Fire in the Hole!

Fire in the hole is a malicious stunt that hurts the victim and doesn't let go. Internet sites have ensured that whoever gets attacked by this prank will be humiliated on an enormous scale. The restaurant workers do have some power to stop it though. They can track down the video and flag is as being offensive. Moderators could read their story and take it down. The fact that they can do this in no way negates the fact that web 2.0 is being used in horrible ways.

I do believe that we could be considered the not-so-greatest generation. Pranks like this have always existed, but they have never been glorified or run as rampant as they have with our generation. I guarantee that most of the people who do these things first heard of them on the Internet. The trouble makers of previous generations have been limited to whatever they could think of or what their friends could think of, but our generation has access to thousands upon thousands of ideas flying around in cyberspace. They can not only look up how to do it, but also see how it's done. Teens can watch these videos and see the creators hysterical reaction. in a sick way, it's inspiring to them. The criticism we receive is rightly given. The media is correctly warning people about these things and is in no way over hyping them.

I honestly don't think that the television shows that glorify these stunts really care what kids do. They might have a "Do not try this at home" disclaimer, but they do nothing to back it up. When kids do these pranks and parents hear that they got the idea from TV, it probably only makes the shows more popular. It's free publicity for the shows and it only makes them cooler to the kids. The problem is that other than cracking down and editing these things off of TV, there's not much that can be done to limit our generations exposure to these things. The best suggestion I could make would be to track down Bam and publicly charge him with assault for it. I doubt the people who originally preform these stunts and all of their imitators would be inclined to do them if they saw others getting in real touble.