I don’t watch television much anymore, but tonight I happened to catch ABC Primetime’s exposé entitled “Cruel Intentions.”

This documentary went behind the scenes to reveal to us outsiders (i.e., those over 20) what social interaction is now like for adolescents in the modern world. That is, in such a world — where every techno-savvy teen is equipped with a camera-snapping cell phone, where IM [instant messaging] and wireless texting are preferred to face-to-face communication and where “Dear Diary” is supplanted by public profiles on web sites like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal or Xanga — interpersonal relationships are an order of magnitude more complex and dynamic than ever before.

Every generation has had its bullies. And every generation that survived high school can attest that girls are often meaner, crueler and more vicious than the boys. The boys might fall into fisticuffs by the creek after school; but the girls would go for the emotional jugular.

And now, in the digital age, the emotional jugular is published on the web for everyone to see… Enter cyberbullying.

To demonstrate teen-teen interaction (or destruction, as it were), an experiment was conducted by sociologists such that different sets of teen girls were placed in isolated rooms for three days and allowed to communicate with other groups only by computer — via instant messaging, e-mail exchanges, updates to personal profiles on various web sites, cell-phone messages, even webcam chat sessions. To fuel a desire for communication, the experiment began with the instruction that a few of the groups should want to be accepted by a ‘popular’ group. However, the need for that premise was short, as the nightmarish experiment took on a life of its own: Like Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, young girls (who appear polite and well-mannered to parents and other adults in public) in no time revealed themselves to be veritable shrews. It is frightening how competitive cut-throat they became, stopping at nothing to criticize tear the other girls to shreds. Insults would become double-talk. Profiles were sabotaged and doctored to say different things. Photos were digitally manipulated to make the target look like a fool or a whore… and this e-ssault and batterblogging was made public in order to really sting. (And you thought rumors, told verbally, spread like wildfire?!)

And when the girls got a chance to chat with the ‘popular’ group (which was the only group to include boys), the talk from these 14 year-olds — fourteen year-olds — was enough to make Howard Stern blush — and in the Real World, this talk is invariably accompanied by revealing photos or video striptease.

The experimental scenario, while contrived, nonetheless served to reveal patterns of behavior that these dozen kids had already established and enacted full-force in their Real-World lives. Having endured listening to the teens’ inane, vacuous chitter-chatter, incredibly poor grammar (and spelling) and vitriolic attacks, I can only come to the following conclusion (in their words): Like, 2 much tech iz sooo f@#ing gay, u know what I'm sayin, B%tch?

Even kids who seem nice become really nasty when they have the cloak of secrecy. Give them the anonymity that comes with a screen name, and these kids prove that the pen web is mightier than the sword. Problem is, this isn’t playful banter — some kids have actually been driven to depression and suicide from such profiling attacks.

So gone are the relatively “good ol’ days” of recent past, when all you had to worry about for your child’s online safety was internet porn. Now you have to screen blogs; and flickr/shutterbug accounts; and MySpace/Facebook/Xanga profiles; and keep tabs on text messages; and snoop to see what kind of pictures they snapped with their cell phones. There’s not really a solution, here. Definitely keep the family computer in the family room, not in their bedrooms. Don’t get them their own computer until they leave for college. Limit cell phone use, perhaps even disabling text messaging for their phones. Above all, try to instill in them manners, Christian morals and a sense of self-worth; but be cognizant that even this, sometimes, isn’t enough to prevent the worst part of human nature from rearing its ugly head.