By McKayla Helm, Editor
With technology on the rise, some people seem to confuse what’s really significant in life. This confusion appears to be everywhere, even in the courtrooms, and it is wrong. When it comes down to it, human life should be valued. People are not handling technology the right way, and sometimes it costs others their lives.
Recently, 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz was accused of hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) network and stealing four million documents from the school. The documents were an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. If Swartz was convicted, he would have faced a maximum of $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison after the government increased the number of felony counts against Swartz to 13 from four. He committed suicide on Jan. 11.
Yet in another court case that has recently been made public is the texting and driving case of Whitney Yaeger. Dave Muslovski was on his morning walk along a highway near Youngstown, Ohio when the 19-year-old driver Yaeger hit him. Texting-and-driving was not against the law in Ohio at the time, and Yaeger was charged with misdemeanor vehicular homicide. She was sentenced to just 45 days in jail. Texting-and-driving has been an issue lately, but cases end up with virtually no punishment.
Swartz had simply stolen a bunch of computer bits, while Yaeger had actually caused the death of a human being with her technology. America is focusing on the wrong areas to punish and to help prevent. It’s more important to teach generations to save lives by not using technology the wrong way than to teach that online documents are most important things in life.
Going by the way things are occurring in court, it appears that harsher punishments are given out when people interfere with important items, such as the documents. Shouldn’t a case where someone has been severely injured or even killed be taken more seriously than a case where nobody was even harmed? Technology was involved with both cases, but yet the violations were handled differently.
I believe that over everything, people should handle human life and death earnestly. In the future, the older generations should instruct the younger ones how to do that so there won’t be any question as to what court case should be handled seriously.
But, before anything even reaches a court, teens and adults nowadays should understand how important it is to hold human life above technology. Before a person picks up a phone while they are at the wheel, they should think about what really matters and treat technology not as a personal device but rather a possible danger while on the road.