Kevin Finch

8/6/2019 Kevin Finch

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Kevin FinchChildrens MediaFinal Paper4-14-09Cyber Bullying Versus Internet Justice in the Case of Kenny Glenn

The Internet as a Medium for Justice and Injustice

Bullying is no longer confined to the realms of the classroom, lunch hall and playground. With theadvance of technology bullying has broken down the locative barriers that have traditionally lead to victimshaving a safe space at home or in their own rooms. This means that the reprieve victims previously felt

by reaching their private spaces has been shattered by the prevalence of identity on the Internet. Inportraying ones identity on the internet through social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebookchildren open themselves up to an almost constant opportunity for bullying. Many researchers have lookedinto the problem and assessed it as such. In my paper I will compare it (with anecdotal evidence) to anexample of what some would call Internet Justice. The story shows examples of Internet bullying takento the extreme, while also showing a criminal being brought to justice by the same points that opened himup to the bullying. In my paper I will compare the differences between what is a the duty of a responsiblecitizen to report to the appropriate authorities, and what is malicious bullying behavior that should not haveto occur to anyone regardless of the infractions that they may be responsible for.In the case of Kenny Glenn is recorded by the websites

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Kenny_Glenn and http://partyvan.info/wiki/Kenny_Glenn, and Iwill provide a summary of the information found on the websites here. Two videos of a thirteen-year-old

boy named Kenny Glenn putting a cat (named Dusty) through abuse that no animal should be allowed to gothrough. On the video Kenny Glenn hid his identity with the hope of preventing exactly what was about tohappen from happening. The members of another website, 4chan.org, caught wind of these videos andwere not in any way shape or form amused. The members of the second site got together via a chat clientand proceeded to discuss how to handle the situation. Due to the fact that many members of the 4Chanforums were skilled in hacking and other forms of Internet manipulation, information was found regardingthe (until then unknown) cat abuser, linking images from the video to the Facebook account of KennyGlenn. Once they had a name the information available from Facebook, the search for more informationcould begin in earnest. Once an appropriate amount of information had been gathered, the local authoritieswere notified, and the legal wheels were in motion for the prosecution of Kenny Glenn as an animal abuser.If that were where the story ended, this would simply be considered a situation where concerned members

of the Internet worked together in order to see justice done in a despicable situation. Unfortunately, thesame people who found it necessary to do everything within the legal parameters also found it necessary totake some of the punishment of this individual into their own hands. In order to make sure that Glennwould never consider abusing animals and gloating about it in a public sphere again, various members of4Chan decided to enact what they call Ruin Life Tactics. This included ordering $500-600 dollars worthof pizza, products, and services that are cash on delivery. These are all pranks that can be associated with

bullying, that thanks to the Internet broadened the range of who could participate in making Glenn feelthreatened. http://partyvan.info/wiki/Kenny_Glenn was one of the main perpetrators of opening Glenn tothese harassment tactics. Those who went to the trouble of finding out information about Glenn took thefruits of their labor and posted them on a website for other people to take time to punish this individualfor what he did.Thanks to the information provided to the local authorities (including potential home addresses, familynames, and a phone number where Glenns mother was reached) Kenny Glenn and his brother Weston

were charged with animal abuse on February 17. This was a mere 2 days after the videos were discovered.Something else that we can thank the vigilant members of the 4Chan website is that due to the investigationfollowing Glenns charge, additional videos were found, making for a heavier case against the younganimal abuser. The cats have been taken in by local animal shelters, and were in much better care now thatthe proper authorities have intervened.This situation exhibits some of the best qualities of people working together to do a good deed, with someof the more deplorable aspects of cyber bullying. In order to properly understand what exactly cyber

bullying is I will provide a better example of what bullying is. Patchin and Hinduja quote Stephenson andSmith as saying bullying is


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A form of social interaction in which a more dominant individual [the bully] exhibits aggressive behaviorwhich is intended to and does, in fact, cause distress to a less dominant individual [the victim]. Theaggressive behavior may take the form of direct physical and/or verbal attack or may be indirect as whenthe bully hides a possession that belongs to the victim or spreads false information about the victim.The important factors that this definition brings up are that the relationship is between two people ofdiffering power levels, an act is committed that results in intentional distress. To follow Patchin andHindujas ideas involving the differences between traditional and cyberbulllying, one must simplyexchange how the behavior is mediated between the bully and the victim. A broader definition of CyberBullying could include any medium that has some sort of technological interface, including phones and

pagers and such. In this paper the focus is to remain on the internet, so I will use that as the basic mediumfor the purposes of this research.

A concept that can be applied to this whole scenario is that of identity. The Internet has long been aplace of mutable identity, from lying about how old you are in a chat room, to playing a character on aMassive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game . Both of these forms of identity manipulation arecommon, and easily done. So, one might ask, why doesnt the victim of cyber bullying simply change hisonline identity in an effort to avoid detection by his online bully? The main reason is simple. In order to

build up the network of friends, and gain trust with his online peers, the victim needs to anchor to some sortof arbitrary identity that those peers can associate with what they come to know as that person. Only by

building up this personality online can the victim manage to have any sort of realistic relationship withthose he has online. Enter the bully. In order for the bully to achieve his goal of causing distress to the

victim, the bully merely has to be able to get in contact with the victim in some way shape or form. Hisidentity does not need to be intimately known to the victim, although it is entirely possible that the victimcan infer the identity of this new person causing him distress regardless of a new avatar, handle, or screenname.

