ABSTRACT
Recent data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Rainie, 2008) indicates that teens’ use of communication technology has significantly increased in recent years. For example, their data indicates that 94 percent of teens use the internet (including 62 percent who use the internet on a daily basis), 58 percent have a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook.com or MySpace.com, 26 percent keep their own personal web page, and 71 percent own a cell phone. These and other new communication technologies have the potential to positively impact many aspects of human communication by providing easy access to valuable information and increasing connectivity. However, like many other forms of communication, such communication technologies also have a dark side (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2007) as they can very easily be exploited to intimidate or hurt others. This chapter focuses on one destructive use of communication technology that has drawn increasing attention from both the popular press and social science scholars: cyberbullying.
