A Window Into Sick Minds

A post on Doc Searls’ blog caught me off guard today. It’s a beautiful spring day in Minnesota lake country. The ice is out. It’s warm and sunny. There’s hardly a breath of wind. Between earth, lake and sky the world is as perfectly blue and green as it gets in this part of the world. Doc’s post focused on Daniel Henninger’s story (Wall Street Journal) about blogs, and the fact that maybe not all things should be shared, even if the Web allows that to be done almost effortlessly.

The story mentions the cannibalistic blog posts from Kevin Underwood who was arrested in the slaying of a 10-year-old neighbor girl (CNN story here). We know Underwood was blogging, and we know his words were disturbing, but we don’t know who, if anyone, was reading those words. Technorati is now tracking over 35 million blogs and there is a new blog born every second of every day. Just because someone writes something doesn’t mean someone will read it.

The Underwood story reminds me of a similar occurrence from last summer regarding Joseph Duncan. This murderer, pedophile and registered sex offender left an equally chilling trail of his thoughts and delusions on his blog. When stories like this come to light and are examined with forensic scrutiny, it always seems like we should have known—that somehow we could have stopped the evil.

Sometimes warning signs on the Web do work. This week, authorities stopped a potential school massacre (ABC News) in Kansas because a telling message posted on MySpace.com came to the attention of the right people. I don’t know if a similar story (FOX News) breaking today from North Pole, Alaska partially owes its disclosure and intervention to the Web, but the story mentions “rumors” and nowadays rumors can be transmitted at light speed via the Internet.

The blog posts of people like Underwood and Duncan are probably unread unless it is by other social misfits or psychopaths. Even though their public writings did not save their victims, it is at least helpful to know that there was that possibility. I disagree with Mr. Henninger. I don’t long for a day when voices like this would not be given a potential public forum. If someone is going off the deep end, any indication—no matter how remote the possibility that someone reads it and does something about it—is superior to leaving it exclusively in the short-circuited minds of schizophrenics that explode some day without any indication.