Abigail Williams has sent you a friend request.

Hi, This is another version of my article. I'm taking this one to the writing lab and will have the finished draft posted asap. Let me know what you think. I think it may be the worst thing you will ever read. Actually, that's a promise.

Gabe

In his 1964 structuralist opus, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan writes that that “Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.”McLuhan is writing to us from the sixties, so its often striking how much his talk on new media technology sounds like the internet. And if ‘mental breakdown’ is the result of information overload, then we’re screwed. In the same article, he describes the past as a time when “many actions could be taken without too much concern…” but how “today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time.” Despite the density of his words, this much of the message is clear: New Media Technology has had, and will continue to have far reaching implications on the fundamental components of human life. Even our understanding of space and time is affected, or “we continue to think in the old fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.”
The tone of McLuhan’s passionate rant is fairly matter of fact but with an occasional glimmer of doom and urgency. Whatever the outcome of the changing world, McLuhan makes it clear that the difference between fascists and the new media is that “the threat of Hitler was external” while the “electric technology is within the gates and we are numb, deaf, blind…” This sounds very bad, but he reminds the reader that “today, when we want to get our bearing in our own culture and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or historical period in which it was unknown. It is with McLuhan’s recommendation that I delve into the following question. Social Networking Sites, the glamorous companion to internet technology of the last two decades, has wrought itself onto our lives and there are many questions about the ways in which it has changed us. Or has it changed us, really? Looking to the past to loosely understand the present, I ask myself what famous moments in history could have really benefitted from 24 hour internet access and a facebook, blogspot, or youtube? Since it is the harvest season with witches and ghouls and the brutalities of winter never far behind, the bizarre occurences in Salem Massachusetts feel ripe for an high-speed internet connection.
As the story goes, Salem was an incident in the not so distant past when fear, jealousy, and possibly halucenegenic contamination of grain stocks made for a couple of very wild weekends. Between 1692 and 1693, roughly 25 people died on the east coast as a result of imprisonment or hanging because they had been accused and convicted of witchcraft. The bulk of the drama occurred in Salem M.A. and since then, the story has served as an allegory for dangers that await all persons involved with or subjected to unchecked superstition, religious extremism and faulty judicial systems. Condensed nicely into a few weeks, Arthur Miller penned the version of the story which we are most familiar with, a tail of overworked girls forever being seen and never heard, and otherwise bored witless by the puritanicall moral code stacked against them and everyone else resideing in Salem at that time. The real life 12 year old Abigail Williams, the main instigator of the witchcraft accusations, became a buxom temptress in the play, and the popular mythology of the Salem trials being the games of dewy young girls on the verge of sexual fruition could easily have garnered all the internet headlines of the day.
Now, to make things interesting…lets endow Abigail Williams with some new vindictive implements. With her new age and sexuality, compliments of Arthur miller, we have the perfect MySpacer posting sexy photos of her self in freshly pressed aprons and scandalously hemmed work skirts. If you’re her friend, you get to look at the photos of her without her bonnet. Being the age group and roughly the socioeconomic ranks that patron MySpace more than any other group, Abigail, like present day farm girls in fiercely Christian hamlets all over the country would have found solace and the means of self expression in the sometimes tawdry realm downloadable layout designs. She would have opted for the yellow background with heart and star clip art wall- paper that had the twinkling and rotating affect. It wouldn’t matter that her friends computers would crash whenever they logged into her site, for she knew that as the head of the roost, they would persist until they could read her highly anticipated blog entry of the day.
On July 6th, 1692, Abbybabby16 wrote:
Tituba is a total bitch. You guys can’t hang out with her anymore. She was seriously trying to make me feel bad for not having done that Equinox thing with her, like I care. I hate her. Goody Parris was telling my mom that she’s even been slacking off on the housework and it’s probably because she’s so heart broken about us not being friends anymore.
