Media Literacy and Criminals

I know that this course is about youth and media literacy, but I've been quite amused recently about the articles that I have been coming across concerning criminals and their use of new media and games.

• Gangs use of Twitter, Facebook on the rise
• Criminal Colin Gunn Used Facebook To Threaten Enemies From Jail
• Dungeons and Dragons Prison Ban Upheld
• Fugitive Christopher Crego Posts Facebook Info That Helps Police Arrest Him
• Prisoners Lose Facebook Pages After Victim Taunts

Interestingly, police and prison officials have had to increasingly deal with criminals and their use of social media in ways that were perhaps quite unexpected. For example, gangs are now recruiting new members and bragging about their exploits on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or lone criminals are taunting others via posts on Facebook. Some of these poor choices on the behalf of criminals have led to their capture or the revoking of privileges in the cases of criminals that are already incarcerated. What seems apparent though is that criminals are now using new media in order to carry out some of their work. In some cases, the police are using this to their advantage, for they can now see and document when threats are made and sometimes even when the acts are carried out when the criminals post pictures of their crimes. In one of the articles that I have provided, one cop is even quoted talking about the need to not publicize all that police are doing with new media to catch criminals so as to keep criminals in the dark about police tactics. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a need to make uniform policies - or simply make a policy at all since there are few official policies in place - concerning new media and games.

Gaming, for instance, seems to be greatly misunderstood. The article about Dungeons and Dragons that I have posted above is a bit problematic for me. I suppose if one is in prison, then they are being punished for some reason and shouldn't be able to do everything. On the other hand, I don't know that I agree that Dungeons and Dragons "promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling." Statements like that lead me to believe that there is an air of ignorance towards gaming that needs to be addressed in our criminal justice system.

With all of this being said, I have found these articles quite interesting. Our focus on youth in this course is not wholly separate for these topics. Informing young people about new media and gaming is important, but it's also important to teach them about being responsible with new media and making them aware that the choices that they make about what to share and post online are choices that need to be taken seriously. A new site has been created called Please Rob Me that simply searches for public Twitter posts in which people freely mention that they have left home. This information can be combined with other location-based social networking tools to determine the location of homes that have been left unoccupied. I'm sure most of us don't think about that when we post status messages about our locations, but it's perhaps something that we should be thinking about and it's a great example of a seemingly simple action that has rather unintended consequences.