The Summer of OU Internet
It’s becoming clear that we — media, fans, players/coaches – don’t have our arms around this Internet business. This is the summer of Internet scandal for OU football.
Some yahoo in Austin posts a fictitious story about Sam Bradford and Landry Jones. Someone posts Josh Jarboe’s rap video that mocks his gun conviction from a few months earlier. OU’s bobstoops.com accompanies some highlight videos with lyrics touting guns and drugs.
A few things we need to remember and learn about the Internet:
1. What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet. Everyone is quick to pull stuff off the world wide web, but it stays somewhere in cyberspace. I just pulled up Jarboe’s rap from more than two weeks ago. The web is as permanent as a newspaper.
2. The Internet is the primary information source for young people, which is problematic. The Internet is full of amazing information, but it’s also full of deceit, which explains why some people believe Barack Obama won’t put his hand over his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance. Young people don’t have the filter of traditional news sources, which aren’t always pristine but provide an excellent counter to the wave of stuff on the Internet.
3. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. If Josh Jarboe did not have the gun conviction, his rap video would have been labeled silly but relatively harmless. When it reached the OU fan base and became widely viewed, Jarboe might have run stadium steps until he puked, but that would have been about it. If Josh Jarboe did not have the gun conviction, no one would have dug into bobstoops.com and figured out the lyrics of the highlight videos, and if they had, everyone would have shrugged. That’s just what kids listen to. But Jarboe did have the gun conviction, so his rap video and Stoops’ highlight videos don’t live on an island.
I know less about the Internet than anyone. I just know what I need to know to get around, to post what I’m supposed to post and to find what I need to find. For us old codgers, we need to realize the world has changed. But the web masters must realize that the freedom provided by the Internet comes with responsibility, and if not responsibility, consequences.
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does responsibility apply to journalism, too?