Bullying and cyberbullying seem to have adapted to the new rules of an increasingly polarized society.

“Once upon a time there was bullying, and now seemingly suddenly is cyberbullying. It seems that this transformation happened a century ago, but we're talking about a process that took only a few years.”

It feels like a million years since this new phenomenon filled the pages of newspapers, populated the nightmares of students, parents and teachers, inflamed public debates, and urged awareness movements, and a potential legislation that demanded preventive countermeasures aimed at both sanctioning and stopping it. There was, in fact, a moment in the history of our society in which bullying was perceived as the perfected, and more prominent embodiment of adolescent deviance, to be taken even more seriously for its intentionality and premeditation: For that it manifested as the desire to "act against someone" that was at its foundation. Then, to complicate this definition, and after the widespread of new technologies and digital platforms, cyberbullying rose. Cyberbullying, that at first was perceived simply as a sub-form of bullying perpetrated through the Net, soon acquired the rank of a very peculiar and different phenomenon, that manifests as an expression of acting "for something" as well as "against someone". Compared to "traditional" bullying, cyberbullying re-invents the concept of aggression, transforming it from "an action only against someone" into "an action also for one own’s sake". It reiterates the concept of repetitiveness, from repetition in the physical space to its reproducibility in the virtual space. Cyberbullying re-acts to the concept of power imbalance, morphing physical force into “cyber talent.”

But what kind of "talent" are we talking about? Certainly a "deviated form of talent show", which serves the need for "self-rewarding" that goes side by side to - if not surpassing - the desire to "punish someone". In this "dystopic form of talent show" each actor plays a precise role: The audience in the studio corresponds to those who view the cyberbullying content posted on the Net (as the audience in a live performance), the jury, in this contest, identifies with those who "like" or comment on a post (therefore, those who express an opinion on the performance itself), and finally, the home-audience, the at home spectators, those who share the contents (therefore those who, with their vote, rule on the success of that performance.)

The 2020 data of the "Proteus Generation" Observatory confirmed not only the dramatic percentage of cyberbullying victims (1 adolescent out of 4 declared to have been a victim of cyberbullying) but also its  perceived harmlessness (27.8% defines it as "a game"), furthermore and equally worrying the consequences that this phenomenon is able to activate:  A dangerous spiral of mutual aggression, such as that 17.3% of victims confirmed that they had reacted to the violence by behaving in return as cyberbullies themselves.

Once upon a time there was bullying and now there is cyberbullying.

It feels like a million years since, but instead we are talking about just a few years ago. In the last two years, in fact, due to the pandemic that has completely redefined our "being in the world", even bullying and cyberbullying seem to have transformed, morphed, and reshaped by adapting to the "rules" of an increasingly "digitally -platformed" and polarized society.

On the one hand like many other phenomena of our daily lives, even bullying and cyberbullying have redefined their traditional strategies from the “spectacle” of the grand gesture, to its contextualization in a logic of "seriality" in which the extent of the damage is indeed directly correlated to its (many) repetition. On the other hand, in line with an increasingly polarized society, bullying and cyberbullying also tend to become more extreme, resulting in brute violence. That same violence that the public opinion debate tends to trace back to the phenomenon of baby gangs, in which 1 teenager out of 3 (38.5%) fears to become a victim.

In conclusion, looking at the evolution of these phenomena: adolescent deviance / violent behavior in the few recent years, we could argue that to a devious, latent bullying / cyberbullying trend, nowadays a declared, manifested violence, is also present and it is precisely this shift that deeply destabilizes the already precarious  life standards (as far as un-safety), in which our adolescents live, vis-à-vis the lack or the impossibility of self-protection.