This isn’t so much about trying to blame anything. Blame is a strange thing to do, an attempt to fulfill an emotional need for revenge by placing blame and then pretending like that solved something.

What I am trying to say is that certain configurations give rise to certain possibilities for activity. You point out that you made sure that your children had a balanced set of possibilities, so their actions are thus balanced.

But what of those people whose only way of gaining, say, control, or empathy, or any number of desired configurations of experience, is through cyberspace? If the “rules” for winning or losing, being loved or hated, or being moral or immoral are rules that are applicable to the virtual world only, and then applied to the physical world, then the results can be disastrous.

Again, this is not about blame. I think part of the problem is not cyberspace itself but the notion of anonymity or “unreality” that some people seem to feel about it, that makes anything they do acceptable in their own eyes. This is reinforced by statements like “it’s only the internet”, even though most of the world’s knowledge and economic structure now exists in “just” the internet.

As for the school shootings…your answer is the common one, and I have been hearing since the first one occurred. I just don’t find it compelling, because these things are a very simple pat answer. Violence has been glorified since before Homer, the media just panders to whatever excites people (whether it is the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s or school shootings), and emotional isolation is the chief complaint of every serious philosopher, poet, artist, and writer for millennia. We, as humans, get a kick out of violence and feel isolated when contemplating our own consciousness. These things are nothing new.

But mass violence with no goal committed by young males in schools? This is either a new behavior, or a very, very old one.

This is why I find it fascinating, because I think that we are in the midst of an evolutionary leap, and organisms have a tendency to revert to primordial behaviors at such periods. I believe that social media and the net are taking off with “normal” people now because the primordial urge to make tribes is coming to the fore, galvanizing old instincts that had been quieted by “civilization”. I think that a sort of spiral of development is taking place, where we are simultaneously stripped down and extended into new arenas. An initiation into the mysteries of the electron.

My urge is not that we blame the technology, but that we actually take responsibility for it in an entirely new way…as more than just another toy, and instead something that can give us incredible new possibilities for existence.

My children have been raised around computers since an early age. As an interesting twist, I have 3 distinct generations of children (the way the dice rolled) – 1986, 1992, 1995, 2001, 2003. It gives me a great advantage in observing trends in technology around children.

As my career and passion is technology based, as it is for so many of my friends, my children have experienced computers in depth most (for older ones) to all (later children) of their lives.

However, we have worked hard to ensure they have had a broad range of experiences outside of technology, and use computers casually, as a natural tool, but also socially. We talk, we share what we find, we interact. I have a fantastic, close, informed relationship with all my children, and I am grateful as hell to be with them:)

Let us not blame technology. It is no more to blame than television of my generation, or the phone, or even the waltz (once seen as iniquitous, dangerous, seductive leader to sin..) Itis how we as parents, and as a society, teach our children. There, I think, too many are failing. As a society, we are doing it wrong.

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