impworks Logo - a grinning imp in flight

Don't Shoot the Messenger

Thursday, August 31st, 2006
2 Comments

Last night’s local news had a piece about some vandals doing something stupid and dangerous. The whole piece was hijacked for an attack on YouTube because the stupid criminals filmed themselves and put it on the web. YouTube was lumped into a "dangerous part of the web" where you shouldn’t go like you wouldn’t go to "the dangerous part of town after dark". I’m not a big YouTube user but the journalist’s trying to peg the blame for an act of stupidity on a web site is just a bit lazy. They too showed the footage the vandals had filmed doesn’t that move them into the bad part of town where you can see nasty things? I wonder if more people watched the footage on the news or on the web.

Vandalism and stupid and dangerous actions happened long before the Internet. Now though stupid criminals film themselves and post it in a public place for everyone to see including the police. This kind of criminal used to be hard to catch. There was little evidence unless they were caught in the act. Now they film the prosecution’s evidence for them. As the old adage goes don’t shoot the messenger.

Leave a Comment

2 Responses to Don't Shoot the Messenger

Mark Friday, September 1st, 2006

Sometimes I wish I was a historian - I'd love to compare the scaremongering now with that for:
TV
Radio
Cinema
The telegraph
Movable type
Woodcut prints
Writing

To your list of scary books you can get in a library I think I'd add The Home Guard Manual 1941 and the SOE handbooks from WWII

darkdwarf Friday, September 1st, 2006

The usual "the internet is a big scary place and should be controlled" scaremongering.

They never used to say that sort of thing about public libraries.

e.g. Allerton library has a book, which I've borrowed a couple of times, called "Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius" that amongst other things tells you how to make a

Laser Beam Cutter
Lightning Bolt Generator
Working Star Wars Like Light Sabre
Sonic Phaser Cannon
Pyrotechnic Blaster
Robotic Control and other Circuits Disabler with Pulse Generator
Object Catapult

Full List is at http://www.thinkgeek.com/books/nonfiction/70b5/

Send this list to the Sun and tell them that the info is available on the internet and there'll be a story. Tell them the info can be gleaned from a book in a public library and there'll probably be no story.

impworks © Copyright Mark Caldwell 1996 - 2024