inflict, more humiliating. Do teachers have any idea this is happening? Less tech-savvy parents? Do they have the skills, tools, and real-time mindset to understand, intervene, mitigate, or help?

Some people suggest that technology convergence is a good thing for us all. I am an optimist by nature, but I can't ignore the dark side of the phenomenon, especially given that the evolution of technology outpaces the evolution of our instincts.

I also think it's enlightening to pay attention to how the kids are using it. It's a glimpse of the future. Not only because it's ubiquitous in their lives, but because their experience of convergence - both positive and negative - is shaping them as people.