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Opinion
Valentine's Day in The Pit
2/27/2007
The problem with this digital culture is that people are no longer learning basic social skills. IMing, facebook, etc. [allow] people to communicate without acquiring basic social graces--tolerance, humanity, compassion, teamwork, etc. Parents who allow their children to grow up hiding behind the Internet/e-mail/IM/Facebook/constant video games, etc. and not encouraging them to actually interact with their peers and others on a face to face level are doing their children a disservice.Oh, yeah, I was nodding my head at this. I've been writing for a decade now about the Lord of the Flies syndrome resulting from kids growing up in a cyberspace without significant adult mentorship, which just magnifies the already powerful online disinhibitory effect measured by psychologists. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," you know.
--Inside Higher Ed
I particularly resonated, however, with the comments of professor Joseph Duemer, of Clarkson University, who noted:
I don't fault the technology--I fault the cruelty of the incident. And the willingness of the mob to participate in that cruelty. But it's not new. It's as old as stoning. As old as burning at the stake. As old as lynching. Technology just makes cruelty more portable.This is what I think, too. It is easy with this particular generation to be concerned with some of the research that shows exposure to information in these new ways might be changing the way young people learn, with even measurable physical changes to their brains. Looking at history, though, the kinds of behaviors the incident at UNC brought out are things you can find from the beginning of time. Just think what happened to the folks inside Jericho after the "walls came tumbling down," or about the Jim Crow era's lynchings, or the atrocities at Abu Graihb.
Then I read the follow-up stories that just recently came out, in which Burke admitted that he and the woman in question had never dated, and that the break up was a staged performance art to show "the power of Internet communities":
The whole thing began when Burke advertised the 'breakup' on the online social network Facebook. More than 1,300 people said they planned to watch him dump Moorman, whom he said in interviews he'd dated for four months. On Facebook, he said Moorman had cheated on him.So, Burke and Moorman just performed a variant on the Lonely Girl theme, with the twist that they caused 1,000-plus people to swarm The Pit. No meanness there from Burke and Moorman, although university administrators might be asking them why they didn't obtain the necessary permit for such a large swarm. (Assuming UNC requires permits for such.)
--Topix
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