On the callousness of the younger generation and the use of web...

I was in college when the internet started booming. Usage was mostly among those on campus and academia. I remember how irc was still such an innocent place where 99% of us on the channels were just college students. My first job in IT didn't even have internet access. There was no need to because the web was still in its infancy and there wasn't much out there that was useful to search. It's so unlike what it is these days. So much information is out there, and so much of my life is conducted on the web, that I cannot fathom if I don't have my broadband access for even just one day. Still, I don't considered myself "hooked". As much as irc was addictive, I was only hyperactive on it for maybe six months; in fact, I was almost completely off of irc within a year. Afterall, most of my irc friends have either graduated or moved on with their real life. After a while, I come to realize that those who stayed on in irc for years are losers or bums in real life, like one of the guys from UT whom I talked to often have been on irc for close to 10 long years! To be sure, he's actually quite a funny guy on irc and he's quite popular too, but I seriously doubt if he can conduct or present himself the same way in real life, which would account for why he's hooked on irc for so long.

I digress again. Where was I...

Ah yes, I meant to write about the callousness of the younger generations these days and on how they use the web or conduct themselves. We know cyber-bullying is all over the place these days. Today, I read the article on this loser bum 21-year-old who took video of himself singing to elementary school kids, then replaced his song with sexually explicit lyrics, and posted the clip on the web and youtube. One can only sigh at the total cluelessness of these younger kids (albeit in his early 20s now), and their lack of civility. The town in Michigan wants to hang him high and dry, as a showcase of how the law will come down on them with a potential heavy sentence of 20 years and more. This dude has no lack of supporters. Apart from the usual cohort of the free-speech crowds who want everyone to do whatever whenever wherever, there are those who come out in support of him, saying he hasn't really "hurt" anyone...or has he?

I can't disagree with the last argument more. The same can almost be said, of passing child pornography on the web. Afterall, it's just the streaming of binary bits of 0's and 1's. But in his so doing, he's explicitly associating very young kids to sexual references that would and should never have happened in real life. The litmus test of this is, if he would not do it in person, believing that singing sexual explicit songs in front of young kids is inappropriate, why would he edit the clip, linking the two?

Surely we know the heavy sentence is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. But if we don't do something outrageous, the younger generations will never wake up to the potential grave consequences that their actions on the web warrant.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the free-speech argument. Those people are mostly nuts, arguing for criminals for the sake of arguing.