Murder, They Messaged
Kim Proctor was no different than your ordinary teenage girl. Easily hurt by insults and just as easily swayed by compliments, she dwelled in an angsty purgatory familiar to most adolescents. But when Kim went from average kid to missing girl, her storyline took a tragic turn. David Kushner reports on the teenage nightmare that British Columbia police uncovered when they peeked behind the digital curtains of Kim’s supposed friends, Kruse Wellwood and Cameron Moffat. Read it here.
This is horrifying. Beyond that, what struck me most was this bit:
Everyone knows teens live with abandon online—exposing their secrets, likes, dislikes, sexual preferences, home addresses, phone numbers, and so on—in ways their parents can’t understand. But it’s not just this generation’s sense of privacy that’s eroding. It’s their sense of permanence. They act as though the words they write and pictures they post and texts they send vanish into the ether. But in fact they’re leaving a running transcript behind, a digital trail of their hopes, their anxieties, and, in the case of at least one small Canadian town, even their crimes.
Chilling. —Sarah
