[The driver] is a total phr33k. In his locker at school, he has pictures of the d00ds from Columbine and Virginia Tech, and those dead bodies from the concentration camps. He walks around in some ch33p ass hoodie trying to look kewl but hes a luser on roids, thats all he’ll ever be.
[The driver] if your reading this, d00d, and not hanging with the elves and fairies, remember: we OWN U. Why don’t you U just do us all a favor and blow you’re [deleted]ing brains out. Your death = EPIC WIN!
Chapter 9
KATHRYN DANCE SAT back, shaking her head. “A lot of hormones there,” she said to Jon Boling.
She was troubled by the viciousness of the blog posts — and most of them written by young people.
Boling scrolled back to the original post. “Look what happened. Chilton makes a simple observation about a fatal accident. All he does is question whether the road was safely maintained. But look at how the responding posts arc. They go from discussing what Chilton brought up — highway safety — then move on to government finances and then to the kid who was driving, even though he apparently didn’t do anything wrong. The posters get more and more agitated as they attack him and finally the blog turns into a barroom brawl among the posters themselves.”
“Like the game of Telephone. By the time the message moves along, it’s distorted. ‘I heard… ’ ‘Somebody knows somebody who… ’ ‘A friend of mine told me… ’” She scanned the pages again. “One thing I noticed, Chilton doesn’t fight back. Look at the post about Reverend Fisk and the right-to-life group.”
Reply to Chilton, posted by CrimsoninChrist.
You are a sinner who cannot comprehend the goodness within the heart of Rev. R. Samuel Fisk. He has devoted his life to Christ and all of His works, while you do nothing but pander to the masses for your own pleasure and profit. Your misreading of the great Reverend’s views is pathetic and libelous. You should be nailed up on a cross yourself.
Boling told her, “No, the serious bloggers don’t argue back. Chilton will give a reasoned response, but flame wars — attacks among posters — get out of control and become personal. The postings become about the attack, not the substance of the topic. That’s one of the problems with blogs. In person, people would never feud like this. The anonymity of the blogs mean the fights go on for days or weeks.”
Dance looked through the text. “So the boy is a student.” She recalled her deduction from the interview with Tammy Foster. “Chilton deleted his name and the name of the school but it’s got to be Robert Louis Stevenson. Where Tammy goes.”
Boling tapped the screen. “And there’s her post. She was one of the first to say something about the boy. And everyone else jumped on board after that.”
Maybe the post was the source of the guilt Dance had picked up on during the interview. If this boy was behind the attack, then Tammy, as Dance and O’Neil had speculated, would feel partly responsible for the assault on her; she’d brought it on herself. And perhaps guilty too if he went on to hurt someone else. This explained why Tammy wouldn’t like the suggestion that her abductor had a bike in the car: that would lead Dance to consider a younger suspect — a student whose identity the girl didn’t want to reveal because she still considered him a threat.
“It’s all so vicious,” Dance said, nodding at the screen.
“Did you hear about the Litter Boy?”
“Who?”
“Happened in Kyoto a few years ago. Japan. A teenage boy tossed a fast food wrapper and soda cup on the ground in a park. Somebody shot a picture of the kid doing it on their cell phone and uploaded it to his friends. Next thing, it started appearing on blogs and social networking sites all over the country. Cybervigilantes tracked him down. They got his name and address and posted the info online. It spread to thousands of blogs. The whole thing became a witch hunt. People began showing up at his house — throwing trash in the yard. He nearly killed himself — that kind of dishonor is significant in Japan.” Boling’s tonal quality and body language revealed anger. “Critics say, oh, it’s just words or pictures. But they can be weapons too. They can cause just as much damage as fists. And, frankly, I think the scars last longer.”
Dance said, “I don’t get some of the vocabulary in the posts.”
He laughed. “Oh, in blogs and bulletin boards and social networking sites, it’s in to misspell, abbreviate and make up words. ‘Sauce’ for ‘source.’ ‘Moar’ for ‘more.’ ‘IMHO’ is ‘in my humble opinion.’”
“Do I dare ask? ‘FOAD.’”
“Oh,” he said, “a polite valediction to your note. It means ‘Fuck off and die.’ All caps, of course, is the same as shouting.”
“And what is ‘p-h-r-3–3-k’?”
“That’s leetspeak for ‘freak.’”
“Leetspeak?”
“It’s a sort of language that’s been created by teens over the past few years. You only see it with keyboarded text. Numbers and symbols take the place of letters. And spellings are altered. Leetspeak comes from ‘elite,’ as in the best and the chicest. It can be incomprehensible to us old folks. But anybody who’s mastered it can write and read it as fast as we do English.”
“Why do kids use it?”
“Because it’s creative and unconventional… and cool. Which, by the way, you should spell ‘K-E-W-L.’”
“The spelling and grammar are awful.”
“True, but it doesn’t mean the posters are necessarily stupid or uneducated. It’s just the convention nowadays. And speed is important. As long as the reader can understand what you’re saying, you can be as careless as you want.”
Dance said, “I wonder who the boy is. I guess I could call CHP about the accident Chilton refers to.”
“Oh, I’ll find it. The online world is huge but it’s also small. I’ve got Tammy’s social networking site here. She spends most of her time in one called OurWorld. It’s bigger than Facebook and MySpace. It’s got a hundred thirty million members.”
“A hundred thirty million?”