Emergent Social Movement and Bullying

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511846/an-autopsy-of-a-dead-social-network/

The above is an interesting post-mortem of Freindster which illustrates some of the emergent nature of social movements.  Its interesting to see the conclusions that the researchers reached about the resiliance of the network.  This echos some of the resiliance models I have seen recently surrounding the issues of bullying, where children and teens who have small peer networks and mentor networks are much less resiliant to bullying.

It raises the question about whether a student is able to be identified as being "vulnerable" to bullying simply by examining their social network and an intervention designed to mitigate the risk or better understand the underlying issues that have contributed to the social isolation of that student. ( I would suggest that the systemic removal of all possible mentors from the school environments means that students are having their social networks composed of other students who are by their very nature not as mature or rich in experience as adult mentors could be, which results in the student having access to lower quality mentor networks).