How to deal with abuse on social media

• Who is this post for? Anyone who regularly expresses thoughts and opinions online
• What does it discuss? How to deal with abuse on social media
• How does it benefit you? Know how to react without expending fear or negative energy

Recently I was struck by a story about Holly Brockwell, who was asked to write an article by the BBC’s 100 Women project about why she wanted to be sterilised. The abuse she received was extraordinarily vile and no need to sensationalise it by reproducing it on this site, but if you wish to read Holly’s story you can do so here

I was waiting for a helpful follow-up to the story regarding what people can do if they encounter such abuse. Sadly there was none, so here are 5 tips we’d recommend if you are unfortunate enough find yourself in a situation such as Holly’s:

1. There is no need to interact. Take a step back, calm down and ask yourself if there is anything to gain from yourself melting down online. There very likely isn’t and you’re only providing the response that the abuser wants in the first place. Nobody fair-minded or balanced will think you are weak for not responding!
2. Think about the true nature of what has been said. If someone is disagreeing with you, even if it is in a passionate way, then you’ll just have to get used to it if you want to have a voice online. However if the words are genuinely threatening – for example threatening to find and harm you or your children – then you should report the abuse to the site owner and the relevant authorities. It doesn’t matter whether it’s online or not, it’s still a genuine threat.
3. Did you incite the response in any way? If you have a passionate view about something then you should expect someone out there to be equally passionate with the exact opposite opinion. Disagreement does not equal abuse.
4. You can block people. You are not a news outlet, this isn’t censorship! There are no obligations on you to be fair and balanced or spend your time and energy dealing with negative emotion and behaviour.
5. Learn how to use your privacy controls.  Be selective about what you reveal online or use controls present in most social media to hide your profile or contact details from strangers.

Do you have any tips for dealing with abuse online? Did you have any negative experiences and have experience to share?  If so we’d love to hear from you!

Are tablets reducing your kids’ digital skills?

• Who is this post for? Parents and teachers
• What does it discuss? A report coming from Australia that suggests increasing use of mobile devices is lessening children’s digital skills
• How does it benefit you? Fresh perspective, focus

A new report by Australia’s National Assessment Programme, an Australian educational body, looks at technology literacy among two groups of children – one just leaving primary school and another in its fourth year of secondary school. More than 10,500 students took part. It compared digital literacy scores from 2011 with those from a survey carried out in late 2014, finding that the number of children meeting basic ICT literacy standards in these age groups had dropped significantly.

The report’s reasoning was that tablets and smartphones were making children competent at using many forms of online communication at the expense of those other skills emphasised by the curriculum, skills considered important for employability.  Our favourite quote in response to the report was from Eben Upton, who came up with the idea for the Raspberry Pi computer now used to teach so many IT skills in schools. He said:

“There’s a place for tablets in education, but we need to get away from the idea that knowing how to pinch-zoom makes your toddler the next Bill Gates”

If you’d like to read the report in full, you can download it here

What are your thoughts on this report’s conclusions?

How phone dependent have we become?

• Who is this post for? Everyone
• What does it discuss? It talks about a photo series warning us of over-dependence on smartphones
• How does it benefit you? Fresh perspective

Smartphones are central to our lives, beyond just chatting and texting. In observation of this behaviour, photographer Kamil Kotarba has created a photo series satirising just how phone dependent we’ve become.

“It’s pretty trivial, but I was motivated by observing my behaviour and the behaviour of people who surround me,” Kotarba told The Huffington Post. “I’ve noticed that,  involuntarily, I use my smartphone every now and again. Without any reason, just to check Facebook’s newsfeed, watch Instagram photos or just slide finger across the screen, thoughtlessly. The technology changed my daily behavior.”

Kotarba posed his friends in public spaces holding their phones, then photographed the space again without any subjects in it. He superimposed the two images together in Photoshop.

In the resulting series, “Hide and Seek,” Kotarba depicts bodiless hands hovering above couches, floating in men’s restrooms. Each is clutching a smartphone, making the artist’s statement clear: our phones haven’t just become extensions of ourselves. They’ve replaced our individual identities.

But, Kotarba said, he didn’t mean for his series to come across as preachy. “I just tried to take portraits of the phenomenon, and provoke reflection,” he says.

How do we stop bright screens disrupting our sleep?

• Who is this post for? Everyone
• What does it discuss? How to ensure bright screens don’t disrupt your sleep
• How do you benefit? Increased alertness; Increased productivity; Decreased tiredness; Decreased stress

OK, hands up who climbs into bed and starts looking at stuff on their phone or tablet? Even worse, hands up who does this with the lights off because their partner is asleep. Right now, I’ve got both hands AND feet in the air 😦

What makes this worse is that I KNOW this is bad for me. I know all the scientific evidence points to the fact that this reduces the quality of my sleep as a team from Harvard Medical School told us just before Christmas last year.

But what’s the solution? Paul Gringas, Professor of children’s sleep medicine and neurodisability at Evelina London has now laid down a challenge to manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers saying that they should have an automatic ‘bedtime mode’ to help them stop disrupting people’s sleep

He says that the blue-green light emissions from such devices can stop people falling asleep by up to an hour, which is pretty significant for a long-distance commuter like me!

Software (free software at that) does currently exist to automatically reduce such light emissions from your laptop or desktop in line with the time of sunrise and sunset in your location. It’s called f.lux and you can download it here (I use it myself, so can guarantee it’s an easy process). The software is not yet currently available for smartphones or tablets as the devices would need to be ‘jailbroken’ to install it and you really don’t want to go there. But at the very least, if you like to work late, this is a good solution for at least part of your ‘bright screen’ problem.

Now we just have to hope our voices can be heard to encourage Apple, Samsung, Motorola etc. to address the wider problem with our mobile devices.

When technology disconnects us

• Who is this post for? Everyone
• What does it discuss? It shows a possible negative impact technology has on our relationships
• How will you benefit? A poignant perspective on where/where not to allow technology into our lives

Technology is supposed to connect us but many would argue it’s also disconnected us from one another. And in Eric Pickersgill’s photo series, Removed, the photographer shows us how mobile devices have changed our lives via everyday portraits with the smartphones and tablets removed from them.

Society is evolving and the nature of our relationships is changing – but for the better?