written by Peter O.

Online identities are a way of sharing real or fake information about your self to a website like MySpace. An online identity is a perfect way of creating a whole new life because you choose what you want people to know and what you don’t want them to. Sharing a video of your self is a type of online identity because you are letting people know what you look like and might be telling them about your personal life. It’s also a way of them seeing what kind of person you might be depending on how you are acting in the video and what you are saying.

The internet allows people to ask for help but unfortunately it doesn’t work the best which can result in deaths or other tragic events occurring. In the following two stories you will hear about how the people in them used the internet to share information about them selves with other people.

Columbine shooting was committed by two high school students Klebold and Harris they were both in their senior year. Harris had a record of minor offense for position of small explosives and threatening messages to certain people. They both had posted blogs and videos of their actions leading up to the shooting. Although Harris had also posted a hit list of the people he intended to kill no one took it seriously and thought it was real. Both Klebold and Harris attended therapy and anger management classes on the courts demand.

After the shooting accrued several things were indentified to the deaths of the students. Both shooters had specific people they had targeted to kill. They shot a lot of the jocks and popular kids, probably because they had bullied Harris and Klebold earlier on in the school year. Harris also killed several kids who strongly believed in god and were very religious. These people who had a strong belief in god who were killed were all girls. There were several warning signs that could have prevented this from happening if both friends and family of the 2 boys had paid close attention to them. Including the fact that Harris and Klebold had several videos across the internet talking about what they were planning on doing and when. They had set the date of the shooting to accrue on Adolf Hitler’s birthday April 20th due to the fact the earlier date was delayed because they had problems making their bombs.

Lots of schools were worried about this happening again do to the fact they had a lot of Goth and Emo students who had a troubling pass. So several schools installed a no bullying policy and made kids who had troubles see a therapist or psychiatrist for help.

Another resent tragedy was the Finnish High School shooting which occurred on November 7 2007 when high school student Pekka Eric Auvinen at the age of 18 brought a hand gun to school and killed 9 people. Both this incident and the columbine shooting involve the use of video messages and blogs. In this case Eric had posted a video of himself on YouTube describing how much he admired the columbine shooting. He included several disturbing thoughts saying that he was planning on doing a copy cat of the columbine shooting at his own high school. A You Tube user saw this and warned the police of what was going on in hope they would check it out. The police did not check it out probably because they thought it was a joke and didn’t want to believe that it was real. Eric probably was trying to ask for some ones help in his video but it didn’t work.

Online identities can be a good thing if you pay attention to the message it is showing other people. While they are not the best way to get some ones help because they might not realizes that you really are going through a hard time and might take it as a joke. So this means that the police should take these messages shown in videos more seriously because so far they have resulted in lots of deaths and injuries. This has huge impact on the community around them and the families of the victims and gunmen too. I have changed my mind on how much information I am willing to share with websites and other people online now.

These are the sites where I got my information from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokela_school_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity