It's Complicated Reflection by Nick Ryan

1/28/16

Blue Stream

This chapter in It's Complicated was very controversial but, informative. It brought up so many good points about cyber-bullying and bullying itself. When I was reading this, I started to question what I defined as bullying. The author tells her audience about Olweus' definition of bullying, Abigail and Ashley's story(among many others such as Taylor and Chris), and how we describe bullying.

The author kept telling her audience that teenagers such as me, use "drama" as a replacement for the word bullying. I started to think, "Wait I do that don't I?" Then, I started to wonder where have I done this. I realized that I use the word "drama" to describe what could be described as acts of bullying(not in this school of course.) Then, I started to think why do teenagers do this?

I started to think about our motives behind calling bullying "drama." I thought maybe it's because we just came up with a new word for bullying, like a slang word for it. I soon began to understand our motives. I think it is because the media makes bullying look so horrible and inhumane, we start to reject the word. So, whenever we see what would be bullying, we get a little bit scared. We go into denial about the situation and call it drama. This was the conclusion I came to while reflecting on reading this book.