“The Upper East Side was like something from Fitzgerald or Thackeray; Teenagers acting like adults and adults acting like teenagers, guarding their secrets, writing gossip all with the trappings of truly opulent wealth. And membership in this community was so elite, you couldn’t even buy your way in. It was a birth right. A birth right I didn’t have and my greatest achievements would never earn me.
All I had to compare to this world was what I read in books, but that gave me the idea. I wasn’t born into this world--maybe I could write myself into it. I overheard enough conversations to be able to mimic the language of the Constance girls but every writer needs his muse and it wasn’t until that photo of Serena in that white dress that I knew I had something strong enough to actually create a legend and launch a website.
Within weeks, I was getting dozens of emails with stories about Upper East Siders’, so I posted them anonymously, and then I got more. Before long, it was a monster–- everyone was sending tips. And when Serena came back from boarding school, I wrote my first post about me: Lonely Boy, the outsider, the underdog. I might have been a joke, but at least people were talking about me” (Gossip Girl).


Or so goes the plot of the final episode of Gossip Girl. After the tension the blog builds up over the show for 6 years, the blogger is finally revealed. And just like that, the blogger flourishes away all the drama.
Highlands Ranch is not unlike the Upper East Side as far as opulent wealth and elite cliques, and in many ways, the people are much like the ruthless rich girls of Constance Day. Many students of my generation—including me—have found themselves wrapped up in the sticky world wide web of cyber bullying. In our tiny, plastic suburbia known not un-lovingly as “The Bubble” many teens thoughts and opinions are snuffed out by their parents, the Board of Education, our teachers and more often than not, each other, leaving our students feeling voiceless or overpowered. That’s when the bullying begins. With new technology advancing daily, it puts the power of maltreatment at our very fingertips. According to a survey conducted of 200 Mountain Vista High School students, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are among the most used social media sites. They’re also the three sites that our students reported they see the most cyber bullying occur, in forms of crude language or harsh words (Social Media Survey). Many comments on pictures or tweets are intended for friends, or meant to make people laugh, but are they always conveyed appropriately? Our 2013-2014 Douglas County School District suicide rates suggest otherwise. In the previous school year, our Douglas County suicide rate was at an all-time-high with over 10 suicides (four of which occurred all within the same week), one murder-suicide and more than 40 reported suicide attempts (Teen Tragedy 1).
“MVHS Confession” was the name of the game one weekend in August for our Mountain Vista High School students, as a Twitter page of this name swept the school like the plague, gaining nearly 500 followers in just over 12 hours. The page featured tweets that had been sent in anonymously by students of our school about their peers. Many of these messages were a stretch to say the least, but as many of the things these students sent in were dubbed as true, and marked as an invasion of privacy, the page was shut down less than 24 hours after it began, and the owners/administrators of the page dealt with heavy repercussions.
“MVHS Confession” much like the fictional blog site “Gossip Girl” from the show of the same name was a site that students of a wealthy school abused with the intention of bringing harm to a peer, and the tips sent into “MVHS Confession” tended to follow the trends of “Gossip Girl” and other confession pages that have swept twitter, including “Colorado HS Confess” and “College Confession”. Not to say that all students are a part of the cyber bullying, or that all suicides are a result of social media, but could it be that the jokes and unintentional hurtful words are the cause of the soaring depression in our youth?