Key questions

• 1. How far have digital networks changed the demographic characteristics of stalkers and their victims; and to what extent has the risk posed by stalkers increased or declined as networks increase the scope for access at a distance?

• 2. Are children and young people today more at risk of bullying than previous generations?

• 3. Does the disappearance of disappearance, the increased visibility of people in online environments, increase the scope for victimization, or the scope for authorities to identify bullies, stalkers and trolls? Can both things be true at the same time?

• 4. Is the online realm more threatening because it is so all-embracing, or less threatening than real life as it is always possible to find your tribe somewhere else online even when you cannot always do so in your immediate physical surroundings?

• 5. In relation to online trolling, are we simply less polite to one another today, or rather have we become more polite, and hence less tolerant of people who can access us, even as we are by the same means incited to access them back?

Links to affordances

Access to victims by digital means is what defines cyber bullying, stalking and trolling. While digital networks do, without doubt, increase access to victims in the sense of communications, this is not ‘access’ as unauthorized and unwanted ‘intrusion’ in the physical sense, or physical violence akin to forms of face-to-face, physical bullying. As such, access may be both increased and reduced by online means, although forms of online surveillance and self-revelation may increase the scope for physical access. Concealment and evasion can be enhanced by online means, but the disappearance of disappearance, along with various forms of online and real-world regulation, means that revelation and punishment can follow. The capacity of digital harassment to incite harm is real, but victims can fight back and use networks to find more fulfilling interactions.

Synopsis

The changing composition of stalkers and the new dynamics of interpersonal revelation, surveillance and interaction suggest that the digital really has made a difference. However, while stalking online shows different characteristics from that carried out in predominantly ‘real-world’ space and time, the most harmful forms of stalking and bullying retain many traditional characteristics, which trolling now replicates as well.