MySpace and the perils of having a camera and being a moron

So there's this girl. Fourteen. From New Jersey. She's got a boyfriend, a camera, and access to the Internet.

You can see where this is heading.

When a 14-year-old Clifton teenager posted nude photos of herself on her MySpace page, she was trying to get her boyfriend's attention.

Instead, she got the law's attention.

Passaic County prosecutors arrested the teenager and charged her with possessing and distributing child pornography after she posted 30 explicit photos of herself on her page. Though it is unlikely, she could face prison time and have to register as a sex offender under Megan's Law if convicted.

Source: New Jersey Star-Ledger.


Leaving aside the issue that she took and distributed the pictures herself, making it hard to see how they're "exploitative" according to the spirit of the laws in question, the real issue here is:

KIDS THESE DAYS HAVE NO CONCEPT OF THE FOLLOWING:

• Privacy
  
• This Isn't A Good Idea
  
• The consequences of their actions

It's 2009; a 14-year-old was born in 1995. Thus, they have no recollection of a time before the World Wide Web. The reality television wave crested in the early part of the decade. Whereas I was 7 years old and watching The Simpsons, today's teens have grown up watching Survivor, Big Brother and the Flavor of Love.

They don't understand, therefore, that maybe having cameras documenting their every move is kind of creepy. And activities normally reserved as "private" (for example, the transfer of n00dz) are apparantly now group activities, because they can't imagine it being any other way.

The lack of foresight on this girl's part Re: Posting pictures of her boobs on MySpace (where everybody can see them) or Re: Sending pictures of her boobs to a 14-year-old boy (who will then turn around and send them to all his friends and so on and so forth) or Re: Once something's on the Internet, it's there for good and never coming off, marks her as being kind of dumb.

But a sexual offender? Nah. On the other hand, we live in a society where overzealous prosecuters slap the label of "sexual predator" on someone taking a leak in an alley, so there ya go.

On the other hand, it doesn't even have to be sexually explicit to land you in hot water.

Check out this guy:

A recent tweet by one would-be Cisco employee proves that when it comes to placing a permanent black mark on your resume via the Internet, Twitter is now the tool of choice. To illustrate, here’s the tweet the now Web-infamous "theconnor" shared with the world:

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

It wasn’t long before Tim Levad, a "channel partner advocate" for Cisco Alert, shared this open response:

"Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web."

Source: MSNBC



The lesson here?

Think before you post. Your boss also has the internet. So do the cops.

If you SIMPLY MUST send naked pictures of yourself to someone, for God's sake, don't put them on MySpace. And don't send them to people who are going to immediately forward them all over the place.

(Note: People are going to immediately forward them. Get over it or don't do it.)

And lastly: If you're comfortable with running your mouth and/or losing your privacy, by all means, go ahead and put yourself out there. Just recognize that there are a number of people who are interested in it. Some of them just want to see you humiliate yourself (/b/), but others can prosecute you (the cops) or make it so you don't have a job (your boss).

Blog #3

HOW the INTERNET is CHANGING EVERYTHING (or isn't)

So it goes without saying that without the Internet and legions of what my aunt refers to as "You damned college kids (who) don't know what you're getting us into," Barack Obama would not be President, he'd just be a senator from Illinois with a funny name and big ears.

But here in AMERICA 2.0^TM Obama is President and he owes no small debt to two things that helped put him into office.

1. George W. Bush
2. The internet.

Obama's campaign team used the Internet to take "grassroots" to its ultimate extreme: One person with a keyboard can argue for him. If one person gets three of his friends to take up the cause, and they get three of their friends, and so on and so forth, the movement grows exponentially.

No number of Grandmother-forwarded chain letters (BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA DOESN'T SAY THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE PRAY FOR OUR SOLDIERS THERE ARE ANGELS EVERYWHERE) can stand up to an exponential, one-at-a-time approach.

This is because people actually listen to their friends. Nobody really reads Grandma's emails.

Not to make this all about Obama. Let's bring George Stephanopoulos in on the party. Stephanopoulos (who is, incidentially, of Greek descent; I know! I was shocked too. His name in Greek: Γεώργιος Στεφανόπουλος) recently interviewed John McCain via Twitter.

Here's ABC News talking about it.:

"It's fun. It's the latest rage," [McCain staffer Brooke] Buchanan said, referring to Twitter.

That's right. John McCain's staff thinks the Internet is like Velcro shoes.

Anyway. The Greek.

"Oh yeah! Twitterview! We're breaking new ground here people, we're beyond the looking-glass, this is going to be the first step into a BRAVE NEW WORLD that sees the news media fully embrace a new technology that early adopters have already abandonded as passe and it's just going to be the best thing ever, there's no way that this can be seen by anybody as anything other than a giant leap forwar--



...


