Eight teens from central Florida kidnapped and brutally beat another teenager from their town, filming the entire event for YouTube.
Was it the desire for attention? Was it desensitization to violence? What allows teens to become so polarized in their social circles that they can brutally victimize one of their own?
I find particularly interesting the argument about the role of the internet in this case. The NY Times article this story appeared in focuses heavily on the fact that the fight was allegedly started over comments on MySpace. From the article:
Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, released three minutes of the videotaped beating, which went on for roughly half an hour. Before the gag order stopped him from doing interviews, he said the attack might have been retaliation for comments Ms. Lindsay posted on her MySpace page about some of the other girls.
By his account, the eight teenagers under arrest….were not initially remorseful. He said he hoped that the attention
the case had drawn would raise awareness about the Internet’s power to desensitize young people to violence.The victim’s parents have taken a similar line. “For whatever reason, this MySpace, my-you, this YouTube has gone too far,” said Talisa Lindsay, in an interview outside their home. “It’s just too much.”
Her husband, Patrick, who stood beside her, went even further, declaring that Internet companies were to blame for what happened.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “MySpace is the Antichrist for children.”
Well, I don’t know about that. But I do know that teenagers have a lot of unsupervised access to other people, strangers and friends alike, via the internet. The internet offers unparalleled opportunities for social connectivity, especially via the web 2.0 social networking sites, which include MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and a host of others as new places pop up all the time. And while for many people web 2.0 is a very positive development in technology, offering new avenues for friendship and professional networking, it’s not a place to leave your kids unsupervised. Yet, from lack of knowledge about this booming social technology many parents do just that.
Consider this. When your child becomes old enough that you are comfortable dropping them off at the mall to meet their friends, you’ve probably – hopefully – had some long talks with them about how to behave and how to protect their safety. If you are going to let your teenagers use MySpace – and in my opinion that’s okay – you should also be talking to them about internet safety, supervising their profiles (they are public, after all!) and communicating with them about the things that concern you.
Over the internet, teens tend to gravitate to places like YouTube and Myspace, where they can create profiles, upload media of themselves (photos and video often taken with cell phones) and leave comments for each other. They also use Instant Messaging (known as IM) programs (like AOL Instant Messaging-AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, etc.) that allow for instant communication with text. As an aside, they often have cell phones with text messaging as well.
When kids communicate via these other mediums and not in person or even on the phone, they miss a lot of social cues that help regulate communication between individuals. For example, if you can’t see the body posture or hear the tone of voice of the person you’re insulting, you may not understand how the person you’re talking to feels about what you’ve said. Or you may not have the right amount of caution or remorse when choosing your words.
There’s a young woman I’ve worked with who is near and dear to my heart, who is the one who first introduced me to MySpace in 2004. I can’t recall the number of times she’s been incited to physical fights (which never manifested, luckily) over hostile, provocative comments some strange teen she’d never met made to her on IM or left on her profile. (Often, it’s someone such as the ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s sister from three towns away who out of boredom starts trouble…)
If parents or other adults are going to allow access to the internet and all of the communication tools that modern culture affords us, then we’ve all got to get a bit more educated about how kids are using these things. And like any other part of a child’s life, we need to stay involved. The internet is this wild west for kids – they can go wherever and do whatever without the watchful eyes of parents. So of course it’s a dangerous place for them.
The world is a dangerous place for kids without the right level of support and supervision from their parents. The internet is no exception.
In a word, teach your kids how to be safe and responsible on the internet, just as you would teach them about their safety riding public transportation or going off to camp.
Media – television, movies, video games and the internet – are powerful shapers of culture. We are all adopting attitudes and beliefs based on what we absorb from the media, whether it’s CNN, Fox “News,” YouTube or Family Guy. So of course, our children and teens are too.
But, if our kids are learning their core values from the internet or other media, maybe it’s because that media is filling some kind of other need for social connectivity they’re not getting elsewhere.
Just a thought.
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