OK, a little reference material before the blog... Check out this article on CNN.com, about a 13 year old girl who commits suicide after a Myspace prank...

Fake Online "Friend" Leads To Suicide

Now, the knee-jerk reaction is, "What kind of a pathetic twit commits suicide over an internet prank?"  And yes, it's rather easy to go there - Suicide because someone is picking on you is, to say the very least, a permanent solution to a dumb-ass problem.  However, let's examine something here: in the past, when you were being picked on at school, it rarely went beyond the school or neighborhood.  Now, thanks to the internet, literally the whole world gets to be in on the joke.

This is something people seem to forget about this modern era.  It can't at all be comfortable knowing that, every time someone wants to berate you "just because" (which, let's face it, is a trademark of children and young adults), that they can do so on a global scale.  And of course, we're talking about kids here - hyperbole is par for the course.  They have no sense of scale, no moral objections to taking things too far, and no ability to comprehend things in the same scale that they express them.  A teenager might say something is "the greatest thing ever, in the whole freakin' world", but really, what do they know of greatness, or of the world?  This may explain why they tend to use such grand terms to extol the virtues of celebrities, video games, and fast food.

However, what disturbed me the most, is the idea that a whole family was in on this prank - How sick is that?  How bad are you at parenting, if your idea of 'family bonding' is to brow-beat a clinically depressed tweener?  How desperate are you to prove your coolness to your children, if you encourage this behavior?

As fir the Myspace portion of the prank, everyone should know by now that I've never really liked Myspace that much to begin with.  However, I'm not going to hold too much against Myspace for this particular incident, mainly because it really could have happened on any other social networking site just as easily.  I'll just stick to hating Myspace for the classic reasons - Rampant spamming, sexual predators, adware distribution, abysmal loading times, and apathetic staff who would rather defend their right to exist than police their own product. I dunno about the rest of you, but if I discovered that a building I owned was a haven for hackers, crackheads, and child molestors, the last thing I'd be telling the police is, "Well, it'd be too expensive and time consuming for me to fix the problem."