Jamie-Lynn Spears

Wow. I was going through You-Tube, and, remembering the Chris Crocker hysteria (his and those he caused), there are now a plethora of Chris Crocker imitators who are standing up “in defense” of Jamie Lynn Spears. “Leave Jamie Lynn Alone” seems to be the most common title. All of them try to imitate the conniption and hissy-fit that Crocker originated. There were those defending her against the illegality of the sex (but illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t good); there were also those claiming to be her father; there was one woman having a hissy fit; and a chain-smoking woman, soon to become a rebel without a car, speaking in civil tones and taking a mature middle-ground position claiming, with no hissy-fit uttered or intended, that she is a human being, she has made mistakes, and she deserves to be alone to reflect upon her life so far from within the privacy of her own heart, like we all do when we make a bad move. Hissy-fits and tabloid publicity do not advance the cause. Amen.

Yes, even within the lunacy of the internet, there is the one lone voice in the wilderness that wishes to set the record straight so that we can all go to bed sober. But I am afraid the effort on the Internet of which You Tube is a part is something akin to handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Level heads are boring, and easy to tune out. Lunacy in fact rules the day.

Back when the Internet was a pup, and before we had the web, there was another forum which served as the emotional scratching-post for people to indulge in their loonier side, and that was called USENET. It is a text-only system (yes, there are binaries, but even that has to be rendered within the message in ASCII text format) arranged by hierarchical topics called “newsgroups”. The more political newsgroups brought out the dogmatic side of everybody, which ensured that learning constructively from political discussion was kept to a minimum, and people just yelled at each other in text form. This was kind of like a text form of Jerry Springer. The Usenet had been described by some at the time as the “world’s largest psychiatrist’s couch” for its ability to bring out the unstable side of people.

While the Usenet is still there for that, we now have You Tube, where not only can you communicate loony thoughts, but we can watch you have a nervous breakdown in full stereo and in technicolour. Ain’t technology grand?

There is a lot to be said about the participants in the You Tube “Imitation Chris Crocker” melee — most of whom look under 20 and at times appear to be under 16. These are kids who do not know the value of empathy and the importance of maturity. Such unfeeling people were always with us at all points in human history. But it took You Tube to bring these people together and make them into a social force to be reckoned with. Their contribution to society is to add to the vast ocean of media pollution that do nothing to make anyone’s lives more worthwhile. They are fun, they appear to be having fun, but to those with maturity and insight, they are adding to the problem, not helping at all.