bloggity-blog-bloggin'-gang-rape?

Considering both the popularity of such images/videos and the speed with which they spread across our wonderful inter-web, there's some food for thought in this article recently published by AZ Central concerning "happy-slapping."

In one of the most chilling cases, a report in the French daily Le Parisien on Wednesday said photos were taken of a young girl in Nice who was gang-raped earlier this year, and the images were circulated at her school.

. . .

"I am nearly certain we're headed toward attacks that become more and more spectacular," said Pascal Lardellier, a communications science professor in Dijon and author of The Thumb and the Mouse: A Study of the Digital Culture of Teens.

"Yesterday, it was a teacher, tomorrow it could be a police officer or a judge," he said. "From the moment that the youths see the media are paying attention, there becomes this sickening process in which they try to outdo one another. It's a vicious cycle.

"They have understood intuitively that all you have to do is smack a stranger in the street, film it, put it up on a blog or the Internet, and it will garner a certain amount of success."

Filming Violence with cell phones...