My response to bullies, shut your eyeballs

I couldn't agree more with  Lisa Stone and her response to Stop CyberBullying day .   I know I'm wading into quicksand here, but I think one of the reasons that stuff like this happens is that our society rewards nastiness with attention. Whether its bullies in the blogosphere, bullies on TV (Ann Coulter, Donald Trump), or bullies  in business (Wal-Mart)  . And if you measure success by the attention you get or the potential eyeballs you reached, as bullies do, then the nastier you are, the more sucessfull you are. The only answer is to ignore them. Don't provide them the "eyeballs"  or the attention that they crave.

In business, you can argue that eyeballs don't count and we should  pay more attention to the health of our relationships or the improvement of  our reputation. But in real life we have to resort to that old "sticks and stones" stuff and remember that its all alot of words -- sound and fury signifying nothing.

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

Maybe you are right, but as a mother of a three-year-old that will grow up in a cyber culture, I think that we need to do a better job of educating ourselves and our children how to deal with this kind of bullying. The Sierra debacle allowed us to focus on this a little bit, and I think that can't be bad.