Davis Cleveland and the Chaos of Twitterverse

Sounds like a book, doesn't it? Actually, it's a serious problem that is obviously more rampant than most parents and adults know about.  First, a brief introduction.  Davis Cleveland is a Texas-born actor who plays "Flynn," Bella Thorne's mischievous little brother on the Disney sit-com Shake It Up.  His storylines are, in my opinion, too short (pun intended,) and he was born to play the role.  The banter he had with "Henry" (Buddy Handleson) was hilarious, some of the best lines on Disney in the past year or two.  A couple of clips here:

 

The clip on the left actually brought about some interesting events outside of television, and, like uncovering bugs from under a rock, it uncovered a not-so-nice side of children these days.  The episode in question had Cece and Rocky going to a party hosted by "Shake it Up Chicago" moderator Gary Wilde. There were at the party supermodels who took an instant liking to Flynn when he shows up with his mom, busting the party.  There are a couple of jokes made about how the supermodels don't eat, etc...  Well, turns out that former Disney actress Demi Lovato saw the episode, and, having had bouts with eating disorders, among other things, went onto Twitter and http://www.nickandmore.com/2011/12/24/demi-tweets-disney-pulls-episodes/">criticized Disney for not having girls of all sizes on the shows.  Davis tweeted back, http://demelzellion.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/twitter-drama-davis-cleveland-vs-demi-lovato/"> taking up for the show. I'm not trying here to analyze who was right or wrong.  Notice that the Tweets were done shortly before Christmas, 2011.  From that point until now, fans of Demi Lovato have been barraging Davis' twitter account with threats, curses, and insults, most of which have overshadowed his efforts to help out fans with Cystic Fibrosis, and more recently, helping out the (far too late) cause of preventing bullying at school.  To show a demonstration, and to warn you, it does contain vulgarities:

Now, everyone's up to date.  To analyze this mess, we have to see how the Internet has changed our way of thinking, of communicating.  For, as Neil Postman famously said, "The Medium is the Message."  The Internet has created an instant communication relay, allowing anyone and everyone to talk about anything without regulation or censorship.  It has, as Postman talked about in The Disappearance of Childhood, taken away the ability of parents to control what information children receive. It is now entirely possible for kids, or anyone, to find out about anything instantly, from terroristic ideas to pornography of every variety.  It also has the ability, through Twitter and Facebook, to provide an instant open communication between a child and potentially every person on Earth.  This has brought the teasings and insults that children would normally get in school (and believe me, I've been the target of many of them), and launches them into the privacy and safety of the child's bedroom.  Thus the recent suicides due to cyber-bullying.  

What I want to understand, however, is exactly why this happens.  The internet effectively removes all barriers between children and the outside world.  In a place where everyone is equal, where social media makes everyone closer than they could possibly be before, it also isolates people to be utterly alone.  People are at once surrounded by friends, and totally alone.  Isolated and anonymous.  As if they were stranded on some far off island.

Which is what brings me to Davis' situation.  The girls who have insulted Davis can be easily compared to the boys stranded on the island in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.  Without rules, the boys slowly turn into feral beings, turning on friends and companions and wishing their deaths.  And Piggy, the sole voice of conscience in the story, is killed when a boulder is dropped on his head.  It is only when adults show up in the end and rescue them that the boys start to weep, to show remorse for all that's happen.  The island was set on fire by the boys, trying to get their enemies flushed out, and thus the place where they enjoyed freedom becomes a nightmare and unlivable. 

Twitter has become much like that island for some children, where vile insults and, honestly, death threats, are launched through the twitterverse without repercussion.  There is no thought of right or wrong, simply of entering text and pressing "Enter."  And since the idea of anonymity is so strong online, there are no consequences for any thought or word placed in cyberspace.  Thus the rumors of RIP(insert famous person here), or the cyber-bullying of students and the outright lies that float around on the Internet ocean like so much Flotsam.  

There are no boundaries on the Internet.  Now, the question is, how to fix the problem?  Parents can try to monitor and provide regulations for their children on what can be done and said online.  The websites could try some sort of technical restrictions on Facebook accounts, especially of famous people and television shows most likely to be followed by children. I say this because the amount of disgusting things hurled at iCarly's Facebook posts every day is amazing.  You should check them out.  It's very easy to get around age restrictions, but certainly something can be done.  But for the most part, it's up to the children online to regulate themselves.  Why would children like those above say those things?  It makes no sense.  But if kids were taught ethics, right from wrong, instead of being set free in the midst of the world's ideas without a single road to follow, maybe a lot of this mess could be controlled.  I guess it's up to the discipline given out by the parents.  And I've been a teacher and a retail worker long enough to know that parents' able to discipline their children effectively are getting fewer and fewer.  It's also up to children, in the online community, to understand the technology they are operating. Facebook can be easily controlled so that those who would say harmful things are blocked.  And if those insulting things are said by people that you don't know (I would say that all of the people hurling insults at Davis have never even met him, nor he them. ), just ignore them.  Take them as part of the static and noise that covers the Internet. Davis is ignoring them, while showing the world how, without rules, children become feral monsters, taking down anyone with lies, vulgarity, even threats.  It is good that Davis is as strong as he is, and that he realizes that very few of these kids will ever meet him.  Notice that the threats that are pictured above happened in February, some two months after the original exchange.  It's my advice that some of these people get help, from their parents, or from psychologists.  Without rules, these girls will wind up becoming adults with major problems, and words will become actions.  We don't need this.  

