Music festivals are a staple of the live music scene. More than just a single-night concert, fans see two, three, four, days and nights of music. Road trips are taken, alcohol is ingested and someone in every group comes home with an embarrassing story. With the sun finally beaming and students coming out of hibernation, music festival season is here.
Americans are confused. No, I am not a communist or a self-loathing civilian, but it is the truth, and Americans are confused on an issue that cannot be ignored: The First Amendment. The First Amendment protects free speech from government action, not privatized company action. About two weeks ago, Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” an online forum driven by user participation, edited their site following a report from the news blog Gawker. Gawker outed an infamous Redditor (online lingo for Reddit users), posting under the handle Violentacrez, who gained his notoriety from his tendencies to start forums based around the uploading of child pornography, misogyny and violence. Instantly, Internet users demanded an explanation regarding Reddit’s violation of the First Amendment. The only problem is that Reddit is privately owned and capable of silencing whomever it pleases.
Lance Armstrong, seven-time Tour de France winner, cancer survivor and hero to many, is now inching closer and closer to being perceived as a performance-enhancing drug user in the court of public opinion. The worst part is that this transgression did not take me by surprise.
School seminars are devoted to preventing bullying, as is extensive news coverage and several educational films. Still, it persists in spite of all of the condemnation it receives. UW-Madison recently conducted a study in which researchers taught a computer to scan the social networking site Twitter to identify bullying-related tweets. About 15,000 of them were tied to bullying. As seen in many cases today, though bullying used to be a face-to-face encounter, it is now digitized and depersonalized. The thing that keeps most people from bullying, the reason why they don’t terrorize and taunt others at will, is an inability to face their victims. Social networking takes this barrier completely away from the situation and allows for bullying to take place from behind a curtain.
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Solutions by The State News
