Many years ago, when the personal computer was just a gleam in our eyes, there appeared an ill-fated television series that lasted about two seasons (1987 and 1988). It was a show named “Max Headroom.” To give you an extremely condensed version, it was a series about the very psyche, the very soul of a man who became part of a computer and its system of connected screens. As part of the computer he was able to track the moves of the unscrupulous and he, himself, never quite turned off. In many ways, the show encapsulated the sum total of the fears of the pre-computer, pre-digital age.
We have not yet crossed to the other side, though we are getting closer. We have not yet physically crawled inside of our “devices,” but they are surely crawling inside many of us.
Let us leave “Max Headroom” for a bit and fast forward to May 2014 and Horning Middle School in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Here, two 12 year-old girls, had become obsessed with a character named Slender Man. Slender Man is a faceless, rail-thin, digital creation who may or may not have tentacles – and who cares? I suppose “he” is creepy looking, but artistically a rather crudely drawn, shadowy character that is often depicted as lurking in online images and crowd scenes.
Slender Man is about six years old and was the creation of a children’s/Sci-Fi/fantasy website. Slender Man is about as real as Bugs Bunny, Tony the Tiger or Kung Fu Panda. Nevertheless, the two 12 year-old girls held down a third girl last week and stabbed her something like 19 times. By any measure that people give thanks, we should give thanks that the stabbed girl will live. The reason the girl was stabbed is that the other girls thought they were doing Slender Man’s bidding. Slender Man “wanted” the girls to stab their friend to prove their loyalty.
Save Your Mock Outrage
How do young children become obsessed in this way? In a sense, how did Slender Man get inside the heads of these two children? In the same way many of us believe most everything we see and read online. We have given our digital tools great power over us – and over our children.
The difference, possibly, is that our children often have no filter. Indeed, the filters on the young “stabbers” were so lacking that they – like good old Max Headroom, crawled right inside their digital worlds.
There is a lot of bluff and bluster about wanting to prosecute the young girls as adults. How about prosecuting the adults as adults, and along with their parents, how about their teachers, superintendent of schools, counselors and anyone else remotely responsible for rearing them?
The same people who offer excuses such as: “My kids know stuff about the computer I could never know,” or “I really don’t understand what kids are up to these days,” are often the same adults who will mindlessly stare and text into their hand-held “devices” for hours at a time. With rare exception (make that with no exception), anything your children can do online you can do online. You are not dumb, you are not clueless, and you are not helpless.
Many of the same adults who claim to be too busy to monitor everything their kids do online, are seemingly also the same adults too busy to play catch or tennis or to go to a museum or to a concert or just to sit and talk. Unlike Max Headroom’s world, your Smartphone’s, computer, tablets, Kindles and so on, have “off buttons.” Here’s a helpful hint: your kid’s devices have “off buttons” as well.
I will whole-heartedly agree that the two girls need help. They need intense psychological counseling and lot of it. They do not need jail time unless a lot of adults are prepared to go off with them.
I would be willing to bet my lunch money that there were many warning signs in regard to these two kids losing touch well before they bowed at the feet of Slender Man. Why was no one willing to be strong enough to stand up to their digital fantasies?
Slender Man returns each day you see. He appears in internet “facts” presented without documentation; photo-shopped movie stars; violence resulting from Facebook bullying; political innuendos and numerous hate sites. There is nothing real about any of it providing we, on the other side of the screen, learn to control it.
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