The human cost of witnessing violence online

In the fall of 2001, my family plugged in our first computer and skipped straight past the screech of a modem into broadband. It meant no dial-up tones, no waiting for pages to load; it was a fast track into places I wasn’t ready to go.

I’d already dabbled in Napster at a relative’s house. File-sharing sites were catnip for a young music fan with little money and an endless appetite. When Napster was shut down, other sites followed. Kazaa looked like just another music library. Then I clicked deeper and realized it offered something else entirely: videos, vast and unfiltered.

One night, on impulse, I typed two words I barely understood the weight of: Daniel Pearl.

Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002 while covering terrorism. His captors recorded his murder and released the video online. It was on Kazaa. And I watched it.

I can’t tell you exactly why I searched for him. Maybe it was curiosity, or boredom. Maybe it was the bravado of a 14-year-old who thought he could handle anything. The adolescent brain is still developing self-restraint, but it’s already capable of being shaped by what it sees.