COPING WITH SBV USING THE INTERNET Thomas Jäger
6. COPING WITH SBV USING INTERNET: WHERE ARE WE NOW AND WHAT WILL THE FUTURE BRING?
7. REFERENCES 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years the Internet has got an increasingly important impact on our everyday life: we use it at various locations and occasions for instance at work, in schools, in universities, in public places, at home; and we use it for a wide variety of purposes such as the search for information, for communicating and interacting with others, for seeking for help and advise, for playing games, shopping online, watching video files or listening audio files, for playing online games, planning our everyday life and numerous other things (cp. Wellman et al., 2002).
Today, approximately 69 percent of the North American population and 38 percent of the European population (with considerable differences between European countries) is online. And though still on a smaller scale also an increasing proportion of the population in the less developed parts of the world has access to the Internet (Internet World Stats, 2007). Since the early years of the World Wide Web (WWW) the number of web sites has grown exponentially. Though the explosive growth rate of the WWW’s early years has slowed (from a growth rate of 850 percent per year between 1991 and 1997 to 25 percent per year between 2002 and 2006) the WWW is still expanding (Nielsen, 2006). In November 2006 there were more than 100 Million web sites available (Netcraft, 2006).
Along with the increasing awareness and public attention for the problem of school bullying and violence (SBV) throughout the world, numerous web sites on this topic have emerged in recent years. Today there is a broad range of web sites and other web resources that focus on SBV such as comprehensive Internet portals, project descriptions, materials, video and audio clips, online games, discussion boards, newsgroups or blogs.
For users as well as for researchers various questions come up when dealing with web sites on SBV, such as • What types of web resources on SBV are available? • Where is their benefit? Where are their limits or possibly even dangers? • Who do we know about users of web sites on SBV? • Who has the chance to profit from web sites on SBV, who not? • Are there any concerns with regard to the quality and the appropriateness of such sites? The answers on these and many other questions related to web sites on SBV are as unsatisfying as surprising: There is no clear answer as web resources on SBV have not been subject of comprehensive research initiatives and studies yet. Of course there are small studies focusing on certain aspects of web resources on SBV, commented link lists, anecdotic user reports about the usability of web sites or publications and studies emphasising the importance of web resources (e.g. Jäger et al., 2003; Minton & O’Moore, 2004). Nevertheless, so far there is no systematic research dealing with the overall role the Internet plays for tackling and coping with SBV. Considering that not only much time but also much money is invested in creating web resources on SBV this is not only surprising but rather astonishing.
This chapter aims at giving this largely “unexplored” field of research a first structure and framework. Due to a lack of research data this chapter can neither be scientific nor can it give a depletive overview about the wide and very dynamic field of web resources on SBV. It rather aims at structuring observations, impressions and ideas of people interested in and dealing with this medium.
In May 2005 we hold the online conference “Coping with School Bullying and Violence Using the Internet3” at which 28 experts – mainly representatives of web sites on SBV – from five continents came together and discussed issues related to this topic. In this chapter we will come back to one or the other outcome of our conference4. However, the focus of this chapter will lay in giving an introduction to the Internet and the World Wide Web in general as well as on information that might be useful for readers dealing with school bullying and violence who are not familiar with what Internet research has to say. Building on this rather general introduction and outcomes of Internet research we will then focus on certain aspects such different types of web sites on SBV, a look at users of web sites on SBV and the benefits and limits of the Internet. 3 http://conference.bullying‐in‐school.info 4 A more detailed overview about the conference’s outcomes is available in form of a conference report (Jäger, 2006)
2. THE INTERNET AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB A BRIEF INTRODUCTION Before we look at what the Internet has to offer in terms of SBV we first will take a look at what the Internet and the WWW are and what some of their main characteristics are. What is the Internet …?
The Internet is a “network of networks” that consists of millions of computers around the world that communicate with each other and that are connected to each other by telephone wire, cable and satellite (UNESCO Courier, 2002).“ The Internet does not contain information itself. It is the infrastructure in the background or ‐ in other words ‐ the transport vehicle for the information stored in files or documents on computers that are connected via a global network (Kahn & Cerf, 1999). Computers on the Internet may use various information and services, such as e‐mail, online chat, file transfer or web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web (Wikipedia, 2006).
The Internet was originally intended to share data between a few universities and government agencies (Wikipedia, 2006). Only recent developments in the late 1990s – user‐friendly innovation such as the creation of the WWW and the distribution of free web browsers ‐ transformed the global network to a mainstream phenomenon that is having an increasing impact on our today’s society. And what is the WWW …?
The Internet is not synonymous with World Wide Web. The World Wide Web, or simply the Web or WWW, is only one way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet.
The WWW is an information‐sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. It incorporates various Internet services (Webopedia, 2006) what allows a broad variety of usages such as retrieving or publishing documents, viewing and uploading images or videos, speaking or hearing sound and many other things.
The founding principle of the WWW is a programming language called HTML that makes possible hypertext links. Each web site, document, audio file or anything else that can be found in the WWW has a unique URL (uniform resource locator) that identifies on which computer it can be found. Hypertext links allow connecting web pages, documents and other web applications and making it possible to navigate easily from one site to another by means of a simple mouse click. It was this unique and truly revolutionary capacity of HTML that made the WWW being a huge interconnected database.