It’s no surprise, then, that the blame game has taken center stage in the wake of the Aug. 16 murder of an Australian baseball player attending college in Duncan.
Since news hit that the suspects, a trio of teens, allegedly acted out of boredom, the pundits and politicos have mused about spurred the apparent thrill killing of 23-year-old Christopher Lane.
Warped minds? Nah. Too easy. One too many status updates? Bingo! At least that was the diagnosis of Dr.
Keith Ablow, Fox News’ go-to psychiatrist and evident Facebook foe.
“We have people saying they have hundreds of friends on Facebook when those aren’t friends, and we have people text messaging when in fact they’re not reaching out to anybody, because they’re sending their thoughts and feelings into the air, if you will,” Ablow bellowed in an on-air interview last week. “We have a culture that is cheapening life, real life.”
While Ablow suggested that the perps might have some psychological issues, he hammered home the ostensibly murderous ramifications of social media.
“Facebook has become ground zero in the battle to either maintain our identities or to let them go into the web,” he said. “And these three (suspects) became non-people with no feelings
for others, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were big users of
Facebook and other things Internet-related.”
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2013.