The Online Search for Celebrity, Teen Reality

"There is so little research, good research, that can give answers to [those] questions. The science has simply not been able to keep up with the technology."
"There's a lot more continuity than we thought was going to happen."
"I think there's the automatic danger of trying to prevent your children from using these technologies because of these instances. They're shocking. They capture the imagination. They're the ones that stand out."
"But for the most part, I think, the research suggests children are using technology in normative ways."
Kaveri Subrahmanyam, developmental psychologist, California State University

"I think what we know is that young people have always made poor decisions around their actions and in particular in doing things that excite their peers."
"It's almost heightened the need to perform and engage with your peers through posting and engaging behaviours that they may not do outside of the social media context."
"We're beginning to see this trend where the excitement over the virality of the post and what that can do for your clout is overriding a sense of consequences among young people."
"There is no core curriculum around helping people navigate their digital footprint and what it means to be a citizen of digital society."
"And that, I think, should be over [behaving as though the digital and physical realms are separate]."
Desmond Patton, technologist/intersection of youth violence and social media, Columbia University

From left, Kayden McIntosh, 16, Denali Brehmer, 18, and Caleb Leyland, 19, are arraigned by a Superior court judge in the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage, Alaska on Tuesday, June 18, 2019, after a grand jury indicted them on first-degree murder and other charges in the shooting death of 19-year-old Cynthia Hoffman. (Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

This transcends the gawking bystander effect, where people tend -- like cattle curious about what is happening -- to gather around the scene of an accident, getting in the way of those who are actively responding, causing problems by their very presence, complicating the process of addressing a scene of carnage, unwilling when asked to move on and out of the way, as though they are self-entitled to gorge themselves on the gruesome spectacle, as a prize talking point among their friends and colleagues.

Only things have changed. People, mostly very young people, are fascinated in the presence of dangerously harmful incidents, as though they are mesmerized and don't want to miss any of the action, even when this is a scene that will end with someone's death. Teens addicted to photographing and videoing bizarre, grotesque, dangerous, illegal behaviours, posting them to social media sites, drawing attention and hoping for plaudits and admiration. Youth violence taking place, being recorded, shared on any number of media platforms.

It is as though teens are witness to a spectacle that is simply a drama that is being acted out, not enacted in real time, impacting deleteriously on some unfortunate; they are emotionally removed from the harm being done, no need for a conscience, for reaction of any kind that might seek a solution, help to aid those being harmed. And then there are the perpetrators, those visiting harm on others, proud of it, tickled beyond pink because they have caused an online sensation.

Someone is injured, perhaps dies -- and those who not only might have prevented the personal catastrophe for some unfortunate, but who might have had a hand in causing the problem with deliberate intention -- thought of as merely disposable, unimportant, a vehicle to be used to gain notoriety. Research into the phenomenon is only in its early stages in an attempt to try to understand the alienating, irresponsible effects of removing teens' sense of reality that social media casts them into.

But some researchers are stunned to realize that what they see in online behaviour reflects in actual fact, behaviour engaged in offline, in reality. Brutish, psychopathic behaviour making no distinction between social media and real-time life events. There will always be such individuals within any society. The shocking aspect, however is the onlooker effect, those who watch, who witness and from whom there is no reaction other than in fact being an accomplice by their lack of reaction.

This is stupidity, this is cruelty, this is unabridged anti-social behaviour unworthy of any human being, to simply do a mental shrug and move on rather than attempt to intervene, to protest, to make an effort to protect a vulnerable person whose life is ebbing away because of the harm being visited upon them. Like older teens in the presence of a  younger teen who wants to be like them, willing and complicit in his own harm because he wants to be part of the gang.

Being given drugs with the relentless intention of doing harm to someone who tagged along with older teens admiringly hoping to be noticed and accepted only to be accepted as a guinea pig to see how he would react being plied with an overdose so the older boys could jeer and express their contempt, even while watching the younger boy's life ebbing away. Finally becoming so bored after taking enough photographs, just walking away leaving death to nurse the boy toward his final moments.

Like a stone tossed into a tranquil pond, causing ripples to cascade out from the central source of the tumult caused, the footage is aired, the photos published online available for their peers to watch and to post their own personal little dashes of black humour with no one thinking to alert authorities, no one feeling it necessary because after all they had nothing to do with the amusing little incident, so it's no big deal...

Oh, wait when Carson Crimini, 14, in Langley, British Columbia became the latest victim on August 7, of one of these 'events', it appears that there was someone who saw a photo of him on Snapchat and who saw fit to call police. Police however, did not respond until two hours later when a skateboarder found the boy lying next to a chain-link fence, cold, hardly breathing. That's when police showed up. And an ambulance. But the boy's heart had stopped beating and doctors were unable to resuscitate him.

Fourteen-year-old Carson Crimeni died August 7 after trying to fit in with older teens through drug use