Victoria Public School graduated over the years
LOS ANGELES — Young children know that name-calling is wrong. Tweens are taught the perils of online bullying and revenge porn: It’s unacceptable and potentially illegal.
But celebrities who engage in flagrant attacks on social media are rewarded with worldwide attention. President Donald Trump’s most popular tweet to date is a video that shows him fake-pummeling a personification of CNN. Reality TV star Rob Kardashian was trending recently after attacking his former fiancée on Instagram in a flurry of posts so explicit his account was shut down. He continued the attacks on Twitter, where he has more than 7.6 million followers.
While public interest in bad behaviour is nothing new, social media has created a vast new venue for incivility to be expressed, witnessed and shared. And experts say it’s affecting social interactions in real life.
“Over time, the attitudes and behaviours that we are concerned with right now in social media will bleed out into the physical world,” said Karen North, a psychologist and director of the University of Southern California’s Digital Social Media Program. “We’re supposed to learn to be polite and civil in society. But what we have right now is a situation where a number of role models are acting the opposite of that ... And by watching it, we vicariously feel it, and our own attitudes and behaviours change as a result.”
It’s a bright, sunny day, probably in late 1911 or early 1912, and the men of Newman Brothers construction company have paused to pose for a photo.
They’re well along in constructing a new school for the board of education.
The exterior walls of the basement and first floor of the new Victoria Public School have been completed, but the second floor has yet to be started and there is still a lot to be done on the interior.
It was a year or so earlier, when the board of education decided to build this new school on Niagara Street.
The existing St. James Ward School, a three room wood-frame school built on Dacotah Street in 1875, was hopelessly overcrowded.
In March 1910, the board purchased 2 ¼ acres of land on Niagara Street as the site for the new school.
The job of designing the modern new school was awarded to architect Thomas H. Wiley, and in April 1911 Newman Brothers won the contract to construct the school.
Classes began in the new school – by then named for the late sovereign, Queen Victoria – in September 1912.
But the new school itself soon proved to be inadequate, so quickly was the school population of that part of town growing. In 1928 the board purchased 75 feet of additional land north of the school as the site for an extension of the original building.
Architect Wiley, called on again by the board, came up with a design that blended nicely with the original 1912 building.
The construction contract once more went to Newman Brothers. The addition’s four new classrooms at the north end of the building were opened in September 1929.
Other less obvious modifications
(Harper), said she’s already seeing the effects.
She said she’s been confronted by students asking why celebrities and political leaders are allowed to engage in name-calling and other activities for which they would be punished.
On some middle-school campuses, “Trumping” means to grab a girl’s rear end, she said.
And teenagers have killed themselves over the kind of slut-shaming and exposure of private images Kardashian levelled at Blac Chyna, with whom he has an infant daughter.
“We are normalizing behaviours, and it’s affecting some kids,” Steiner-Adair said. “And what’s affecting kids that is profound is their mistrust of grown-ups who are behaving so badly. Why aren’t they stopping this?”
Social media satisfies a human need for connection. Users bond over common interests and establish digital relationships with their were made to the structure over the years to accommodate the rise and fall of the area school population. At times demand was so high that the school had to make arrangements with other institutions favourite public figures, following and commenting on their lives just like they do their friends’.
Gossip is a bonding activity, and it doesn’t take a Real Housewife to know people love to share dirt about others’ perceived misdeeds. Collective disapproval creates a feeling of community, regardless of which side you’re on. Having a common enemy is “one of the strongest bonding factors in human nature,” North said.
Trump’s attack tweets have proven his most popular, according to a new study by Ohio State University professor Jayeon “Janey” Lee.
“Attacks on the media were most effective,” Lee said of her analysis of tweets posted during the presidential campaign. “Whenever Trump criticized or mocked the media, the message was more likely to be retweeted and ‘favourited.’”
Cyber incivility, particularly when practiced by cultural leaders, can have a profound impact on human relations, North said.
Studies show young people who witness aggressive behaviour in adults model and expand on that – notably Memorial United Church down on Maple Street and the nearby Ukrainian Hall – to provide temporary classroom space.
However, by the end of the 20th century population trends had behaviour. She pointed to Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura’s famous “Bobo Doll Experiment,” which found that kids who saw adults hit a doll in frustration not only hit the doll as well, but attacked it with weapons.
Social media is an atmosphere devoid of the social cues that mitigate behaviour in real life, she said. When violating social norms in person, there’s immediate feedback from others through body language and tone of voice. No such indicators exist online, and retweets can feel like validation.
“When we tolerate leaders — in the popular media like a Kardashian, or a president — behaving in this way, we are creating a very dangerous petri dish for massive cultural change,” Steiner-Adair said.
Young people, who may be the most plugged in, are getting mixed messages as they form their moral concepts.
“It behooves us all to question why we are participating in this mob of reactivity,” Steiner-Adair said, “and what are the character traits we need to model for our children.” changed decidedly. Enrolment declined to the point that the school board decided to close the school in June 2002.
Since then the school has found an important new life. In 2004 Women’s Place of St. Catharines and North Niagara purchased the building and converted it into Gillians’ Place, a 40-bed shelter for abused women, opened in 2007.
In closing, I can’t pass over in silence Victoria Public School’s brush with fame, its moment in the limelight. In 1983 the interior of one classroom and the school grounds outside were chosen for the shooting of scenes for a simple little Christmas film,
that has turned out to be a holiday classic, replayed on television year after year at Christmas time.
There is a lot of animosity and competitiveness between my sister and me. I don’t trust her with my feelings because I always get hurt. I’ve always received good grades, I financially support myself, and have a stable job. My parents have never had to worry about me. However, she is always demanding their attention (and I really don’t like attention) and I have started feeling invisible.
My sister recently had a baby girl, the first grandchild. She never sends me pictures but sends them to others, hasn’t invited me to see my niece, and phases me out from the rest of the family. None of this is surprising to me — I actually expected it.
But what is bothering me is that my parents are phasing me out, too. They send me a text every now and then to see how I’m doing, but they never visit me (I live eight hours from where they live).
I am visiting their beach house for a short stay. I tried to plan the trip around their availability, but they are always busy. When I asked them if they would be around, they said they are going to visit my sister. We haven’t seen one another since Christmas, and my feelings are hurt that they aren’t making an effort to see me. I didn’t realize I’d become so irrelevant when my sister had her baby.
I thought about talking with them about it, but then, how will I know if their response is genuine, or just something they have to do to make me happy? Am I being selfish? — UPSET
You aren’t being selfish to want to have a relationship with your parents. The trick is how to have that relationship when you feel so alienated.
It is every family member’s right and responsibility to respectfully express their honest feelings, regardless of what the response might be. I suggest you do this with your parents, rather than let this continue to fester. You say that you don’t really like attention, and so this sets up a conflict; if you don’t like attention, then how are you to get it when you do want it? They may read your independence as a lack of interest.
You should tell your parents that you understand they are busy, but that you really want them to be in your life in a more active way. Ask them if there are things you could do differently to make this possible, and ask them to accommodate your modest needs, too. I don’t think you should frame this in a way that calls their relationship with your needier sister into question, but simply ask for what you want.
You should also attempt to have a relationship with your young niece, even if your sister makes this extra-challenging.