New media, old problem

I am a sham of a television columnist.

If you, gentle readers, didn’t notice, my last column was my feeble, thinly veiled attempt at revealing the fact that I spend way more time on YouTube and the Internet in general than watching TV.

However, I do try to reconnect what’s going on in the broadcast world and online, since they are becoming increasingly dependent.

As of late, there’s been a potent example of this intersection of internet and TV in the recent indictment of eight high schoolers for their filming and posting on YouTube of a savage beatdown of one of their classmates.

On March 30, in Lakeland, Fla., eight teenagers invited another teenage girl over, and began assaulting her with punches, slaps and knees. The kicker? One of them was standing in the background and filming the entire episode. The beating was allegedly in retaliation for things the victim had said online about the others, and the teens planned to post the video online in some sort of retaliation.

I’m not here to comment on the nature of the crime. I think we can all agree that what happened was a terrible, violent, Lord of the Flies-style beating that no high schooler should ever have to experience.

However, the media’s handling of this incident was both predictable and sub-par.

Once the story broke and the video did get leaked to the Internet, much to the dismay of the victim and perpetrators the news outlets started looking for an angle on the story, like any self-respecting cadre of journalists. Since this story has the interesting kink of videotape and YouTube, nearly every outlet went with the tried and true angle: blame the Internet.

As soon as I heard about such a hard-hitting scandal involving one of my fave Web sites, I knew I had to get to the bottom of it. I went to CNN, and they actually had a video update about it. After a brief discussion and display of the actual taped beating, the commentator began his interview with an expert. His first question was if he thought that the prevalence of sites like YouTube and MySpace exacerbated problems with teenage violence.

My stomach churned, for multiple reasons.

First, because I could see this guy generating his angle as he spoke. Granted, most angles do take shape while you’re interviewing your sources. But right out of the gate, the story that the reporter wanted to make out of the interview was painfully see-through.

Secondly, it did kind of give me pause. Usually I’ll stand up for the Internet when people try to blame it for any societal ill, when in reality the people complaining are probably still running MS-DOS on their computer. But you have to wonder, would this crime have been committed, or committed as forcefully, were it not for the presence of the camera and the promise of celebrity and humiliation of the victim by posting the video on the Internet?

It’s hard to say. But between this event, and “happy slapping” in the U.K., a fad where young ruffians run up to a stranger on the street, slap him or her, and tape the whole thing on a camera phone, the argument that the promise of Internet fame through portable recording technology gains credence.

On the other hand, the promise of Internet-beatdown fame may exacerbate teen violence, but it’s not completely responsible. By placing the blame squarely on the Internet, we lose focus on the true cause of this anger that eventually boiled over into group assault. The fact is, regardless of the Internet, you have to be some seriously disgruntled high schoolers to lure a girl into your house and beat her up as a group. So, maybe instead of debating the finer points of new media and their relationship to violence, we should look at why these kids felt so compelled to attack a fellow classmate. The root of this violence probably dates back to these kids’ home lives and their upbringing, not to the search for fame. That search for fame is most likely a function of their alienation and anger. If teens in the ’50s had had cameras, would they have taped mailbox baseball? Probably. But cameras didn’t exist then, and they did it anyway. This illustrates that teen violence exists whether we tape it or not, but it’s hard to say whether taping intensifies it or not.

However, at least if people are thick enough to keep taping crimes, the system will have a much easier time finding the guilty parties.

If you wish people still played mailbox baseball, e-mail Ayres at jayres@media.ucla.edu.

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