There, on the pages of Facebook or MySpace or Tumblr, they go about the natural business of being teenagers — gossiping and complaining and saying stupid things in stupid ways. And though they know they are essentially doing this in public, there is something about the forum that also makes it ephemeral. The commentary may never be erased, but for Hannah and company, the instant it rolls off the screen, it doesn’t matter. However badly they comport themselves, it’s out of sight, out of mind and off the conscience.

That’s why I suspect it wasn’t Hannah’s brattiness or disrespect that drove Tommy to shoot the laptop. It was his perhaps unconscious awareness of an unbridgeable gap between him and his daughter, the gap between knowing what it means to be publicly humiliated and belonging to a cohort for whom humility is an increasingly arcane concept.

You might start to wonder about the Darwinian implications. After all, as humans evolve into ever more exhibitionist beings, not embarrassing easily might be seen as a highly adaptive trait.

Which also means that Tommy’s method of discipline ultimately failed. His video didn’t just record the end of a laptop; it tried to embarrass someone who’s so accustomed to people exposing themselves online that it doesn’t occur to her to be embarrassed. He hurt himself worse than he hurt her.