This missing identity can even work to the Bullys advantage. This can allow the bully to work incollaboration with other bullies to continue the distress beyond the normal abilities of a single aggressor.This leads to a greater sense of paranoia in the victim, not knowing who exactly is harassing him, or whythey are doing so, making the victim feel like he or she somehow deserves it. This self-mutability alsomakes it possible for those who would not normally partake in the act of bullying to do so. If one werewondering about how it may feel to bully someone, perhaps a victim himself, the one could create anidentity on, and then harass someone anonymously.In the case of Kenny Glenn, the bully(s) include anyone who took part in any of the action that occurred

past the proper authorities being notified. This makes an important distinction from the 4Chan members

who researched the information on Glenn, and the people who acted upon this information to cause himdistress (though in many cases these people are one and the same). The aggressors are in a position ofgreater dominance because they are able to perpetrate their acts without fear of reprisal, due to theiranonymity, while Glenn is in a position of inferior dominance because his identity has been compromised,and he is lacking the comfort that those who are assailing him enjoy. The distressing acts in this caseinvolve both physical actions (products and services being ordered to his home) as well as verbal attacks(distressing phone calls).Erving Goffman first introduced the idea of positive and negative face, in the context of social interactions.He argues that when one is presenting one self, there are two things that are underlying the presentation.Positive face, the desire to be liked by others, and negative face, the desire to not be imposed upon.Actions that bullies take can (in this context) be taken as severe face threatening acts. Because they are notconcerned about remaining polite, and because they have the advantage of anonymity, the bullies in thiscase have absolutely no regard for their own face values. Coincidently they have no concern for the face

value of their victim. Quite the contrary, their goal is to perform as many, or as intense of face threateningacts as possible. Their acts diminish Glenns positive and negative face by making him feel as if he is notliked by others (for apparent reasons) and by removing his autonomy via the physical products and servicessent to his home with malicious intent.At this point, I would like to make an important distinction between teasing and bullying. Keltner et aldefine teasing as an intentional provocation accompanied by playful off-record markers that togethercomment on something relevant to the target. This definition shows teasing as something that has a socialimportance, as opposed to directly referring to something that is solely designed with the aim of eliciting anegative response. This leads to bullying being a type of teasing, while not all forms of teasing are

bullying. When one bullies, they are intentionally provoking, but it is with the sole purpose to tear down


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the targets negative or positive face, as opposed to simply bringing up something relevant to the target. Inthe Glenn case, relevance to the target is also removed from the equation. Instead of choosing some aspectof Glenn and focusing on that, the aggressors are simply latching on to the fact that he has done somethingunacceptable in their eyes, and it must be punished, and just one of the many punishments happen to be his

being reported to the local authorities. These acts are only being used in the broad sense to cause distress.There is nothing specific to Kenny Glenn that will specifically cause distress by sending him large numbersof pizzas that he cannot possibly afford. This action simply tear down his negative face because it imposesupon him to explain to the pizza deliverer how he did not order the product and he is unable to pay for it,thereby putting him into an embarrassing situation.How does justice work into this equation? Kenny Glenn clearly committed a crime (as per OklahomaStatutes, Title 21, Chapter 67 Section 1685: Acts of Cruelty to Animals) and flaunted his success in hisavoidance of receiving the appropriate repercussions. While flaunting this success he drew attention tohimself, and someone acted on it. As such, the local authorities followed the law to make sure that Glennreceived the repercussions as Oklahoma Statutes, Title 21, Chapter 67 Section 1685: Acts of Cruelty toAnimals requires. The only reason that these actions were brought to the attention of the proper authoritiesis because certain members of a certain forum managed to see that something needed to be done. Thequestion is: Was it their responsibility to make sure that information made it to the authorities? Why didYouTube not report the incident instead of simply removing the videos? In this section of the paper, I will

present my research regarding government surveillance and privacy technologies.Should it have been up to the members of 4Chan to step up, search for the information necessary to convict,

or should the government had had some hand in the gathering of the pertinent information for the arrest orKenny Glenn? In a world where information inundates those who look for it on the Internet, thegovernment has gone to special lengths in order to use this information for the protection of the UnitedStates on the whole. Tamara Dinev expresses one position on this problem in her article on SocialAwareness and Internet Literacy. One of the more important hypotheses that Dinev comes to in her articleis that internet literacy is negatively related to the perceived need for government surveillance and

positively related to government intrusion concerns . From this it can be inferred that, according toDinevs research, those involved in the search for Kenny Glenn feel that not only was it their duty to dowhat the did, but it was also their right, as opposed to the governments right to meddle in the affairs of theinternet.Another idea is brought up by Goldberg et al when they state that the threats to ones internet privacy aretwo-fold: your online actions could be (1) monitored by unauthorized parties and (2) logged and preservedfor future access many years later . This is an unfortunate situation that has happened to one, Kenny

Glenn. YouTube has since eliminated the incriminating files. This has not, however, prevented them fromstaying on the internet. In another effort to make sure this animal abuser Gets whats coming to himAnonymous of 4Chan has ensured that the videos are ensconced in their own site www.Kenny-Glenn.net. This violates both sides of the internet privacy fears that Goldberg et al bring up. First, theactual existence of the site implies that someone was somehow monitoring his actions in the first place, andas the evidence shows, someone was. The second half is far more dangerous. Due to the recent conceptsof Google Vetting one has to be careful what comes up when ones name is Googled. Thanks to thewebsite mentioned earlier, when one searches for Kenny Glenns name on Google.com, a series ofinformation pops up explaining what it was exactly that this kid did.So, from using this particular event, we can examine several aspects of how the internet is a communityunto itself. The particular phenomena that were apparent here were bullying, justice, and identity. Themembers of the 4Chan community found something they believed to be unacceptable and made sure the

proper authorities were alerted, and did what the could to prevent things from being swept from the

publics eye. They were then not pleased with what the authorities were doing once the information waspresented to them, and thus proceeded to take the task of punishing the individual under there own terms.

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