Articles on bullying and reputation

Here is a NYT article about effective means to fight bullying. And here is an article touching on the related subject of our inborn morality.

And here is an article about how the digital age makes it harder to escape your past reputation. Ironically, this is published in the same issue as an article about the whitewashing and rehabilitation of GW Bush's image.

The article about new online privacy-eroding services rings very true for me today. As I was sending an email message to a friend, my email program warned me, "Your message has the words 'I'm attaching' in it, but you have not included an attachment. Would you like to send this message without an attachment?" That was useful. But also today, as I was posting something on facebook, the site had pictures of me with my face highlighted, asking if I wanted to tag the person in the photo. Given what the above NYT article says, I assume that facebook was using some face recognition software. This was mildly intrusive, but not a big deal, since I didn't label myself in the photos they showed. But I did scroll through the photos out of curiosity, and was distressed to see photos of my father when he was dying (I had posted them for my mother to look at). Presumably his face and mine are so similar that the software thought it was me. But this "helpful" service confronted me with distressing, sad pictures that I didn't want to see in that moment.