Paris Brown: leave the girl alone

First of all, apologies for not posting for so long; I've just been so busy with other projects, but I'm going to try and post more often from here on out!

My first thoughts upon hearing the news of Paris Brown’s foul-mouthed tweets were actually that of sympathy.

I can’t help but feel that everything has been blown well and truly out of proportion. The teenager’s tweets were from quite some years ago, and chances are she was a young, impressionable child, showing off to her friends online, as so many kids do nowadays.

If you haven't heard about this story, you can have a look here

In a way I sort of feel her pain. The Internet has changed in recent years; it’s no longer exclusively for chatting to friends, shopping or playing games. It’s a much more powerful tool, especially when it comes to employment and upholding your reputation.

Over the past year or so I’ve really used the Internet to my advantage: I’ve gained loads of experience writing for online newspapers and blogs, and I’ve started to build my reputation as a journalist. And one of the things I’ve done to create a more professional online presence is vetting my Twitter. I removed tweets that could be deemed as offensive or taken the wrong way, and I changed my handle from the rather girlish and ditsy @graciebabesxo to a simpler @gracehutch28. I’m not sure if I can say yet whether doing any of the above will have helped, but at least I have my own piece of mind that something I posted on Twitter years ago won’t come back to bite me on the ass.

Whilst I understand that there are endless cases of racist/threatening/abusive tweets and messages posted online by the likes of celebrities/politicians/footballers and the like, but they have one thing on their side which makes these tweets less excusable: age.

With age comes experience, and with experience comes common sense; both of which Paris was obviously lacking when she posted about hash brownies and drinking binges. But we all make mistakes, and most of them are made when we’re young and naïve. And unlike Miss Brown, most of us get to make them out of the spotlight and away from media scrutiny.

So before you judge the 17 year old crime tsar – as the Daily Mail today dubbed her – just think back to when you were in your teens, making whatever mistakes you did and only having your parents to answer to, not the entire British population.

How did we ever live without...

iPhones?

Last weekend was one of the best I've had in ages, as my Dad and I went camping to Ilam, Derbyshire. It was a weekend of walking, eating, bike riding and getting to grips with Dad's new T5 California camper. All in all, a great weekend, and it provided me with a well-deserved break from (seemingly) never-ending revision.

However, we couldn't help feeling cut off from the rest of the world. Don't get me wrong, I love the countryside, and I'd probably choose it over a noisy, bustling city any day, but what I don't love is the sense of isolation. And guess what this was all down to? That little message in the top left corner of your phone display.. 'No Service'.

Sad, I know. But this weekend has proved that technology and Internet have quite literally become a necessity in our lives. And it wasn't just the inability to send a text that was frustrating us, there were so many things we couldn't do! Most of which we probably take for granted on a daily basis.

For example, my Dad had planned to sit and sift through his emails when we arrived at the campsite, having left the office early in order to pick me up. But an hour into the journey and complete lack of signal or data connection meant this looked unlikely.

Next, finding a pub for tea. Instead of looking on Google maps, we had to actually ASK the people running the site of the nearest place to eat. Preposterous, I know. Nevertheless we found one, but I can safely say Google maps would've provided us with one more suited to us - but I'll save that for another post.

Filling out my food diary on MyFitnessPal after dinner wasn't happening either, with absolutely zilch date connection. Much to my surprise, the pub/hotel we ate at didn't even have WiFi. I mean, I thought that'd pretty much be a certainty in this day and age. But then again, maybe that reflects my own personal reliance on the Internet and such like.

Upon leaving the pub we were tipped off by the barman that we'd be able to get a few bars of signal in the car park. We literally rushed outside and started waving our iPhones in the air for dear life. YES. 2 bars of signal, it wasn't perfect but it was good enough for us! Beaming, we picked up emails, checked Facebook and Twitter, and I updated my food diary. Along with sending fraught texts to people along the lines of "Shit signal everywhere, don't panic we're not dead!" Excessive? Maybe. Necessary? Definitely.

After standing in the car park clutching our devices for a good 10 minutes or so, we decided to head back to the campsite, watching as the little white bar dropped and dropped, before eventually going completely.

Setting off on our bike ride the next morning, I slid my phone into it's carrier attached to the centre of my handlebars (too far?) and watched it literally come alive as we rode through areas of good signal; texts, emails, notifications, tweets. I'd never felt so popular.

We stopped at various places for breaks (even though I think they were more phone breaks than refuelling, etc) and eventually reached a lovely little pub, where we sat outside in the sun and had dinner. To our delight, it was a signal hotspot, and so ensued about an hour and a half of fairly silent web-browsing, putting our phones down only to eat.

This weekend really has made me realise that I am probably far too reliant on my phone and iPad. But then again, isn't everyone? On the journey home I started to think of ways I could wean myself off them, but as you can probably guess from this post, I never finished that dialogue with myself.