High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com.
I gotta get over to that site and take a look around. I checked it out once, but I didn't stay. It was kind of like walking into a colorful and loud mall. Everything screams "buy me" and everyone seems to be screaming, "I want to buy it!" It's a grasping, in-your-face, site, but kind of hard to describe otherwise, except to say that I can see why teens love it.
Maybe I should set up an an annex to The Daily Eudemon over there. I get the impression that a lot of teens spend the bulk of their surfing time at myspace, almost as if to say, "If it ain't on myspace.com, it ain't worth surfing." That's exaggerated, of course, but a Eudemon annex at myspace might introduce a new generation of young readers to Brews You Can Use and other urbane adult favorites.
A few ACLU-ites are murmuring "Big Brother" over this. A couple of points:
*It's nothing new for a school to take disciplinary action with respect to off-premises actions. If the Columbine killers had posted their plans to myspace.com, should the officials have merely steered them into counseling but otherwise do nothing to foil the plans or expel them? Likewise, I had a friend get suspended from basketball for drinking off campus, and no one questioned the school's rightful authority to do so.
*Schools have a legitimate interest in making sure a student's words don't translate into actions. Granted, many words are merely words, but words are often the prequel to actions. Anyone who doesn't realize this ought to spend more time reading the spiritual masters (of any religion: start with Buddhism, if the monks of the Philokalia scare you) or merely looking in his own heart. Thoughts-->words-->actions. It's a common-sense progression.
*One local school district can't be "Big Brother." It simply doesn't have the legal reach to come anywhere near Orwell's world. It's like accusing a mischievous kid with a slingshot of being Bin Laden. I realize it's just rhetoric, but "Big Brother" is one of the most over-used phrases of the past 20 years.