Yeah. Once again, a note for media dinosaurs and elderly presidential candidates alike: If you do not understand the Internet, hire someone who does.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS is that the Internet is not a fad that's going to blow over or a storm to be ridden out. The Internet is The Way The World Is Now. If you can harness it, you have a fighting chance. If you can't, you will fail. And if you decide to ignore it and hope it'll just go away, you really, really need a new job.

BLOG^2

So I'm reading this article from the Guardian, which says:

A Nielsen Online report says two thirds of us now use what it calls "Member Communities," which includes both social networks and blogs. MCs now make up "the fourth most popular category online – ahead of personal email," says Nielsen Online.

The thing about this that I find striking is that email is a personal, one-on-one sort of thing. What social networking sites do is open your communication to any number of people.

You can look at this two ways:

First of all, you can say, "Well, this is good if people need to get their information to many people at once."

The second way of looking at it (and the one I follow) is to say, "Well, that's what the cc: and bcc: fields are for."

What the social networking revolution has done is allow people to be their own personal information dissemination machine.

ANT IS EATING LUNCH. ANT CAN'T SHAKE THIS COLD. ANT IS WATCHING THE MARLINS LOSE. And so on. It feeds into the personal need of wanting to be interesting, wanting to be wanted.

The benefit of this incessent twittering and facebook status changing (both activities I am unashamedly guilty of) is that unlike an email, social networking is easy to ignore. You don't recieve a thing that you have to open, read, and delete. You can just sort of skim your feeds:

PAIGE IS GOING TO THE FESTIVAL!!! "Who cares?" *scroll scroll scroll*
MATT IS WATCHING HOW IT'S MADE, IT RULES "Yeah it does!" *scroll scroll scroll*

What this means is:

a. Information has to become more succinct. Enforced brevity means that whatever you have to say better be interesting, or at the very least witty, for people to take notice of it

b. Whatever people have to say becomes less in-depth. There's no room to actually say anything of real substance. All you get is "what I'm up to at this moment in 149 characters or fewer."

As opposed to a blog, where you can go in depth into issues. Nobody does, but the option's there.


Social networking, not surprisingly, is also affecting the way real-life networking works.

It's not just the internet but the media as a whole that affects the way people interact in the real world. Ours is a generation that communicates by quoting movies and tv-shows at one another. Back in the day this sort of thing was reserved for Monty Python fans. Now everybody does it.

Same thing with the internet. Last week I changed my Facebook status to:

ANT IS ON A BOAT (F. T-PAIN)

Inside of, like, 45 minutes I had responses:

- I got my flippy-floppies!!
- This is old
- OMG I LOVE THIS SONG HA HA HA
- I fucked a mermaid!

and so on.

And what do you think happened the first time I saw the people who commented on this? We started talking about the "I'm On A Boat" song. Unreal. It's no longer "How's the weather?" or "You going to that thing tomorrow?" that we use as icebreakers, it's "WHY DIDN'T YOU POKE ME BACK :( :( :(" before the actual conversations start.
\

The Funny Thing About Playboy

An idea formed while sitting at a bar, talking to the bartender, drinking Rogue Dead Guy

The funny thing about Playboy is that back in the day, old school--old school--Playboy was a serious, intelligent magazine. Sort of like Esquire. On the forefront of social issues of the day.

On one page you've got Hef talking to Martin Luther King, Jr. about serious, capital-I Issues, like the civil rights movement. Then you turn the page, and oh, look. Naked chicks.

I read the 1984 Playboy interview of Paul McCartney (and Linda, since God knows she could never keep out of anything) and aside from pointless Yoko-bashing it was a well-conducted interview. It having been God-only-knows how long since I've actually leafed through the magazine I have no clue if the quality of writing is as high as it used to be. Maybe if they'd interview important people again and stop trying to be Maxim they'd be decent again. Which reminds me, I should try finding the interview of John Lennon.

It also reminds me that, damn, Maxim is a terrible, terrible magazine. It's like USA Today. To hell with words! I want bite-sized information nuggets and graphs and charts and stuff!

A brief aside: Is my generation the last to have not spent their entire lives online? Is there anybody growing up these days to have had to raid Dad's stash? It's odd to think (and considering the... uh, "variety" of material out there, somewhat horrifying) that the children going through puberty these days are having their first holy crap it's a naked lady moment be some creepy Japanese tentacly-thing.

I wonder what Miss February 1991 is up to these days.

Also, Hef really needs to send a memo to the boys in the art department that airbrushing only hurts the pictorials. These women apparently don't have pores. The "I'm a wax doll" look is unnerving and wrong.

