But the basic idea is that a seventeen-year-old student, by the name of Dave Kori, got his hopes up one morning because there was a thin layer of the powdery, white stuff outside and was frustrated to find that he should have done his homework after all-- school wasn't cancelled.
However, Kori didn't internalize his frustration at having a top-notch education or even limit himself to complaining to his friends; he called the office and home of the school official who had made the Snow Day decision.
When the man's wife receives the obnoxious message, she chooses to call Kori back and give him a piece of her mind.
His infringement on privacy might have been forgivable if he had left it at that, but Kori seized his opportunity to make the lives of a hard-working couple even more difficult. He posted the voicemail from the woman (which was understandably angry and comically derogatory) on Youtube, and created a Facebook page complete with phone numbers and a petition to fellow obnoxious students to harass the couple further.
And that isn't even where it gets bad. It gets bad when the Youtube video and the Facebook group gets thousands of hits and comments in the first few nights and the Post decides that this is newsworthy.
Youtube and Facebook are websites that can act as vehicles for personal expression and debates over what is and is not moral are not hard to find.
However.
These debates are almost exclusively shallow and almost always reduce themselves to personal attacks aimed at other Youtube and Facebook users. There is a tendency among Youtubers to use the video comment box to have moral and ethical arguments completely unrelated to the video. Thousands of hits on petty, ridiculous webpages which negatively impacts individuals in the real world are not unheard of.
My major problem is with the Post covering this as news. The seventeen-year-old that invades the privacy of a school official and upsets his wife can only benefit from more attention. His self-involved sense of self-righteousness needs to be addressed by his school's faculty and his parents, but the controversy should not go any farther than that.
I think that the Post's decision to cover this story was a result of the print media's increasing desire to attract internet affluent readers and to connect to people who spend a considerable amount of time on video-sharing sites like Youtube and friend sites like Facebook. Unfortunately, I think that the deference paid to the situation and the 'number of hits' is as shallow and unpalatable as the young man's actions.
