COINCIDENCE?

     Just a quick thought, but do you think the internet's ability to preserve much of what gets posted on it (and the ease with which such stuff can be copied and stored on other media for reposting anytime later) and the rise in anti-bullying groups is more than just a coincidence?

     Being bullied is never fun, regardless of its form or severity, even though it does teach you things about yourself, your attackers, humanity itself, the unfairness of life, futility, etc. But whether you were physically assaulted, openly ostracized, a convenient scapegoat, shunned, had your joys mocked, or merely ignored, it was safe to say that upon graduation from high school, you were given a new chance to start over. Hell, in college you just might meet several people who were bullied for the same reasons you were. Instant understanding friends! No guarantees of success of course: your brain chemistry now likely reflects some sort of trauma taking the form (and probably combination) of fear, vengeful envy, heartbroken silence, social awkwardness, comforting pride, simple hatred, worthlessness, or purposelessness, etc.

    The internet, however, is like permanent high school now and even though you've long since matured from previous naïvetés, the internet remembers.
     Photographs had to be taken with somewhat bulky cameras using actual film which then had to be developed. Not only that, but cameras weren't exactly something you could just carry around and plus the number of picture you could take were limited and instant sharing was not possible without a Polaroid camera. If you wanted to show someone an embarrassing photo of someone, you had to physically hand it to them and that person would have to hand it to someone else and so on and so forth. Sure, copying was possible, but that took time and money. Making fun of a person via a picture you've taken of them was difficult from both a logistical and economic perspective. Now we have digital photography and cellphones to not only take a picture that instant but can be shared hundreds of times essentially both instantly and at virtually no cost making any embarrassing outfit or antic effectively immortal.
     Your old poems? Notes given to girls/boys you liked? Fan-fiction writer were you? Evidence of prior phases you had gone through? You could throw them away, tear them to pieces...hell, even burn them and they'd be gone, existing only in your head and those heads whom you had shared them with. But these days, did you post it online? Are your uneducated opinions still available on some internet forum? Did you use the same e-mail for everything for a while so a simple Google search can lead a dedicated searcher to all sorts of goodies? How many websites have you signed up for that you've completely forgotten about? How many passwords have you forgotten? It's inescapable... I'm also sure you've never ever once forgotten to sign out of an account either.

     It makes me wonder...