This Island Internet

Both my dear readers are very busy, so they might have missed out on the news item about the beatdown by Florida teenage girls, which they videotaped and wanted to post on the Web. They might also have missed the discussion that has arisen around it. Apparently everybody involved in the case seems to be saying, "Don't blame me/my daughter, it was the others/the Internet."

And apparently Barry "Men in Black" Sonnenfeld fears the Internet is eroding society. It is so pervasive and hypnotic, he believes, that kids today have no sense of privacy, thus enabling totalitarianism. He might view the Florida incident as evidence of this.

Here's my response...

Point the first: Helen A.S. Popkin, voice of reason and sanity, makes a simple point: you cannot blame the Internet because teenagers sometimes do ridiculous, even horrible things. Teenagers can be like that. (So can adults.) It's not that hard to figure out. You know the old saw, "With freedom comes responsibility"? Well, if you agree with that, you agree with its attendant correlation: with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. This needs to be learned, and it needs to be taught.

Point the second: It does seem that the current generation is more media-savvy than any other. But they do have their limits, as Shakhti discovered recently, and the rest will have to figure it out too.

The take-home lesson here is, I think, that things ain't so simple as we'd like. People are different, they behave differently, which brings me to...

Point the third: Here's my sociological observation. Individuals do not act like groups of people; that's why we talk about mob psychology, as opposed to personal psychology. Seems to me we're forced to come to grips with this stuff called technology, and we have to do it again every day. This means each one of us must deal with it, and society as a whole must too. And these are distinct orders.

Time was when photography was (a) feared because it would put painters out of business or (b) loathed because it wasn't, couldn't be art. Something similar with movies vs. theater. Who would say that now? Why not? Because as a whole, we have learned what we can do with film - the fear and loathing came out of ignorance.

It took a lot of effort and bumbling, but we've learned. And are still learning (as demonstrated by innovative works and stinkers alike). That's what's happening now with computers. We're learning the ropes as we go, as can be seen by the double-edged Youtube and the Florida beating.

My basic point here is that the shifting of responsibility is so human and yet so maddening.

In some ways this is complicated by findings such as this, one where a person's decision-making can be determined prior to that person's awareness of the choice. Interestingly, John Dylan-Haynes (the leader of the study) seems to doubt the reality of free will: faced with an unsavory decision, "We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point....But I don't think it's plausible." (Quoted in Wired.com.) (I'd say the only real thing the experiment proves is there's a delay in awareness, not a rigid determinism. But that's another post.)

But it doesn't complicate everything. Let's assume the experiment is strictly speaking right and decisions can't be changed. Now imagine the following courtroom scene...

Lawyer: Your Honor, my clients could not have been guilty of assault and battery. Sure, they talked about it for days. Sure, they intended to put their appalling act on display for the whole world to gawk at. But so much evidence shows that people do not have conscious control over the decisions they make! Therefore, they cannot be considered responsible for deciding to whup their classmate's ass.

Judge: Oh good, then I'm not responsible for giving them ten without parole. *slam!* Next!

Now, Mr. Sonnenfeld, I'll be the first to admit being mesmerized by the WWW. Look, I've got a blog. But if I don't finish my dissertation, can I really say, "Stupid dumb Internet...kept me from doing my job"?

As for Mr. Dylan-Haynes's comment, I won't go into the hairy issue of free will. I'll only say that he doubts a certain conception of free will, and that is all he can legitimately say. More than that, and he would be committing the same error in philosophy as Richard Dawkins does in theology - namely, assuming that his interpretation of the problem is the only proper one. It is not.

So. Teach your children well, let them make their own mistakes, and hope for the best. Don't blame the Net just yet. But by all means, fear what people can do with it.