Getting Worse?

Every few years we get treated to another talking head somewhere telling us how much worse the world has gotten since the last time we looked, and how all of this is the fault of whatever social, political, economic, racial or national group the talking head making the pronouncement is against. Most people pay no attention to this sort of thing, given that self-appointed guardians of taste, purity, goodness and/or righteousness have been making these pronouncements for at least the last 12,000 years (and possibly longer), and despite the dire warnings being given the world is still here and no one is being eaten by giant goat-eating cockroaches (except in certain parts of New Jersey). But then there are cases like the one out of Long Island, New York, this week about a mother using Craigslist to get revenge on one of her 9-year-old daughter’s classmates…

As reported by the local CBS affiliate station, a 40-year-old woman placed a sex ad on Craigslist and then gave out the victim’s first name and telephone number to men who responded to the ad. Needless to say, the mother in the case is protesting her innocence, and we should all remember that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the local news, let alone read on the Internet. But in this case it doesn’t really matter, because we all know that even if this case turns out to be a hoax, somebody, somewhere is going to see this story online and decide it’s a good idea. Unless Craigslist stops taking sex ads (which seems unlikely; they didn’t stop taking those ads after it turned out a serial killer was using them to find his victims), this exact scenario is going to happen somewhere in America in the next year or so, and there’s no telling how many more people will get hurt…

People who are prone to that sort of thing will pounce on this case as further proof of the corrosive effect of the Internet on our society, but I have to wonder. No one was actually hurt in this case, and unless the girl being targeted and her parents are complete idiots, there was never any real danger involved; this would appear to be nothing more than an extremely high-tech version of the old prank of writing someone’s name and telephone number on the wall of a public restroom. The difference is that instead of a small local audience, this prank could be seen by anyone in the world who wanted to, and instead of hearing about it around the community, we’re hearing about it online (or on television), which tends to increase the volume (and the outrage) in these cases. The real question isn’t even whether this sort of thing is making our world even worse to live in, so much as it is, what do we do about it?

Granted that years ago a prank of this type couldn’t possibly be disseminated to dangerous recipients around the globe, years ago we didn’t have the resources to identify, track, report and defeat such outrages, either. Measure and counter-measure have evolved together, as they always do, and if the reach and impact of idiots like the offender in our story have grown, so have our abilities to fight them. The real question is how do you propose to prevent this sort of thing? We’ve established that governments will never be able to regulate the content floating around out here in cyberspace, and that means that there’s really no way to guarantee that someone can’t post prank ads somewhere, anymore than you could patrol every public restroom in the world with a rag and a bottle of solvent. With proper education (and vigilance) we should be able to keep anyone from getting hurt, but that’s still one more thing to worry about in an increasingly hostile new world…

So is our world actually getting any worse? Personally, I doubt it; I’ve often said that the world is getting more complicated, not necessarily better or worse. Unless somebody can actually show me that the percentage of idiots in our midst is actually rising, I have to conclude that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Even if it means that we’re going to have to invent the electronic equivalent of self-cleaning latrines…