Monday, 10 May 2004

Naughty network!

I love [read: hate] how the media constantly tries to blame the internet for whatever it is that they think is wrong with the world. Last night on Channel 7 news, there was a story that started like this:
The internet has been blamed for a 13-year-old girl running away with a man twice her age
It seems they met in a chat room. Just for fun, let’s see how that sentence sounds when we replace the word internet with a dictionary definition I just copied from dictionary.com:
A computer network consisting of a worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange has been blamed for a 13-year-old girl running away with a man twice her age.
It’s hard to point out exactly how stupid an assertion this is without sounding patronising. So I wont. I merely draw the phenomenon to your attention. Thank you.

No comments: