Abstract
Considering cyberbullying as a challenging frontier of analysis in the social sciences, we find ourselves today with the duty to analyze it within a much broader social context. Indeed, we must take into account the logic of exclusion, as a fact. Today, in the logic of how the Internet works, a thin line separates the victim from the perpetrator; this is also due to the Internet we know today, made up of a mass and a headless power. Trying to amplify this dichotomy, we can say that today we live in the era of the so-called “ban-opticon” (or the logic of prohibition). This logic ranges from simply removing Facebook friends from the list, to excluding sources of knowledge. This article has focused on the discussion of cyberbullying by applying an interdisciplinary approach from sociology to psychology, with the analysis of important aspects such as empathy, hyperconnection, individualization. The concept of empathy, studied several times through the terms Verstehen and Einfuhlung, has today been explored by many parties. In fact, the term Empathy has been used to describe sympathy or compassion. The interdisciplinary approach allows a broader and more innovative analysis to better understand the phenomenon of cyberbullying and to conceptualize new intervention strategies in the social and educational fields to open new frontiers in research.
Highlights
In the context of contemporary society, the need to identify new interpretative categories through which reading the complexity of the present is increasingly coming out
The first part of the paper will aim at circumscribing the investigated phenomenon, identifying similarities and differences with respect to the most common forms of Cyberbullying and Empathy bullying; subsequently, starting from the considerations of authors such as Putnam and Bourdieu on the centrality of social capital in building of a community feeling, it will be highlight the role played by the dynamics of individualization in the process of deterioration of the subjects’ social capital and how this can be interrelated with the spread of forms of cyberbullying
The development of sites for sharing files, such as videos, represents another side of the coin: on the one hand in these sites we find information, reviews of various products and entertainment, on the other they give a significant contribution in strengthening the phenomenon of cyberbullying, at least in its first phase
Summary
In the context of contemporary society, the need to identify new interpretative categories through which reading the complexity of the present is increasingly coming out. The broader aim of social researchers is developing adequate analytical tools and explanatory criteria suitable for re-defining the meaning of social action, fitting it into a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that overcomes the existing fences between the different fields of study In this perspective, both sociology and neuroscience can offer a valuable contribution for interpreting the complexity of social ties and the dynamics of building subjects’ identity, providing new tools through which analyzing innovative forms of social interactions. A synthetic and effective definition of bullying is that of Sharp and Smith that speaks of “peer abuse,” that is a kind of social relationship between friends based on power and control roles This phenomenon is characterized by aggressive behavior repeated over time. Cyberbullying is often believed to be conducted anonymously–but it is only a popular belief, research shows that only half of cyberbullying is anonymous (Ybarra and Mitchell, 2004)
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