Once upon a time, there were five Toronto high school kids who didn’t like their vice-principal.

But instead of quietly discussing the aspects of the woman they saw as a tyrant — as I would have done, and trust me, I was a fantastically stupid teenager — they went high-tech and posted slurs against her on the social networking site Facebook.com.

The comments suggested violence, so Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute called the cops as they’re required to do. The student who started the Facebook page, Bradley Parsons, got holy hell from the cops and his parents, and he and four other students were suspended.

Days later, students who were angry about the suspension got rowdy, throwing bottles and a skateboard at the police, and four were arrested and charged.

If these young people only knew how much the situation has gone from learning experience to life-changing event. I’m not just talking about trying to cross the border with a criminal conviction on your record: You would be amazed how long parents can stay steamed at you. You have a lifetime to resent them, but it’s still not going to pay your university expenses, is it, young man? Is it? Are you listening to me?

On the bright side, young Bradley now has 321 friends on Facebook.

Sadly, he has yet to discover that they are fair weather friends. Facebook friends don’t pay your legal fees. And I suspect that if they do show up in court to support you, they won’t make a terribly good impression. Everyone looks cooler on their Facebook picture, you see.

Internet gone to extreme

The online world is like that. It’s solid, then it floats away. Its warm friendship pierces the heart. Then the wound turns septic.

The Birchmount students say their right to free speech has been stomped on, and they have a point. But online freedom leads to delusions: that online discourse is both truthful and private. In fact, it is public and it can do harm.

The problem is, there’s free and there’s loony.

Newspapers restrict journalism so fiercely that they are mandating boredom, discouraging the breaking of new stories, killing good writing and driving themselves out of business. They also diligently check letters to the editor for inaccuracy, libel and crudeness.

The internet has gone to the other extreme. There is wonderful writing online, but it is frequently thoughtless and foul, racist and frightening. It is so free that blogs, chat lines and talk threads are often the chosen destination for embittered, deranged people, repelling the intelligent readers who were supposed to make the internet a new haven for humanity.

I used to enjoy the Guardian talk threads, but they’re now so abusive that they lower my spirits. Yet these threads are moderated!

The unmoderated letters tacked on to the bottom of online columns, as in the Guardian‘s daily Comment is Free, are a bile festival. Here in Canada, one online response to an abortion-rights column I wrote for another publication actually praised the child-torturer Dr. Josef Mengele of Auschwitz for not being as bad as doctors who perform abortions.

I was horrified. Part of me knows that publishing this letter online was a social benefit. It revealed what extreme anti-abortionists are like. But I still think it shouldn’t have been posted. (Note: CBC moderates its online letters).

The result of all this is not, I think, democracy. Why should everyone have a voice? They don’t in daily life. There are some people you wouldn’t sit next to on the bus. Online, clever and perhaps sensitive letter writers with an actual point to make are driven away by the ignorance and sheer hatred displayed by the other posters.

‘Fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts’

Salon.com recently ran a fascinating piece by Gary Kamiya on the damage done to writers by massive instant online feedback. Yes, there are thoughtful readers, he wrote, but there are also “fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts.” At some point, all the responses begin to blend together and the intelligence is lost.

He says the worst abuse is directed at brave writers who reveal painful truths about themselves, and these are the writers we need most. As well, women, who don’t have much presence in the online world to begin with, are given cruel nicknames and mocked for their appearance, mostly by male readers but surprisingly often by females too.

Kamiya says the real danger “as writing becomes more of a dialogue and less of a soliloquy” is that writing will flatten out. It will become boring, trying to be accommodating to large numbers of people, when the best writers have their own “voice,” a highly personal quality that makes writing lively and interesting.

As a result of the Mengele letter, I no longer read my posted reader mail (although friends will send the intelligent, helpful stuff along) partly because I can’t respond and partly because I don’t want to. This is tragic. I suspect my writing has become more tame to placate invisible people, and I miss my readers. I used to have coffee with these people; now I draw away.

To me, writing is private and I send it out publicly. But online, nothing is private, as that poor vice-principal learned. Everything is up for debate and attack. Lewis Hyde famously made the distinction between creative things that are gifts and those that are commodities. There’s no big money yet in online journalism. But the commodification has begun and weird online abuse is part of it.

The internet began as a wild, free and good place. It has changed, as the recent sexually motivated death threats to American tech-blogger Kathy Sierra have shown. Scared for her life, she is now offline.

So kids, watch what you post online, even under a pseudonym. Words matter. As do pictures of nooses next to your face, in Sierra’s case. You’re eating away at something that was once a great notion.

This week

A clever young Canadian-South African, Richard Poplak, has written one of the finest, funniest and most tragic memoirs I have read in years, called Ja, No, Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa. It is a gem, all the pleasure and pain and ruthless observation concealed inside the gleaming jewel of the book.

With much quaking and shaking, I finally watched Snakes on a Plane. It’s a mess. With a production budget of $12, which meant the film had to be shot in the dark, and dialogue so lame it was in traction by the first scene, the film even missed the point of snakes. It’s not so much that they bite, it’s that they’re snakes. They’re angry, living, moving ropes. I didn’t watch to the end. I hope everyone on the plane was bitten and eaten and lost their luggage.