Slashdot Mirror
Catching a breath...
Heads Up. This is in the Be Careful What You Wish For Dept: A bunch of reporters and producers are trawling the site looking for geek kids to put on TV and radio, and to interview for newspaper stories. Journalism has suddenly discovered that this story is a little more complicated than violent video games and geek monsters.
Be careful, especially those of you who are younger. Some of these reporters get it, some don't. Some will worry about your best interests, and others won't. I've declined to give any e-mail addresses of kids relaying the realities of life in High School to reporters, since in some cases, radio and TV exposure would make their lives worse, not better.
It's an individual choice, but think about it. If you need guidance, please feel free to e-mail me, as I worked in newspapers and for a TV network before becoming a cyber-gasbag and writer.Update: 04/28 02:03 by H : Doug has also put up ListenToUs. This is a gathering place for us to communicate with each on social issues, especially in light of Littleton.
I just wanted to briefly thank Jon Katz for all of the hard work he's done on this story. Millions of kids across the nation know the pain of being abused by their peers and thanks to Jon and Slashdot, this message is finally getting out.
For those of you in High School, be careful but vocal. Don't let other students trample over your rights. Physical and mental abuse is something that shouldn't be tolerated in any environment, espically by young people. Hopefully by getting the word out, we can make a change.
United we stand, Divided we fall.
Once a reporter has interviewed you, you lose control over your words. What you say and what gets printed can easily get misrepresented, misunderstood, or taken out of context. The printed/aired story becomes "Truth".
I've been interviewd twice - once as a teen by the local paper after I won an award to attend a science honors program at Columbia, and once as an adult regarding a subject area and program I worked on. The local interview was OK, although I didn't like how I was described ("flippant"? - I'd have to ask my parents for the clipping if they've kept it for 30 years!).
The "professional" interview quoted me at length, made me appear to be an authorized spokesman for a government program (I wasn't), and never told me I was being quoted vs. providing general background. After the story ran in an industry newsletter, I was almost fired at our customer's request, which would have permanently ended my employment in that industry! Fortunately, I was able to convince my bosses that I was taken advantage of, and my track record with them backed up my claims. (The "reporter" later called me to ask how I liked the story he had printed! Fortunately, yelling and cursing on a phone call in 1988 was not then a felony)
There is much to be said for annonymity over noteriety. If you DO get "lucky" enough to be interviewed, I'm sure John can offer specific advice; here's my 2 cents:
1. Get the topic and "slant" of the story before agreeing to be interviewed.
2. Make clear what is for quotation and what is not.
3. Present yourself as you want to hear/see/read about yourself.
4. Keep your own record of the interview and have someone else present (a parent or trusted adult if you are a minor).
5. You lose all control over your words the instant the interview ends.
6. The reporter is interested in getting a story and benefiting themselves, not in helping you. This is reality, not cynicism.
7. Be helpful without becoming vulnerable. Some of these people WANT to be educated and will listen to reasonable words.
Good Luck!
You know, just like alot of you my school years up until university were utter hell. I can't begin to describe the overwhelming emotions of fear, anger, hurt and bitterness that consume me when I think back on them. I learned to harden myself and I pushed all of those emotions down deep. It never affected me and I didn't think it would because, like I told everyone "I don't care what people think about me." After such a long time of keeping that burden pushed down inside of me I thought nothing of it.
However, after reading all of the postings and the hellmouth articles it finally started to hit me. Those emotions finally rose up and I can honestly say I shed a few tears. In post after post I found people I could finally relate to and who were feeling what I was/had felt. Call it geek therapy, or whatever, but it was nice to not feel like an outcast.
The part that hurt the most is that my wife and I don't see eye to eye on this issue. She bought into the media hype and fanatacism and not only tries to justify it but defends it too. So I printed out the two articles and some of the comments and took them home for her to read. I really needed her to understand. First of all I had to almost force her to read it, secondly she got only past the first page and a half and said that that was too much reading for her for one day. I felt like saying "What not enough pictures for you?" She promised to read more of it later, but I doubt that she will. That made me feel even worse.
I guess that's what you get when Mr.Geek marries Ms.Popularity.
Anyone have their familiy not get it or actually turn on you for telling them the truth?
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Superstition is a word the ignorant use to describe their ignorance. -Sifu
One thing that it seems "visitors" may be taking away from all this on Slashdot is the idea that the connection works both ways: Just because people can understand what might drive those kids to commit mass murder and might even admit to having those feelings themselves does not mean that they're defending what was done or saying that murder is ok.
Just like I could say I respect Hitler's leadership abilities without being a Nazi or that I can understand why immigrant Irish workers and sharecroppers hated blacks without being a racist, I can say that I understand what might drive those kids to kill without having a trace of the urge myself. These were not normal people. As many people have pointed out, they were in many ways like us, but they were not us.
Many people here may spend countless hours looking at the pentagrams id shows us, but the vast majority of these people don't worship the devil. These kids, however, had the racist feelings to stand behind their swastikas and the guns to back up those feelings.
As one of the emails to Katz showed, some people think we're defending what was done or saying that it's understandable. It's not. It's the emotion behind the actions that's understandable. I would hate for visitors to Slashdot to think that we all think what was done was somehow justified.
I am not a Sociologist nor Ethnologist i.e. I am not a scientist specifically trained to analyse an alien culture. But I am a scientist (Phycisist) from Germany and part of my motivation to come here is to understand the American culture.
