I can’t resist quoting Julian Sanchez at length:
As regular readers know, I’m fond of invoking a thought experiment from philosopher Derek Parfit called “The Harmless Torturers.” Parfit imagines one scenario in which 10,000 torturers each torture one of 10,000 victims using an electrocution machine. Each torturer clearly inflicts terrible agony on an individual victim. In Parfit’s second scenario, each torturer’s machine is configured so as to deliver one-ten-thousandth of the same voltage—a quantity so small as to be utterly imperceptible to the victim by itself—to all of the victims who were individually electrified in the first scenario. In the aggregate, the torturers inflict exactly the same amount of pain on exactly the same number of people. But in this second scenario, each torturer can—with some justice—claim that his actions are “harmless.” Each, in other words, can claim: “If I stayed home, there is not one of those 10,000 victims who would feel any difference.”
As applied to physical torture, the scenario is fanciful. As applied to psychological torture, it describes the norm. Only a few really horrid people commit themselves to relentlessly harassing and abusing a single individual. But many teens—and not a few nominal adults—will make a handful of snarky and cutting remarks to numerous different individuals over the course of an ordinary day. It would often be overblown to characterize any particular remark as bullying: In isolation, all but the most fragile of us would shrug it off. In the aggregate, they may be intolerable to even the most self-assured.
One reason “cyberbullying” may present special problems is that the Internet and social networks dramatically increase the realistic number of people who can pile on a single victim in a short period of time. Each aggressor might rationalize their own part in the distributed bullying as just one or two comments, though the victim perceives an overwhelming assault when these are all combined. For an analogy in the physical world, we can look to street harassment, which is enabled by the high volume of anonymous, brief public interactions characteristic of urban environments.
I’d actually say that much of real-life bullying in schools uses a similar dynamic; like urban streets, schools are a place where people who might make comments are unnaturally dense, and you just have no choice but to be walking by them lots of time every day.
Another issue is prejudice. For many people, the bigotry they encounter in their day to day life is small, difficult to complain about, and often ambiguous. (I’ve posted about this before.) A study has found that subtle, ambiguous racism is actually more mentally difficult to deal with than blatant racism.
And this, too, accumulates. It’s easy to dismiss one rude clerk, one sneering stranger, one odd look. But the more it happens, it’s tiring to have to wonder, each time someone treats you with inexplicable rudeness, is it bigotry?