Maybe it's just the models they use. That girl from Flagler, Laura Croft? Not particularly impressive.

Blog 1!

The Internet, the quintessential example of what The Communications Revolution Is Capable Of, has gone from being a way for a handful of eggheads at various universities to trade research to the most important technology since the printing press.


The ability for people to communicate with potentially billions of people has given rise to social-networking websites where an entire second life—to steal a phrase—is possible.

The biggest news about this communications revolution is the fact that people who have typically not been great users of the Internet or computers in general now have an online presence. Elderly grandmothers sending jokes and such in email has been a common phenomenon for years, but the Catholic Church has recently got into the game.

Two recent news stories illustrate:

Today the Roman Catholic Church will expand its presence in cyberspace when Pope Benedict XVI launches the Vatican's own channel on YouTube.

The Pope will use the site to post daily news clips, videos of his speeches and other ceremonies from the Vatican, with audio and text in four languages: English, Spanish, German and Italian. The channel is due to go online today during a news conference in the press room of the Holy See in Rome.

"It certainly shows that the church recognizes the value of YouTube and making itself as accessible as widely as possible using whatever means possible," said Rev. John Pungente, an ordained Catholic priest and executive director of the Jesuit Communication Project in Toronto.

Father Pungente also suggested the Vatican should consider getting a Facebook page or an account with the micro-blogging site Twitter.

source:theglobeandmail.com

But also:

Pope Benedict XVI says social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace can foster friendships and understanding, but warns they also can isolate people and marginalize others.

Benedict urged a culture of online respect in his annual message Friday for the World Day of Communications.

Benedict welcomes as a "gift" new technologies such as social networking sites, saying they respond to the "fundamental desire" of people to communicate.

But he also warns that "obsessive" virtual socializing can isolate people from real interaction and deepen the digital divide by excluding those already marginalized.

He urges producers to ensure that the content respects human dignity and the "goodness and intimacy of human sexuality."

source: Associated Press via huffingtonpost.com


While this may signal the start of a new chapter in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI appears to see the Internet as both a force for good (in the sense that it can bring people closer together than ever before) and evil (in that it can also, paradoxically, isolate people from one another, trading face-to-face contact for the more distant, at-arms-length world of online.)

Random thoughts

...while waiting for 305 to start in an effort to drive the pretty black girl I saw on the west lawn from my mind.

1. Pizza and beer is the best lunch.

2. People seem to think that I hate kids.

It's not that I hate children. I'm not an ogre. I just hate screaming, whining, crying and temper tantrums so endemic to children as a whole.

Take the two kids I met over the weekend while I was at work.

Saturday night, a 9-year-old girl was at work, eating with her parents. To be precise, her parents were eating, she was not. She was sitting there reading Calvin and Hobbes.

So I struck up a conversation with the child. Calvin and Hobbes is, she said, her favorite comic strip. Mine too! Cool! I said.

The mother's "My child is conversing politely!" smile fell hard and fast when I mentioned that I'm going to be getting Spaceman Spiff tattooed onto my arm.

"COOL!" the child said.

The other kid was a three-year-old boy on Sunday afternoon. He had a Day-Glo green band-aid on his chin and was eating his hot dog and bun separately. Turns out he had gotten stitches on his chin a few days earlier. We bonded (I showed him my own scar on my chin, visible through my stubble). It was awesome.

Especially when she told me that he had to be forcibly strapped to the operating table.

When I ran down a steep hill and into a fence in New Jersey, I was seven. I remember my mother, father and a nurse lying across my body and barely managing to get me still enough that the surgeon could stitch me up.

Either way, this kid was sticking out his chin and proudly displaying his wound. Then he lifted his shirt to show off the scar that ran directly across his belly.

"Chicks dig scars," I told the kid. Then he fist-bumped me.

Three years old. This kid is going to turn out well.

TEXT BLOG: A NEW ERA DAWNS

Sitting around in Wysocki DOCTOR Wysocki's web publishing class. We are, evidently, to set up and establish blogs in class today.

So, insofar as I'm already ahead of the game, I get to save a few minutes of time that I'd otherwise be spending on thinking up another Ghostbusters reference. With this wealth of time I'm now, uh, writing this.

youwillperishinflame.blogspot.com shall live on, upward, not backward, forward, not upward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom! Huzzah!

DID YOU KNOW? I HAVE A TWITTER! So, like, add me or whatever.

On a completely unrelated note:

So, you know how it's weird and all when someone you don't know calls you by name?

Well, when it's the chick behind the counter at the pornography store, it's about ten times more awkward.