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Student Banned From Minnesota Campus Over Facebook Comments
Be careful just how you vent online is the lesson from this story pointed out by reader kungfugleek, from which he excerpts: "A University of Minnesota student has been banned from the Twin Cities campus after three of her instructors felt threatened by some of her Facebook postings. Amanda Tatro was patted down and questioned by campus police when she got to class Monday. The 29-year-old mortuary science student had posted comments on her Facebook page after breaking up with her boyfriend. She told her Facebook friends she wanted to stab a 'certain someone in the throat' with an embalming instrument. Tatro said she was 'looking forward to Monday's embalming therapy.' When the instructors learned of the postings, they contacted police." The Star-Tribune's account offers more detail.
Actually, no, it hasn't.
When I was in High School, the campus had an open layout. DOZENS of entrances to dozens of buildings. Completely impossible to put metal detectors in every entrance because every classroom was a separate building.
We also had a smoking section.
In short, the school trusted their students, even to the point of allowing them to make their own informed decisions regarding smoking.
Now, with Columbine in the mix, would I have felt safer with all the metal detectors, cameras, etc in place?
FUCK no. If something similar had happened at my High School, I would have had dozens of EXITS to get away from any danger. Instead, today, we have High Schools that are basically a trap for anyone caught inside during such an attack. Now, attackers only have to cover a couple exits to keep their victims from escaping.
Which obvious signs are you referring to? We are inundated as a society with killing. Movies, TV, news, video games, music, even the fucking opera is usually about killing. So now we're unstable when we parrot all these horrible things that we see every/hear day? You're not unstable if you watch killing, but you are unstable if you write about it...
Your last sentence is the most important one. What has changed most is the medium. Before people felt the need to express themselves at near-strangers using text, a medium notoriously bad at correctly conveying emotion without a lot of hard work, talent, and luck, the sort of outbursts unearthed from TFA by DJRumpy would have been delivered passionately, in person, amongst friends. The friends, seeing the outburst delivered in such a rich medium, and having a good working knowledge of this woman's personality, would in the vast majority of cases easily discern whether she was seriously disturbed and dangerous or only blowing off steam.
Contrast that with a Facebook post that shows little more than text on a page. Facebookers are willing to friend just about anyone they barely recognize, and that goes double for college campuses. These people, and the teachers and authorities later alerted to the post, have little to no frame of reference in which to place the comments made. We as a whole tend to be cautious when it comes to strangers, and when the only data are a few notes threatening attack, the stakes are high.
I'm approaching my late twenties and like many of you grew up online. To me those posts barely register because I've seen and used such expression enough to understand the medium and the likelihood that she's just blowing off steam. Still, by posting that content in that context, it's also obvious to me that her risk of bringing the wrong sort of attention to herself is also high. This looks to be just another case of someone who doesn't understand the privacy ramifications of putting her information online.
Your brain is not a computer.