'Happy slapping' - not just dangerous alliteration
I suppose every generation has its peer group-promoted trends, good or bad, whether it is chopper bikes and schoolyard bullying behind the bike sheds, iPods and Red Bull & vodka-fuelled partying and so on. A reader has responded to my thought on the word 'cowardly' with a comment about 'Happy slapping'. For anyone not familiar with this term, it involves an act that is essentially a planned assault, which is 'filmed' on a mobile phone, and often then displayed on the Net.
I can't help but feel that, as far as trends of the day for young people go, this is a pretty sinister development, along with the use of mobiles to photograph other teens undressing or in the toilets. All assault is a crime, so of course the schoolyard bullying was just that too, but now the Net allows the technologically-savvy youth of today to display records of their experience of all kinds to a worldwide audience, the implications for deep psychological damage, especially in the case of the dressing room/toilet photos, is immense.
Can anyone offer any insight into where it all started to go horribly wrong in terms of losing the moral plot?
