Why would someone do that?

Read the sententious shite in The Daily Mail or listen to the roving lynch mob of Liveline and you'll know that it was the website YouTube that kicked a 15year-old girl in the head in Ballymun.

Or The Sunday Independent, reporting on 27 August that "leading child health expert" Dr Deirdre Forde of Kildare called for Bebo to be "banned" after someone wrote nasty things about her sex life in the comments section of her son's Bebo page.

She now looks upon her son as a "monster".

(As an aside . . . what sort of damage does it do to a 12-year old to have his mother label him a "monster" in the mostread newspaper in the country? ) Or the colleges who, bless their naive little hearts, think that they can actually prevent teenagers from spending time on Bebo or MySpace.

Or the teachers' lobby screaming about the insolence of ratemyteachers. ie for allowing presumed authority figures to be ridiculed by children. Shut it down. Even the Oireachtas, rather hilariously, thinks it can block its staff from blogging.

Welcome to Backlash 2.0.

Jose Bove's anger at his impotence is now being experienced by teachers, lawyers, parents, gardai and the Oireachtas. It won't be long before some politician here "does something" about this. And when that "doing something" is exposed as a PR stunt, some guy on a building site will wonder where his JCB has got to.

It's fashionable in the Irish media to demonise the internet as a thing for nerds, paedophiles and bullies . . . while email, Blackberries and online shopping are so familiar that they carry no stigma whatsoever. But we've never honestly faced up to how all of that connectedness via the internet is changing us.

The same technology that allows grandparents to say good night to their grandkids on a Skype video call is the technology that allows a gang of thugs to "happy slap" a 15-year-old girl into hospital and brag about it online.

The same technology that brings jobs to Ireland by concentrating back-office corporate jobs here also takes good jobs away by allowing an Indian software engineer to compete with an Irish engineer by doing the same work for 1/10 the price.

So the distances, hierarchies and walls that once protected us from cheaper labour, disrespectful children and images of violence and sex are all gone, thanks to the internet. So are those imposed by church and state that kept Ireland wilfully poor, ignorant and unfree for so long. We see the consequences in all their beauty and ugliness.

So what do we do? Uninvent the internet? Blow up internet cables? Ban everything we don't like?

No. We learn the same lesson that business learned in the dotcom crash . . . the rules of human interaction don't actually change simply because we use bits rather than atoms. The laws of supply and demand and of profit and loss didn't get repealed, as internet investors discovered in 2001, and neither have our laws that govern our relationships with each other and try and protect the weak from the strong.

It is defamation to write something untrue and hateful about someone's mother on the wall of a toilet. As it is online. It's criminal assault to kick someone in the head.

Putting a video of it online should make it easier, not harder, to convict offenders . . .

something that the rules of evidence should reflect. If it takes a change of legislation to make that happen, it should be considered.

But the lynch-mob, ban-it, prevent-the-future mentality so many Irish people fall back on isn't going to work this time. The schoolkids are laughing at your feeble attempts to stop them using Bebo. And when someone does take the JCB to the internet cable, you'll be able to watch it. On YouTube.

The future is happening whether you like it or not.