Serious exploration into the changes that socializing on the Internet is causing should be undertaken.
For the first time, a primary socialization of people is often anonymous, worldwide and allows a person to express their fantasies, fantasy self, and the hear and socialize with others also doing so - emotions and thoughts previously having no verbal or interactive outlet. This technology opens areas of human nature never before with any outlet or real applications.
Does this allow people to vent? Do people increasingly get sucked into their fantascies - including dark, sadistic or violent ones? Seduced by the dark or bright fantascies and thoughts of others? Cause a person to increasingly become their inner unrestrained thoughts or to become those of others in some social network? Does it cause a person to divide into two or multiple personalities, confusingly intermixed with their real life? Does a person find their cyberworld self and social communication friends more attractive and increasingly lives their life in cyberworld?
This case raises the obvious complex question of did he really mean this? Would he really have done it? Was this some bizarre back-and-forth escalation of a bizarrity sadistic words and fantasy contest that was really just words and nothing more? Or was he really plotting to do such things? Was he and the interactions on the internet exposing the reality he was actually headed towards? Was he being sucked to that reality by having this interactive release - and the gratifying interaction with others - having changed him in ways that with that interaction he never would have?
We all know that people post and say things to others on the forum it unlikely would ever say to anyone in real life. So, then, are these internet words "real?" about each of us? Or are they just words and releases we otherwise cannot do - harmlessly so?
Strangely, the crime he is charged with it the crime of expressing his thoughts not expecting them to come back at him in his reality self. Police often seize computers and thus "prove" the person is overall bizarre, anti-social, decadent, abnormal etc. But is having bizarre, anti-social, decadent and abnormal thoughts and expressions with other really proof of anything about the person?