In class we have been exploring the Internet and its uses. Some people argue that it is good while others argue it is bad. I personally love the Internet and all of the tools and services it supplies me. While I don’t think that it is necessarily acceptable for people to use it to exploit others I do admire how fast and easily news gets out. My favorite thing about the Internet is you never know what you’re going to get. I was extremely shocked to find a story about a British boy who recently fathered a child at the age of 13. THIRTEEN years old? How is that even possible? I’m pretty sure that at the age of thirteen I still thought that the stork was in charge of getting babies to where they’re supposed to go. I couldn’t imagine my little thirteen year old brother even coming close to putting himself in that position. I checked and re-check to make sure that I was reading this story off of a reliable source, to my demise I was. The Sun, a real life news source in Britain reported it (here’s a link to check it out).
After I got over my initial shock of the story, I began thinking about the privacy of families verses the sensationalism of journalism reporting. I asked myself whether or not it was fair for this story to be out into the public, whether or not the family or the new father wanted to be labeled a certain way. I think that we can attribute this die-hard, absolutely have to get the story mentality to the Internet. Writers obviously want to get paid more and assigned better stories, but if we didn’t have the Internet would people read or know about as farfetched stories as these? Would gossip and intrusion of people’s private lives be so acceptable? While I love the Internet and all of its ins and outs; I’m not sure I’d want my personal life to be a click away from anyone. Would you?
