okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

By now everyone has heard about Megan Meier, the young girl who killed herself in October when she was 13. The details of the story are rather bizzare, and bring up all sorts of discourse about how far we should go in prosecuting a 49 year old woman who, for whatever reason, thought that she could tick off Megan enough through this fake identity to leave a relationship that I guess didn’t even really exist or only on cyberspace or, yeah it’s really weird. If the girl was having a relationship with someone online that didn’t even exist in the first place, I don’t know.

I won’t even begin to understand how a 49 year old got dragged into a fight that adolescents were having anyway, particularly online. How can you intentionally manipulate someone like that online, and not even using your own profile but one someone set up for you at that? What’s worse is that I am to understand that this women actually knew the girl in real life.

People have debated this issue to death about how hypersensitive people who are depressed can be. If you’ve never been depressed or suicidal yourself you would have no clue as how you can magnify these issues. They should have left Megan alone; on the other hand, and what no one really likes to talk about, is that this shows that Megan had been depressed for quite some time, had kept it to herself, and most likely would have found any irrational excuse to kill herself. Opportunity presented itself and she took that fatal leap; some of us come back from that and some of us never get there, it’s that simple.

It’s a sick way of looking at it but again unless you’re suicidal yourself you can’t really comment on it. I’ve spoken on this issue before, particularly with the Virginia Tech situation; what is it about a society that allows so many people to fall through the cracks and so successfully enables so many people to commit suicide that it takes a tragedy like that one, or this one, to really get someone’s attention. I hate to see someone go at such a young age, I mean 13 life can change and turn itself around so quickly you wouldn’t even realize it. You haven’t experienced anything you know absolutely nothing at that age.

Nothing is going to come from this; perhaps the woman will get the full 20 years in jail hopefully she is isolated from the general population and she actually gets to see those full 20 years. We heard about this a while back and had completely forgotten about it except for now that an actual ruling has been reached. We’ll have a few far reaching laws on the books created as a result of it but then they too will be diminished because individuals that already have a problem with some of the perversion that goes on in MySpace and other social-networks will begin using those laws to their own advantage, instead of within the context that they were designed for.

Sure it’s great that there has been some justice, but it won’t have any effect on social-networking at all and certainly won’t change or educate the public about depression or suicide whatsoever. Those are the real issues at stake, because quite honestly, privacy advocates will be protecting anonymity on social-networking sites long after I’ve died of old age. There aren’t any tools that are going to protect anyone from anything as long as the lines continue to be crossed and adults continue to use the sites to do stuff they wouldn’t be able to do in real life; such as confronting the person in real life, as the woman could have, or perhaps she couldn’t because she was so close to the girls parents, yeah right.

What’s even worse is that because it is an incident between an adult and a child we’ll never really know what truly happened. The adult is always the bad one because they are supposed to be more mature and details are almost always left out when the general public gets a hold of the news. At the same time it seems to be that, more and more, adults fail to use any discretion when dealing with children anyway. That same perverse society that treats children like adults and emboldens them and gives them the authority to talk to adults any kind of way and disrespects them on the one hand, goes to extreme lengths to protect them from evil that their own parents should have been more vigilant about fighting against, on the other.

There was no MySpace for me at 13, heck I was still playing with Atari. In fact I didn’t even get to chat until I was like 20, and that was on Gopher using Telnet. But would it have made a difference, perhaps; I had the same old friends and associates and the Internet could have opened up a whole new world to me at the time. I wouldn’t be talking to schoolmates or people I saw every day either to me that seems like such a poor use of the technology but to each their own. I mean there are people across the world you can hook up with, but anyway. But we feared our parents; if we took a plane flight to Greece we just didn’t come back for fear of what our parents would do to us. That’s like, opening up the car door on the way back from the airport and falling out of the car at high speed and running away type of trouble; like you’re no longer welcome in your home anymore.

Yet times have changed, for some the Internet is a fantasy but for others it is quite real. If you don’t already know watch the tapes of that girl getting jumped and beat down that was played over and over again in the news. A reflection of how much different life has become, and how much it is still the same; technology rarely changes anything when it comes to human behavior …