Recently, (fittingly the National Day of Action against Bulllying and Violence) the principal of a Queensland primary school made the news by threatening her students with disciplinary action based on 'Facebook traffic that either bullies a child of this school or in some cases denigrates some staff and the school'.

Her reasoning was that the Facebook Terms of Service state that you must be at least 13 to have a Facebook account. But her real problem was that the website was facilitating online bullying, or to use the formal (and utterly awkward) name, cyberbullying.

Here's the thing: social media is not to blame for cyberbullying. The internet was not a sweet safe place until Zuckerberg et al showed up - ask anyone who ever had to disable comments on a blog post, delete a forum thread, or leave an online chatroom.

Every state education body has formal policies for dealing with bullying, each with their own section on cyberbullying, and wads of money have been thrown at creating online resources for addressing the issue, including the Cybersmart website and a newly created app for iOS (apparently Android users are immune).

But the problem doesn't stem from a failure to try and address the issue. The problem is the nature of the issue itself. Cyberbullying takes behaviour born in the schoolyard and adds two elements: ubiquity and anonymity.

Like just about every geek I know, I was bullied in school. But I could head home and know that the taunting, the insults and the negativity were bounded by time and space - school and the horrors therein had been left at the other end of the bus ride.

Years later starting out as a teacher, I learnt that students arrive every day with an 'emotional schoolbag' of their dreams, problems and concerns. The contents of this bag may shift over time but much of it has migrated to the phone in their pocket.

Think of the ways we've used technology to make our lives portable. Pervasive. With us all the time. Now throw someone who doesn't like you into that mix. The reason is unimportant. What matters is they have a presence in this portable world, as do you. And with that point of connection the taunting, the insults and the negativity are now portable.

Pervasive.

With you all the time.

Add to this that there's been a ton of research to show placing a layer of technology between you and someone you know makes it easier to say things that you'd never say to their face. This freedom only becomes more powerful when your real identity is taken out of the equation.

Once upon a chatroom, anonymity was the default setting for online interaction. But as sites like Facebook and Linkedin guide us to present ourselves to the world honestly, means of online expression that still allow anonymity have become the new note slipped into the locker or message scribbled on the bathroom wall.

Take Formspring. Launched in 2009 as a 'social Q&A site', the website allows you to post and respond to questions either using a profile or anonymously. This had predictable results for the teenage user base - given the potent combination of a platform to stand on and a mask to hide behind, Formspring became a place where one could ask ("How much of a slut is [insert student name here]?") and answer ("Total slut. Saw her with some guy last weekend going for it") without fear of reprisal.

But let's think about an online congregation spot for students that seems to get missed in the cyberbullying discussions - online gaming. The existing literature seems to ignore online games (the NSW education handout 'Cyberbullying - Information for staff in schools' doesn't even have the word game). In part it probably stems from a lack of understanding about the interactions that are a part of online gaming, or perhaps the rhetoric around the digital-violence-begets-real-violence argument has simply become the default comment for games and kids.

However, online gaming is one of the few domains where anonymity is not only welcomed but expected - my PS3 name isn't William Cohen. And matching anonymity with a competitive environment is guaranteed to bring out the worst in everyone. For example, whilst terms like 'gay' have finally started to be treated as derogatory in the schoolyard, they are still part of the gamer lexicon.

The comments section for the article about our Queensland school principal was rife with conflicting parental opinions, ranging from 'good on you' to 'would sue back to the Stone Age'. But there was a trend to the discussion - responsibility.

I'd argue that with the cyberbullying issue it's time we connect that absurdly loaded word with another one - awareness. If we're going to come up with real plans to help students to deal with being bullied in a virtual environment, we'll need a team effort from parents and teachers to be aware of the problem's mechanics, not just alarmed by its outcomes.