You gotta love the mainstream media. It's amusing and almost even impressive how they can take anything new enough for their target audience of middle-aged housewives to be wary of it and blow it up into a seemingly catastrophic issue. Look, these guys need news to make a living, and it's an unfortunate fact that there just isn't enough news out there to fill their entire air time every day. So sometimes you have to improvise. And by "improvise", I mean "convince parents that there is something out there that will follow your children to their house and murder them in their sleep".
The latest threat to the safety of children everywhere is social media. Facebook, online chatting, Youtube, things of that nature. The talking heads on TV will go on at length about how being called a name on the internet, or "cyber bullying" as they call it, will somehow result in death 101% of the time. Now, I can't imagine any motivation TV news networks would have for smearing the media that is replacing them and making them irrelevant, so they must be on to something.
A PBS documentary explaining to parents that their kids are doing something as new-fangled as it is lethal goes into depth about the story of a boy who killed himself due to "cyber bullying". While watching this, I couldn't figure out why the kid didn't just turn off him computer or just stop using AOL chat. I'm no psychiatrist, but I think it's safe to say this kid had issues beyond having an internet connection when his first thought upon seeing unpleasant things on the internet is to kill himself instead of, you know, getting off the internet. The power button to the computer is RIGHT THERE. Pressing that button has got to be easier than hanging yourself.
Next, CBS brings us the tragic tale of a woman who was called a "whore" on Youtube. The deeply-concerned sounding interviewers ask her lots of questions, but surprisingly "why didn't you just avoid the offensive videos?" is not one of them. But she certainly isn't just in this for an easy buck or anything - the woman says in the first interview that she has no intention to sue Google. By the next interview, she has already sued Google. It seems to me that the real news story here is "You can make a fortune suing billion-dollar companies over nothing, and get full media support for your underhanded greed!" Man, if I got a dollar for every time I was called a name on the internet I could probably BUY Google by now. Amazingly, I have yet to commit suicide.
I'm reminded of a show I saw in which two girls are talking about a social media site. "Don't you get nervous, with all those people talking about you?” one girl asks the other. "They aren't people I actually know", she replies. "And if I ever get fed up with them, I can just do this-", and she turns off her smartphone. She might have been on to something.
Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yha7oa21YM&feature=relmfu
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6797340n
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/view/
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