By George Stephenson

Why those crazy kids and that wild Interweb thingy!

Recently the hayseed think tank, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, issued a report that apparently emanated from the 1950s on the use of computers in school.

With some dubious mining of a couple of studies done in far off lands, the centre came to the conclusion that there’s too much time being wasted on teaching kids about those new-fangled computers and that Interweb thingy.

Indeed, it pointed out that schools have to spend lots of money on technology and kids are learning about software and hardware that could well be out of date by the time they graduate. All good points. We really should only teach kids about things that are cheap and never change, like blocks of wood. And dirt.

The Frontier Centre, however, missed out on the most persuasive argument to keep kids away from the bits and bytes: how it is causing the total destruction of some people’s homes if not society itself.

British newspapers have been reporting that more and more teenagers are having parties while their parents are away and posting their locations on social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook.

One paper blared that the Internet is “to blame” for the assorted rampages.

In one case, a 15-year-old decided to play while the parents were away, announcing online that she was having a party. By the time the cops showed up there were some 2,000 teen partygoers doing their best to dismantle the family abode.
 
Electronics were stolen, windows and furniture smashed, the family dog fed ecstasy and, in one report straight out of Ripley’s, four inches of beer on the dining room floor. The teen host was so mortified, she went online the next day and told the world what an awesome party it was.

Not to be outdone, an 18-year-old Richie Rochelle opened up her family’s 21-bedroom family mansion to anyone with an Internet connection and the ability to read. Some 2,000 kids showed up, joined later by dozens of riot police and police dogs.

These, and some similar (albeit less dystopian) parties, followed the hijinks of a 16-year-old moron in Australia who also announced on MySpace his parents vacation plans and his free reign of the homestead.

More than 500 beer-soaked teens showed up at that hootenanny, followed by dozens of police, a helicopter and dog squad. Not satisfied with laying waste to one house, the revelers went through the suburban neighborhood destroying what they could and even tossing another police car on the barbie.

But some parties in Britain are making that look like high tea. There is now a group which calls itself the Facebook Republican Army that trolls social networking sites, looking for parties to crash and trash.

And through it all, most of the blame seems to be aimed at that insidious evil Internet. If only the Frontier Centre and researched further.

Yes, it is all the fault of technology. Those poor kids, use and abused by a bunch of silicon chips with nefarious purpose, like HAL the computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey.

In fact, the Internet might respond to party time as HAL did back in 1968: “Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”