Technology Increasing Student Brawls?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The NYT story below is about how smartphones have increased brawling at schools. Though I have no reason to doubt this, it is not like peers didn’t always sometimes encourage other people to fight. The scope is different and technology may make it more cyclic, pernicious or counted (since there was often no record of fights 30+ years ago).

Is this as dramatic a problem as the article implies? Any stories or comments?

Excerpt:

Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted. He watched, horrified, as a dozen teenage boys rampaged through the cafeteria, pummeling and kicking one another, overturning tables and chairs. Other students jeered and jostled to film the fight on their phones.

“It was like a stampede of videos,” said Mr. Martinez, now 18 and a senior. “Everyone was trying to get the best angle.” But the pandemonium at Revere High School in Revere, Mass., was just beginning.

Within minutes, students in other parts of the building began receiving text messages about the lunchroom brawl. Suddenly, teachers said, dozens of riled-up teenagers started racing down hallways and careening down stairways with their phones to get to the fight.

To stop more people from flooding into the cafeteria, Revere High posted staff members in front of the lunchroom entrances and issued a “hold” order to keep students in their classrooms. Administrators called the police to help restore calm. The school said it ultimately suspended 17 students involved in the brawl.

Across the United States, technology centered on cellphones — in the form of text messages, videos and social media — has increasingly fueled and sometimes intensified campus brawls, disrupting schools and derailing learning. The school fight videos then often spark new cycles of student cyberbullying, verbal aggression and violence.

Normal link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/15/technology/school-fight-videos-student-phones.html

2

Big cafeteria-wide brawls have never been common, and still aren’t.

If the actual statistic is just for fights in general (most involving only two or maybe 3-4 people), then I wonder if it’s accurate, or if phones have just made it harder to ignore them when they happen. In my day, if I told the principle “Johnny attacked me after gym”, I wouldn’t be able to prove anything, but now, students can.

3

Yeah, it’s that train of thought that made me ask the question.

4

Yeah, I also wondered if it’s just making them harder to ignore. They were a regular occurrence back when I was a kid.

5

This is a Heisenberg’s Brawl Uncertainty Principle thing. Things change because you observe them. Are we seeing videos of brawls more because we have more videos? Are we seeing more because videos promote more brawls? How the hell could anyone really know without a proper study of brawl frequency?

I saw fights when I was a kid but never saw a literal BRAWL in the sense of “more than a few people all fighting at once.” Never, and I didn’t go to some posh schools. But there’s a lot of schools, who knows?

6

I have to agree - I saw zero and I went to public schools, at least one of which had at least had moderate racial tensions. Now a few cafeteria food fights I did see (in the aforementioned school), but that never boiled over into any actual violence. It was just deliberately aping the film Animal House.