What we need to do is laugh.  Thankfully, Disney, Davis Cleveland and his crew, as well as most of the other shows are there to make us forget about some of this junk.  If only life were more like some of these episodes, with all the problems taken care of in 22 minutes.  But, alas, in today's world, it's just not to be. 

Family Pictures, Lord of the Flies: Chaos and the Individual

I was digging through a box of family pictures the other day, and after pouring through tons of pictures, I came to a startling conclusion. My brother has tons of pictures, in all his uniforms, from ROTC to Police officer to whatever. Even my cat has around 30 pictures taken of him in different poses. And don't get me wrong, my brother and even my cat are very photogenic. But after going through that box of pictures, all the pictures taken after 2000, I could find only 2 pictures that were clear and were taken of me. It's a shame really, that only a handful of pictures were taken of me after I finished my English degree. When I came to Borders and observed this phenomenon, I found I was not alone. Most of the people that worked with me just didn't have pictures taken of them that are recent.

Now, there's something to be said for getting pictures taken every few years in order to give the police something recent to go on, and it's also reasonable to assume that pictures are much more often taken of children and people in uniform more than regular people not doing anything. And pets. Hopefully I'll be able to put more pictures on my Myspace page when I get some made, not just of me, but of my friends (which will be so that only those friends can see them), and maybe some other things as well. Anyway, I was miffed at the lack of pictures of me at the moment. You'll have to forgive the moment of self-centeredness.

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I just realized that I've been doing this for a year now, and I've written 75 blogs in that year. I've learned so much doing this, being able to write and extrapolate and cogitate, mixing theories and possibilities, and realizing how much more I have to learn, socially and physically and mentally. Balance is the most important aspect of anyone's life, and it's something that, right now, I'm lacking in.

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CBS is currently running a show called Kid Nation, which is a reality show with little pretense that it actually is a show where children make all the decisions. Of course there are adults on the other end of those cameras, and there are doctors and educators and all kinds of people taking care of the actors and actresses. This is less about a social experiment and more about contrived entertainment. More of a true social experiment was the novel (and subsequent movies) Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The social experiment in the novel was that children were stranded on an island without adults, and they had to survive, create a social structure, and organize a society in which everyone could survive. Well, according to Golding, it is impossible, and the children turned into savages and the ones who couldn't survive, didn't. Of course, Golding was also paralleling the idea of the island as a microcosmic social experiment to the Earth and humans as the so called children who are trying to survive. As a novel that is actually a social commentary, the novel works excellently. The movie made in the 1990's shows this explicitly as, after the boys are rescued, there is a shot of bombers flying overhead toward their destination, in some past war. This shot alone instantly compares the animal behavior of the children with the primitive ideas of mankind that blowing each other up would actually solve anything. The social and political heirarchy will break down into chaos. And while this is normally true, I believe, because cahos will always reign over order, it does not always have to be this way.

Where Golding falls short in his experiment (or perhaps he does include it in the two main characters), is that individuality often succeeds in maintaining order and goodness while society degrades itself into anarchy. This is such a Romantic idea that most cynics cannot see it in modern times. I cannot help but think that an individual who maintains the ideas of right and wrong and keeps them solidly has to overcome most of the temptations that would lead one down the path of societal denigration. A child by themselves, when faced with his own morals and beliefs, will come closer to doing what's right than a child influenced by , say, a school class of his peers. Morality and ethics only preservere in the individual, and will constantly break down in the face of society.

But I've often wondered if that idea of individuality could be harnessed in such a way that the society of individuals that exist in that microcosm might withstand the temptations of the unmaker (OSC reference) and maintain the heirarchy intact. And I'm not just talking about a society or a town or a classroom (for an interesting read on this, try The Butterfly Effect, by an author I can't remember right now, but rather a family structure where children live basically without the effect of a competent parent. Would it be possible, given individuals that have an ingrained moral and ethical code (which I believe most people have), to have a collection of children that could maintain the social heirarchy and not denigrate into cahos the way Golding would have us believe? I do believe it is possible. I once thought about writing about a program where orphans or children who had been put in foster homes...etc... would be put into a program where they would live with themselves, govern themselves, and use their skills to contribute to society. It had sort of a Lord of the Flies feel, and also some of the more nostalgic elements that I was talking about in my last blog. And I have found that, in some instances, it can work, for individuals. In a world without parental guidance, some children can grow up with ethical and moral values and function quite well in society. Of course, I have a feeling that such cases are rare. But of course, there wasn't a plot, just an idea, a philosophy.

Of course, this blog post is connected to one I did earlier about Golding's work Darkness Visible.

(I don't like the cover of the book below, try finding the green one in a used bookstore someplace)