The big news is that fat ass Sara Osbitch is threatening to tell Father about Proctor, who, for the record, is just as into me as I’m sort of into him, so I never wanted to be that person that Parris talks about at services. Still, I never thought I would be hanging out with Tituba either. Lol. Go figure. Anyway, I know I can trust you guys to not tell anyone because you know I’ll switch to your ugly little faces. One more thing, Biznitches, looks like we’re doing a midnight hike this Wednesday. Betty is bringing cider. It is there, that I, the uber sexy Abigail Williams, will unveil my master plan of destruction for the hoary hags of Salem that keep giving me shit.
The Sara Osbitch Abigail refers to is actually Sarah Osborn, one of the first three people to be accused of witchcraft by Abigail and her hysterical friends. Dorothy Good was one of the later victims of the accusations that spread like wildfire. Each of the accused could be cast in a restaging of the crucible by any member of the PTA from any street and from any network of adults that ever came into contact with the libidinous mayhem of teenagers. And what would have happened had the Abigail gang been granted access to social networking technologies of today. The question, however amusing it is to ponder, is admittedly ridiculous because the presence of internet technology assumes so many vast changes in the world that extremism, superstition and weak due-process probably wouldn’t have been as big a factor. At least one would assume so, because if McClurin’s assertion that the content of new media technology is never as impactful as the technology itself, then every fundamental fibre of 17th century Salem would have been radically different. Still, the inconquerable bad behavior of people everywhere never fails to rear its ugly head, and like porn and religion, pettiness finds vibrant new avenues of expansion with each new technological flourish.
As recently as 2006, conspiracy, intrigue, and the indominatable heart of human pettiness sent a friend request to Megan Meier, a 16- year- old girl living in O’fallon Missouri. The result was violent death for a girl who fell in love with an imaginary boy who’s MySpace profile had been created by the wrathful mother of one of Megan Meier’s classmates. As this story goes, the mother, a woman named Lori Drew, had heard that Miss Meier was spreading gossip about her daughter. Lori Drew flew into a rage and sought to punish the 16-year-old girl that had perpetrated slanderous rumors against her daughter. So, with her jilted daughter and several of the daughters friends, a fake MySpace profile was created in the form of a 16 year old boy named Josh. The only thing missing was a secret midnight meeting in the wilderness, complete with campfire. The creation of the fake profile, in light of its tragic outcome, takes on the quality of an evil conjuration by a literal suburban hag who’s behavior resulted in charges for three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information, to inflict emotional distress and one count of criminal conspiracy. It was admitted in court that LoriDrew intended to use Meier’s e-mails with Josh to get information about her and later humiliate her. What ended up happening was Megan Meier fell in love with the imaginary Josh. Seeing an opportunity, Lorie and her conspirators lured Megan into a fake love trap and then finally slammed the coffin lid. The once affectionate ‘Josh’ became suddenly cruel and his final message to Megan read, “the world would be a better place without you.” With that, Megan Meier hung herself with a pink scarf in her bedroom closet. A few blocks away, paper mache witches hung in store windows for Halloween caught an updraft from the opening of bell chimed doors.
The event of Megan Meiers death, while hardly a parallel to the events in Salem, is more of a testament to the fundamental fibers of human cruelty and vindictiveness that do not change, no matter how massive the change of internet technology may be. But an interesting question posed by the Megan Meier events is the question of whether or not the simulated anonymity of social networking sites permitted Megan’s torment in a way that could only have been possible previously in a social environment as backwards as…say, Salem? But then, McLurin himself says “as electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.”
Along the lines of similar sentiment, McLurin also describes how despite the deterioration of tribal patterns of behavior in the face of technological advancement, it is that same advancement/ “speed up, such as occurs with electricity” that might “Serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement…” If this restoration of tribal patterns can be associated with the rowdy behavior associated with tribal states of society, then maybe the circumstances that permitted a middle aged soccer mom to wreak havock on a 16 year old girl via the internet will appear again and again. Or maybe this is just a blip, or growing pain of a radically knew way of life. While this is not a guaranteed trend or outcome, the possibility of such disasters are never so far beneath the surface that we forget about them completely. For whenever we accept person a facebook friend request, we accept the possibility that we can be unfriended, stalked, publically humiliated, all with a click of a button. Lets pretend for a moment that the internet realm of today is sort of a continuation of a curse muttered by one of the convicted witches in 17th century Salem, and that this global village we click into regularly is capable of becoming the village in which everyone is feeling invisible enough that they will gladly cast stones.