By snoadmin
MySpace and YouTube are making headlines again, but not in a positive way. With the technology of camera phones and those networking websites, high school students are not only still fighting on campus, but they’re recording it and posting it online.
Recently, eight teens were arrested for attacking a 16-year-old girl in Florida. The fight was arranged so that it could be recorded and posted online. The video shows a couple of girls beating the young girl, who was desperately trying to escape, but to no avail.
Although school fighting may not sound like news, authorities are worried that such networking sites are raising the number of such “animalistic behavior,” as one police officer said in a news interview.
Text “girl fight” or “school fight” in the YouTube search box and a bunch of clips of young kids going at it like crazy maniacs will appear.
The thing that made me cringe was the messages posted under the videos, encouraging more violence and at times starting some sort of cyberfights.
If the teens fighting happened to be black or Latino, the racist comments would have been all over the place. Are MySpace and YouTube at fault here, or are kids just more violent nowadays? You can’t really blame the messenger without thinking twice about the kind of mixed messages being sent.
Reality TV shows are creating instant celebrities out of your average Joe and we keep throwing money at a war. Combine those two ideals with the easy accessibility that young students have to camera phones and laptops, and you’ve got yourself little online reality shows that promote violence. Or whatever.
-Julio Salgado
