Bike Girl

I'm assuming you've all seen the video of "the bike girl", as she is being referred to in the media and on the streets. She's become the embodiment of the protesters' beef with the actions of the police during the G-20, and today she came to my newspaper class because she's apparently friends with my instructor's daughter (pgh's a small town, eh) and we were able to group interview her about the whole ordeal.

For the voyeurs (all of us): Her name's Lauren Wasson, and she's not a protester or an anarchist, but a curious onlooker that got caught in the melee. (Really? No way!) Why she threw the bike? Anger, incited by the love taps from the riot police. ("I don't just go throwing my bike at cops everyday.") She's never had a speeding ticket and she's facing a felony now. According to her, the police were hitting her and pushing her before the news camera started filming them, and then they dislocated her shoulder when they had her on the ground and, of course, bruised her. (Oh! And the big bad professional news programs got both her age and information about her work wrong. Ha. Fact checking at its finest.)

Obviously, it was really awesome to get a story of such timeliness and significance straight from the source, since--as I'm sure you all know too well--.... people don't care to talk to student reporters. Or students in general.

But there's a certain aspect about this that I think relates to our class, and it's the more substantial reason why I posted this: Thanks to the internet, Facebook, YouTube, and TV news stations posting videos online, her story has spread like mad throughout the region and she's become a psuedo-celebrity in days. Although this has exacerbated her torment in some ways, I also think she's been handed a soapbox and a megaphone. But, of course, that means other people have too. She said that when she got out of jail Friday, a guy she's never met from Columbus, OH, emailed her to say he set up a Facebook group and a petition site for her cause. Conversely, an unknown woman called in to Honsberger Live (a controversial program on KDKA news radio that I've never heard of) and told him that she lived next to Lauren in Shaler (where Lauren doesn't and has never lived) and was happy she was arrested because she was a piece of shit and is going to hell, or something like that--I'm paraphrasing what Lauren paraphrased so don't quote me.

It reminded me to some extent of Emily Gould, and how quickly the internet can inflate or deflate someone's ego or fame-- or rather, how quickly we can, by shouting from the rooftops via one innocent, inconspicuous click. Worth thinking about.