I recently e-mailed a friend of mine about the story of a student not being allowed to graduate because of a photo that she had posted to her MySpace page. My friend Tim, voice of reason that he often is, had this to say about it:
I can’t believe that broad wasn’t allowed to graduate because someone called her a drunk pirate on MySpace. If that’s how real life worked, nobody we know would have ever graduated from college. Think about how many people put in performances worthy of much worse labels than ‘drunken pirate’. What a joke. Cyber-bullying is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of….talking shit on the internet is something everyone needs to get used to. I’m so sick of people getting rattled by the absolute dumbest things, like anything that happens on Facebook or Myspace. Anything that happens on a site like that has pretty much no bearing on the world in any way, shape, or form. I mean, we could just make up a profile for someone and they’d never even know and we could talk shit all day about stuff that we have no idea about…I can’t believe anyone takes anything seriously that they found on Facebook, let alone MySPACE!! When was the last time you saw a fact on a site like that? I just can’t believe anyone cares. They should have kept Facebook as a site for college-kid assholes and college-kid asshole alumni. Now that people’s parents are on it, it’s turned stupid and no fun and now you have to worry about not graduating from school because of some picture of a drunken pirate on MySpace? Fuck that.
He makes some incredibly valid points: Learning to take shit from people (whether its on the internet or in reality) is something we all need to learn, hanging out where people's parents hang out is never fun, and software that facilitates someone getting fired for partying shouldn't be the next big thing.
-Parker