I've always been a fan of technology because in my mind all those wonderful gizmos, gadgets and computer-thing-a-ma-jigs are not only great advances for our society but also examples of how human intelligence has grown and evolved over the years.
That smug and superior notion has been given a good solid re-think in recent days thanks to the many news stories in the past few weeks that showed a decidedly darker side of that same technology.
One of the first subjects for this column was the growing number of people using something called Facebook.
Now years later Facebook is one of the most popular sites on the world wide web and pretty much everybody has a Facebook account for catching up with old friends and stalking old flames.
Unfortunately we see it's also being used to torment, harass and bully people.
You've likely read the recent story of a teen from the Lower Mainland who was allegedly gang raped at a party in East Vancouver and then pictures of the despicable event were posted to Facebook pages.
RCMP tried to get the pics removed however as soon as they take one set down a new set gets posted.
Isn't that nice?
Gives you lot of faith in the next generation doesn't it?
I know it's a question I'll never get answered but "What the hell is wrong with people?"
And this behaviour is not limited to Facebook either nor just the brainless and soulless.
Perhaps you read or saw news reports about the wonderful mother-daughter team that opened a MySpace account in the name of a fictitious 16-year-old boy so they could gain the confidence of a young Missouri teen girl only to humiliate her.
That teen girl ended up committing suicide because of the cyber bullying, which the mother who opened the account, Lori Drew, called "a joke."
That same kind of mean-spirited "joke" was behind another similar tragedy recently when a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey committed suicide after his encounter with another man was secretly recorded and streamed onto the Internet by two undergraduates.
It's a bitter irony that the two students, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, sought to ridicule someone else but ended up exposing their own deplorable and vicious natures to the world.
Heck, it's not even confined to the living either.
You can find lots of stories out there about thoughtless people posting inappropriate and downright disturbing things on Facebook memorial pages.
Again, "What the hell is wrong with people?"
It was these kinds of stories, we hear, that made a Don Ross Secondary School vice principal in Squamish recently erase a cell phone video of an alleged bullying incident and student fight for fear of it ending up on YouTube instead of preserving the evidence of the assault for police.
I am pretty certain about a few things.
No matter how many gadgets and gizmos or wonderful computer apps, programs, websites and hardware we create for society's advancement, some kids and adults will always be cruel and there will always be small-minded and intolerant jackasses who enjoy making life miserable for kinder, gentler souls.
I guess human intelligence hasn't grown or evolved as much as we'd like to think.
