For this week’s assignment, the article I found deals with cyber-baiting. In 2006, a woman named Lori Drew created a MySpace page where she pretended to be a teenage boy. She used this pretense to communicate with a 13 year old girl named Megan Meier, who was a former friend of her daughter. She started out by sending love messages to Megan, supposedly from a boy named Josh, for a few weeks. However, she soon began sending hateful messages, including one that said that “the world would be a better place without her”. Megan ended up committing suicide because she felt so rejected by “Josh”. When I first heard this story, it made me sick to my stomach. I think it is disgusting that people use the internet to take advantage of children and teens for sexual purposes, but this case takes things to a different level because an adult was intentionally trying to harass and cause emotional damage to an innocent little girl.
I think this would definitely be considered a misuse of the internet! I mean, using the internet under false pretenses by pretending to be someone you’re not is, in itself, a misuse of the internet. But to take advantage of the fact that internet communication is somewhat “anonymous” and use it to harass or mislead someone, especially a child, is very disturbing. I think that it would be really hard to prevent people from abusing the internet in this manner, because there is really no way to check a person’s identity online. I mean, websites such as MySpace would have no way of knowing that the person creating the profile was actually a middle-aged woman instead of a teenage boy. And I’m not sure that there is really any way that we could prevent people from creating fake profiles. So I think that the only way to prevent a tragedy like this from occurring again is to educate people to exercise caution with online communication. I know that parents always tell their children not to talk to strangers online, or not to give out too much personal information, or not too go meet someone you’ve been talking to online. However, as I’m sure all of us know from experience, children don’t always listen to their parents. And children tend to be especially trusting of people who are their own age (or people they think are their own age, such as in this case). In that case, I think that really the only way to fix the situation would be to prevent children from using social networking sites.
In this week’s reading, Postman says, “…with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The Technopoly story is without a moral center”. I think this sums it up very accurately. Some people on the internet tend to lose their morals and act in ways that are unbelievable, such as this woman Lori Drew. If she were to do something like this in real life, and maybe send letters to the girl instead, then it would be just as appalling of an act. So why should people’s actions on the internet be any different from how they would conduct themselves in real life? The answer is that they shouldn’t.
Wow, that is amazing and unfortunate. What was the womans reasoning for harassing this girl in the first place? It is sickening that this adult woman preyed on an unsuspecting little girl. People, especially adults, really need to think about what they’re doing. What this woman did ended a life, the life of an innocent child. There should be some way to moniter what is going on. It should start with the parents.
That first story you tell is horrible! I cannot believe that there are people in this world that do such things.
This is obviously extreme internet misuse. Occasionally I will flick on the TV and find the show ‘to catch a predator’, which basically catches people that engage in illegal communication with young children online. Apparently there are a lot of police stings like this. This is a good thing that police are now beginning to realize that there are many illegal and criminal behavior being done online.