Commentary

What About The Children?!

For two days about three weeks ago, the press was fixated on a story involving a young girl and the Internet. Someone she met in a chat room lured a thirteen-year old girl by the name of Christina Long away from her home. After taking the train to Danbury Fair Mall and leaving a McDonald’s where she met this stranger, she was later found strangled to death.

Needless to say, the New York press (it happened in Connecticut) was rabid with headlines that suggested that the Internet was somehow responsible for this young girl’s death. The New York Post, in fact, had on its front page, “Internet Blamed in Death of School Girl.”

So it was that the question was raised among some of the digerati (can we still be called that?): Why does the press continue to malign the Internet any way that it can?

The Internet, if we can label it a "thing" in this sense, is as responsible for this girl's death as much as the train is for getting her to her meeting place or McDonald's is for being that meeting place.

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If this girl had met this fellow through the personals in a newspaper, would headlines read "Newspaper Blamed in Death of Altar Girl?" Or if she met him at the library, would the headline read "Library Blamed in Death of School Girl?" The headlines should read "Man who Killed School Girl Blamed in Her Death."

As Americans, we have a difficult time with the notion of individual culpability. If someone does something bad our first inclination is to look for the reasons outside of the individual committing the act. We look to childhood trauma, creative “afflictions," or exposure to a given medium as the cause for negative phenomenon. We believe that technologies and institutions should be responsible for our lives in every way, and they receive the blame when things go awry. Schools should raise our children, the government should protect us from ourselves, magic pills will cure our ailments, and computers will make us smart.

Confucius once wrote that we should look, first, to ourselves for the cause of missing the bull's eye on the target rather than looking to the arrow or the bow.

American public culture is one of laziness. We are a one-hour photo, instant oatmeal, microwavable, quick-fix society. It requires discipline and responsibility to be involved in our children's lives. It requires duty and will to be involved in the functional well being of a community.

What can we, as an industry, about altering the voice of the press when it comes to the coverage of the Internet as a medium: not much. This kind of coverage and this kind of angle is just too good for a paper to pass up. Face it; most news outlets live for this kind of occurrence. When it comes to this kind of thing, you won't see "positive" coverage of the Internet as a medium until newspapers start leading with things like "Teenage Boy Does Nice Thing for Parents, Neighbor." Good news just doesn’t sell.

I think the focus really needs to be on business coverage of the space. It is in the Wall Street Journal or the tech pages of the NYTimes or in newsweeklies where the press does the most damage to the Internet as a business tool and as an advertising vehicle.

As long as bad things happening to regular people are popular news items, the Internet, as a medium, will always have to take some heat when it comes to the social ramifications of its presence in our lives. Television still takes its lumps from time to time.

What should really be our concern is how do we get those covering the industry to cover it more accurately? How do we get the venerable scribes at the Wall Street Journal to stop using words like “hits” in their reportage? How do we get business writers to cover the success stories of the online advertising rather than just the failures? This is our real challenge, as it seems to be the only thing we can do something about. The industry needs better PR and more eloquent advocates. And it needs to make nice with those in the traditional media industry alienated a few years ago when money was plentiful and egos loomed large.

If you want someone to say something nice about you, after all, you usually need to be nice.

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