The most scary thing I observe in the mainstream culture is a disdain for intelligence: "Dumb is good!" a slogan I saw in the TV movie "Brave new world" could be almost the banner for mainstream (white) America (may be a little bit different for the black American culture). I talked to a white American psychologist about it (a professor of mine at business school) and he told me he perceives a teen attitude that equates "being smart with being uncool". What a weird culture. In Europe being a university student means to be someone special, somebody with the potential to outstanding intelectual achievment, somebody who favors scientific truth over a big paycheck. Copmpare this to the frat boy as student role model.
I was a geek as kid. And I was an oddball but I had some respect from my peers, because I didn't suck up to the teachers, and I helped them out when I could. I don't know how many geeks had experiences like this in the US. This good geek school experience seems to me rather the rule than the exeption in my country. I hated school just because I wasn't free to do with my time what i wanted.
My fiancée is kind of an American geek girl who went through school by escaping into permanently reading SF. She hated Junior High and High School, and I think it did some severe damage to her. If we have children we don't want them to go through the American non-academic school system.
I try hard to figure out what is going on in this culture and why it is so different from Europe. Since I haven't gone through the US school system I don't know what it is from the inside but it seems to me to be a prime problem of the American society. I am aware that this is certainly no new insight, but it is concerning to see that nothing seems to be done about it. I remember that Bush senior put it on the agenda when he ran for presidency. I know that Steven Jobs, in an interview I once read, was delighted about the idea of organizing public schools privately, but I don't think he had the time to follow up on this.
In Europe it is good common political practice to compare your own national society with other Western countries in order to learn how to improve. That is something completely missing in the US (political) culture. Why invent yourself if you can copy good practices? The open source movement showed that this works for all sorts of matters. Nevertheless the US are just roasting in their own juice. The US society might figure out something the hard way, but it will produce a lot of unhappy American geeks along the way (and some dead students).
Over the past few days, people here on
Do you really think that the primary reason for the ostracism of these two kids was because they were especially intelligent or geeky? How many geeks do you know of who are car theives? How many Nazi geeks do you know of? Even if you knew a car-stealing-racist-Nazi-geek, do you think you would be especially compassionate towards them? I try to be compassionate to everyone, but for kids such as these, I don't think I could even muster that. There had been reports of these kids walking down halls yelling "nigger" at any black person they saw. If I was faced with this (I am black), I have little doubt that I would be downright hostile towards them. I was ridiculed for many things back in highschool, but whenever someone insulted me because of my race, I could always count on 99 percent of the rest of the school to stand behind me in my defense. Although the students of Columebine HS probably regret it now, I'll bet that many of them acted similarly.
I seriously doubt that these kids were really geeks. I find it pretty odd that so many of you here consider them as such merely because they played Doom and had a home page on AOL; even my mom has played a few video games and is working on a homepage on AOL -- of course her page isn't likely to be filled with death threats, pentagrams, and/or swasticas. So many people here have objected to the fact that the schools are now (after the killing) "cracking down" on geeks because they think they may have homicidal/suicidal tendencies. I'm sure I don't have to remind any of you here, but geeks tend to have FAR more self resect than that. Despite the ridicule geeks receive daily, most geeks I know carry a huge amount of dignity with them; some are even a little egotistical. As far as I can tell, these killers hated both themselves and everyone around them. A person who is confident in their ability to eventually succeed isn't going to shoot up their schoolmates and kill themselves. If you want the schools (both the administration and other students) to stop scapegoating geeks, you should emphatically remind them that geeks have absolutely NOTHING in common with someone who is capable of amassing a stockpile of weapons, walking into a crowded room, and shooting anyone present.
These two killers have been described by other students as being "freaks." Only the media has tried to portray them as "geeks." Which account do you believe?
This is going to be a interesting week.
:)
The first week after the Littleton killings, we were blasted with all the standard cut and paste tragedy news in the mainstream media.. All the "the community is coming together" crap that always happens after a tragedy such as shit. But this is different. This really struck a nerve in the geek population, because many of us relate to the killers. As sick as I am sure it makes us all feel, its true. There is a little bit of them in a damn large population of us. We are doing someting about it, as a community, we _have_ come together.
Week one was everyone putting the peices together. I was watching it on several dozen mailling lists I administrate. I was actually waiting for someting along the lines of what was going on there to happen here on Slashdot. It has, and the Slashdot effect in its own little way is taking effect, but not on someone's website today, but alot of people's minds. A place were we are all happy to see the load averages cranking up.
"Thinking about these things can't help but make you smarter." -- Jello B.
It applies, big time. Although, this goes even farther. Jon is right, we should be carful what we ask for. Actually, scratch that. We would be _aware_ of what we ask for, and be ready for it when it comes.
On the Internet (as Jon put it at some point), a story rides is its own merit. This one has some real issues behind it, people are intrested/scarred/concerned/effected.. The action here WILL have an effect. Even if it is just to show some of the people truly effected by this that they are not alone.
As I see it, no matter what happens here, we win. As a community. The role the Internet has teken in this... is good.
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. "The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and
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. "The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and
. intelligent. The machine easily m
So, while geeks seem to be the target of the recent witch-hunt in schools around the country, and we are right to feel indignant, remember that we do NOT corner the market on alienation.
No sig.