Cyber Violence is Real

The technology of cyberspace and Web 2.0 has produced developments so rapidly that events are occurring before we have time to anticipate or plan for the consequences. No joke, the Internet has produced real casualties in many ways. One example involves two 13-year old girls who were having a spat. The parents of one (the parents!) advised their daughter to connect with her foe using mySpace as a fictitious boy. Treat her well and befriend her online, then rip her to shreds, including "The world would be better if you weren't in it."

The victim hung herself.

What happens to the parents who initiated this disaster? Nothing. No laws exist to prosecute such behavior.

Some girls harassed a thirteen year old boy with text messages. He committed suicide. Repercussions? Not legally, but I wonder what those girls think now.

Your computer taps into material that can inflict real damage. The concept of virtual rape is growing. ABC's 20/20 tells of a real estate agent whose daughter decapitated herself driving his Porsche into concrete at 100+ m.p.h. Police dutifully took pictures of the scene for their records. One policeman, no malice intended, sent the images to his home computer not clear of the implications that others had access to it. Someone posted the photos online.

The father, four months after the accident, thinking it is a link to real estate images, encounters the photos of his decapitated daughter. He is suing the police department.

I hurt myself a couple years ago and worse than you think. I watched the original video of the beheading of Eugene Armstrong (the link here is a safe wikipedia link about Armstrong). I don't think the original footage is posted anymore (I'm not looking). Search at your own risk. The original took several minutes. That's a long time to be conscious as your head is cut off.

I was shaking, traumatized, eyes welled up, sick to my stomach, and psychologically wounded in a way that took time to recover. It stuck with me for days, like ingesting a cerebral poison that started streams of thought I could not control or stop, wondering what it must have been like for him, for the killers, the camera operator, as Armstrong screamed in terror beyond language. I have seen a fair amount of intense footage including other violence and murder. The Eugene Armstrong video slammed my psyche hard enough to scar the mind, a permanent blemish from damage that cannot be undone.

Twenty years ago, a snuff film sounded like a huge deal. The semantics get entangled as motivations eliminate murders or deaths caught on camera by chance, but an intentionally produced video of a real murder where someone is deliberately killed before the camera as depicted in the film 8MM is now just a search away. Most of us probably saw the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I posted the thing. The footage showed a real execution, and it occurred as tame. I don't think I like what that means.

I would speculate that YouTube has boundaries, but few resources are required to obtain a server and a connection to post anything. Anything. Yes, we have the story of the man posting live footage of his raping/molesting a child and the police investigator who managed to get officers on the scene in time to shorten the act and arrest the man. That was a miracle and the exception.

Omnivores have a dark side. They videotape sex, fights, outrageous party developments, and staged / partially staged confrontations for shock value. One operates the camera while the other(s) commit the extreme, whether it is tearing the clothes off of a screaming woman in a public place, beating up the homeless (seen one of those? I have not), or verbally assaulting some stranger in public to collect footage of the reaction. All of the above is then posted online, completely eclipsing the farce of reality television.

The originally intriguing (when it started) "Survivor" having devolved to the ridiculous "Kid Nation" can't hold a candle to the usually unedited or barely edited and very real footage of real people whose consent or prior knowledge of the event does not exist. The amusing "You're on Candid Camera" involved carefully staged situations designed for humor and cautious of potential outcomes.

The young omnivores exercise no such caution, and this is dangerous. Some naughty teenagers messing with a camera are going to point it in the wrong direction. Police will not find the recording device around the bodies. Our K-12 schools seem to move too slowly, but if I were running the show, cyber safety would become a class for all children literally as they start to learn to read. Learning to read and learning to surf have merged. I can't get it into the schools, but if you're a parent with young children, consider that cyber safety involves a lot more than keeping a child from seeing pornography. Pornography didn't lead a thirteen year old girl to hang herself.

We have dropped a spark on a pile of flammable stuff, and I don't know how this unfolds. I remain a staunch proponent of Web 2.0, Internet technology, and the explosion of human connectedness and communication. Without it, I fear a tyrannical dystopia too horrible to imagine.

Even with the great information explosion and the ability to spin circles around mainstream media, we face extraordinary challenges.