I can't help but feel sorry...
A co-worker picked up the latest Vanity Fair for the Star Wars article in it and brought it to work. After shifting through the same boring article that accompanied the first two movies in Vanity Fair around their time of release, I looked around and found something more disturbing.
In the UK, a boy was arrested for attempting to kill another boy, a friend that he had on MSN. THe twist is that the boy that was supposed to be murdered planned it.
"Mark" was a boy that got caught in the trap. The judges decreed that the boys name never be used. Mark made friends with another boy and soon got more thatn he bargined for. THe boy in question, let's call him "Chris", took months to set up a never-ending cast of characters, including a high level Intelligence advisor working for the British M5, a sister, a gay stalker, and a few others.
Chris logged into MSN for the first time under the name Racheal and started interacting with Mark, which fell hard. Chris then proceeded to draw out a complicated plot to bring Mark to the point of killing him. Chris, discribed by his mother as a lonely boy, took to the net like fish to water, immersing himself in a online life that was spun out of his own fantasy. Eventually, Chris has one of his 'online' personas order Mark to kill Chris and the other boy followed.
This frightens me on two levels. First, that someone out there is crazy enough to plan his own murder. That is a biggie. The second part is the really strange one for me: The other boy bought it all.
From the details, which are too involved here to go into, anyone in their right kind should have been able to see that everything was all wrong. From Chris being forced to masterbate on a webcam to 'save' his sister from a gay staler to a high ranking intellignece officer telling supposed 'classified' secrets in a open chatroom, to the Racheal character's death being discribed to Mark in detail only to have her 'reappear' and say she was in a coma.....dang.
I would like to believe people have more common sense than this. Sure, 'Mark' was only 16, but even at 16 most of us would know better. It comes back to the idea that I think everyone knows, deep down, that online life is dangerous. If this isn't a good example, I don't know what is.