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What is with society and the media portraying all internet friendships as evil acts created to lure unsuspecting teens to the lair of some creepy 40-year-old who's waiting to capture and kill them. Or even just all internet relationships ending in something above, or that someone gives false information just to lure some young person into believing them to be a teen.
How dumb are the people who believe that all of them turn out like this? I told my gaming guild about IW and all the great friends I had here... they did a response like the one above, saying "Oh, they're just trying to trick you," or, "She's probably some eighty year old woman," or some such. Why does everyone believe this?
The media gives false portrayal of such things. I know this for a fact as all the time on the news we all hear about how someone was killed when they went to meet someone they met in a chat room, or how someone was missing after they went to a meeting spot. Why do none of the success stories, which are much more legion than those disasters, always make headlines? The answer is simple. Nobody wants to hear about people being happy because it makes them realize how bleak their lives are. They like hearing about how someone was kidnapped, killed, or molested. They don't like hearing about people meeting, being happy, and just having a jolly good time.
After the aforementioned guild incident, I told my family. That was about as big a mistake, as my aunt immediately began saying how she saw about ONE case on Oprah portraying one of the above scenarios and telling me that I should only talk to people I know in real life online (if anyone can see any use in the internet existing by doing that, please tell me). Nobody else in my family was supportive either. They mocked me, purposely got the names wrong and read my private conversations.
Anyways, I think I got a bit off track there. Where was I? Oh yes, why people believe such bad things about the internet. Well, I think that my thoughts can best be summed up by a couple of verses from "The Panama Deception" by Anti-Flag (alright, its not for these purposes originally but it works here).
Our lives reflect TV sitcoms and tragedies, by corporate choice. I ask "How many of you swallow the lies," "How many of you, do not realize..."
...And like a flock of sheep with wool over your eyes, you never stop to question you just fall into line. The media's a business that provides entertainment. Their bottom line money and stories that will make it so they run with stories that promote the lies to keep the ratings coming wealth from promoting world strife...
Life must be so easy when you dont have to think. Black and white like printing from a newspaper's ink...
and it goes on from there. Anyways, essentially what that says is that people believe whatever the media tells them about these things just because its easier. And the media isn't shy about putting these rare mishaps out there either; it keeps the audiences there, creating profit for them, so they dig for stories and if they can't find any, they'll likely make something up.
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