RE:
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“Our goal is not only to deal with this issue, but to try to educate parents across the state and across the nation that this is what your children are watching,” (Sheriff Grady Judd) said. “This is what some children are participating in...”
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I'm not aware of any other cases of American students beating up a classmate with the intention of posting it to the internet.

Since assault is a crime, apparently most kids can figure out that wouldn't be a good idea.

I absolutely agree with you on this. The Internet is being used as a scapegoat by the parents. The world of a teenager is and always has been rather mysterious, especially to their parents. Arguing that MySpace blocks parents from accessing their teen's profiles tells me two things:

1. A lack of parental control on the use of the Internet. If those parents controlled and supervised their children's use of the Internet, they would never be locked out of anything.

2. False sense of righteousness. Do these parents think that by having access to their child's MySpace account will open up the entire world, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, hates of their child? No. Talking to them usually helps. Not snooping on their Internet profiles.

This was a clear case of bullying and we all know that bullying is as old as time itself. And like you said, in the old days stories of bullies terrifying others were carried by verbal means. So if we used the same arguement these parents are using, that means that talking is what made the bullies in the old days beat people up.

I think that presently, too many parents are taking the onus off of themselves and finding fault with everyone and everything else for the shortcomings of their children. There's only so much finger pointing someone can do before they run out of fingers. But knowing these people, they'll probably blame the Higher Authority for only giving them ten fingers...

No offense but whether she said anything mean or posted anything mean is beyond the point, freedom of speech. That freedom doesn't exactly leave physical scars (emotionally maybe, get over it). The beat down is absolutely crazy. These students should be charged with everything possible. Assault, Felony, Kidnapping, blackmail, attempted murder and anything else they can tie the video too.

Let me explain some:
When the girl stopped the victim from leaving, that is kidnapping without a doubt. When the girl said she would "catch a bigger beat down if said victim went to the cops", that is blackmail. The video shows the girl waking up from being unconcious from a prior beatdown, head trauma + more beatdown= attempted murder. Oh, and I forgot, conspiracy and premeditated charges also. The use of the cameras and the number of people lead to those charges.

The girl obviously won't talk trash anymore, she got her beatdown. Now it's time to show that bullying has its consequences also, these kids need to go away to jail or juvenille detention for a couple years as an example to other bullies.

A beauty queen I know is constantly talking about character education as her "platform." At first I thought she was just being conservative, but I'm beginning to think there's a real case to be made for it as a new subject in school.

I saw this on the Today show this morning and I was outraged. Seriously - I was yelled at the TV.

The mother of both Megan Meier & the mother of the victim were blaming youtube & myspace for "supporting" such horrible acts.

I've been relatively vocal about my distaste for youtube. Why? Cos it's transcended. It has little to no competition and basically has inserted itself as acceptable form of media that no one seems to question for their kids. HOWEVER, that's not youtube's problem, that's their success. They're providing a community-based service. COMMUNITY BASED. Aka, the community has the choice to watch, post, repeat.

It's about education & parenting. I was enraged to hear these people pointing at myspace & youtube, like its an autonomous brain with a singular attention span and an embedded moral core.

Crazy people... Do not rely on sites to RAISE YOUR CHILDREN. Do not rely on sites to give your child a moral compass, or discipline them for being bad. Sites have no singular focus within their community, and therefore cannot stop for a moment to put their hands on their hips and give appropriate attitude to inappropriate choices. That's not the purpose of the site.

This is also why people need to be aware that CHILDREN UNDER 13 should not be hanging out there. Or at least, not without thorough community & understanding from their parents.

The problem is NOT the internet, it's the fact that a group of people had teen-aged children make TERRIBLE PREMEDITATED choices to beat the CRAP out of a single girl. That is the heart of it. What adds to repulsiveness of this is the fact those same children wanted to then SPREAD THEIR BAD CHOICE AROUND in a public forum. Very "Carrie" to me, ahem, pigsblood + prom.

Le sigh. And calm. Sorry, I just get fueled by people who are not taking responsibility, and instead spreading their own insanity by blaming everyone else.

The mother of one of the girls spoke yesterday on the Today show, and I couldn't help but ponder about apples and where they fall compared to the tree in this case.

Thank you for posting this, I had much of the same response on my blog. Blaming YouTube and MySpace is totally off target for anything productive to come from this disturbing story.

Parents have to be teaching kids empathy for other human beings. The lack of empathy is what leads to trash talking about peer beatings. I wish that was the message making the news, not another "internet is evil" story.

After seeing the video clip over and over and over again with the commentators talking about the serious problems with the internet, I wonder if the news shows have any problems with their own shows running snippets of the video over and over again. How quickly they’ve forgotten that TV used to be the cause of all of societies ills.

Aside from that, I have to agree that most teens aren’t thinking how cool it would be to beat someone up just so they can put it on YouTube. Most kids just don’t go around beating up other kids- it takes a certain mindset that has no sympathy for others to do that sort of thing. You only had to hear the interview of a parent of one of the suspects and, given her attitude, you could imagine how she’s raising her daughter and understand why her daughter would be involved in this sort of thing. Parents get an awful lot of blame for even the slightest thing, but sometimes it really is the parents’ fault.

For these kids, posting it on the internet is more like a bonus rather than a reason to do something. YouTube does help broadcast trends- think of all the goofballs who tried to “ghost ride the whip” a year or two ago- but again that just would have spread by word of mouth before. The trend would have evolved slower, but it still would have happened. It’s really more interesting discovering why girls are becoming more violent, or rather, more willing to act upon their aggressive impulses, which has been happening long before YouTube existed.

Thanks for your thoughtful and articulate post on this story; I was looking for just this sort of thing when I was posting about it on the orb28 blog yesterday. The internet is not to blame for teens fighting--I'd rather look at the cultural implications of why those girls thought violence was an acceptable way to deal with the problem, but no one seems to be talking about that.

You know, another interesting fallout of this whole incident is the immediacy of the mob justice that results. I believe these girls deserve every bit of justice that can be served, but I believe that the government should do it, not the people. What I'm referring to is what I found last night in the comments sections of the assault video on YouTube. Many, many people were posting comments that contained the names, addresses and phone numbers of the eight teens and inviting people to inflict harm upon them and their families. This isn't right. Social media has its perks, but sometimes, it brings people too closely together too quickly and can incite swift mob mentality that festers into what can result in horrendous consequences. If someone did indeed harm one of the family members because they now have the address, will YouTube be blamed as an instigator and co-conspirator now because it was a platform for people to post what is in essence an electronic lynching poster?

Totally appreciate that point about the internet Anastasia. Most fears that people have about online culture are fears that have existed long before computers entered our world.