Remember the horrifying case of the Missouri mom who used MySpace to bully a 13-year-old neighbor to death? Young Megan Meier hanged herself in October 2006, after a 16-year-old boy she’d gotten close to online began sending her cruel and hateful messages, including one that suggested the world would be a better place if she were dead. But the “boy” never existed. He was an elaborate MySpace hoax, says the FBI, dreamed up by a group that included Lori Drew, the mother of a former friend of Megan’s, and Drew’s underage employee.
At the time of the suicide, Lori Drew earned national condemnation for her role in tormenting, harassing and hounding a child to death, but she was never arrested because she’d broken no state laws. The feds, however, saw it differently. This morning, a federal grand jury indicted Drew. She’s being charged with conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers, under a federal statute designed to ward off hackers, but which has never been used in a social networking case until now. The FBI says Drew gathered unauthorized information in direct violation of MySpace’s membership rules, and used that information to torment, harass and humiliate a juvenile. Both Megan and MySpace are named as victims in the case.
The release of the latest entry in the violent “Grand Theft Auto” video game franchise has parents and child development experts wringing their hands. Jack Thompson, for example, a self-styled crusader against video game violence with a penchant for hyperbole, calls GTA “the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio.” Ahem. We prefer the more reasoned approach of someone like Harvard Medical School psychologist Lawrence Kutner, UC Berkeley psychology professor Stephen Hinshaw and Greg Niemeyer, game developer and assistant professor for New Media at Cal.
And Greater Good Magazine is sponsoring a panel discussion - “Grand Theft Childhood? The Surprising Truths about Violent Video Games” - featuring those very guys this Tuesday at 6 p.m. It’ll be in the North Gate Library at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the wood-shingled building on the northern edge of campus. All free. Bring Qs for the Q&A.
“Grand Theft Auto IV” hits store shelves next week. If you’ve somehow missed all the fuss, been living on a desert island or in a hermitage someplace, “Grand Theft Auto” is an insanely popular video game series in which players work their way up the criminal underworld ranks by stealing, pimping, killing or street racing their way through a gritty, urban environment. Needless to say, it’s controversial. And the latest entry in the franchise explodes Tuesday.
We’ve all heard how TVs and computers should be housed in the den, not children’s bedrooms, but we’ve usually heard it in the context of internet safety and television violence concerns. Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics gives us another reason: there’s a link between teens with TVs in their bedroom and unhealthy habits.
A University of Minnesota study found that teens with TVs in their rooms watched four to five hours more television per week than their young colleagues with TVs in the den. Kids with their own TVs joined in fewer family meals and ate fewer fresh fruits and vegetables. They ate more fast food and drank more sugary sodas, and they read fewer books and studied less. And the boys had lower GPAs. Yikes.
QUESTION — Hi. Just need some direction and/or advice on where we go next with our situation. My 16-year-old plays Guild Wars. He will spend his entire weekend playing this game. He will also play from the time he gets home from school until late. He will get “warnings” everyday from us (parents) that he must have his homework finished first, he needs to be off by 10 p.m. and on weekends we have to fight a huge battle for him to leave his room. We believe his grades are suffering due to this game. He says it is not due to the game, but rather because he doesn’t understand or doesn’t like the teacher(s). Read the rest of this entry »
Remember the horrifying case of the Missouri mom who used MySpace to bully a 13-year-old neighbor to death? Young Megan Meier hanged herself in October 2006, after a 16-year-old boy she’d gotten close to online began sending her cruel and hateful messages, including one that suggested the world would be a better place if she were dead. But the “boy” never existed. He was an elaborate MySpace hoax, says the FBI, dreamed up by a group that included Lori Drew, the mother of a former friend of Megan’s, and Drew’s underage employee.
