Social media continues to show its relevance as a crime-fighting tool, with a recent video uploaded to iCNN. The user-submitted portal for citizen journalists on CNN’s website served as the catalyst in the investigation seeking justice against a girl that punched a fellow teen in the face. The young girl that was hit had made a remark on her dislike of a certain music group, causing another girl to physically retaliate.

As another teen had caught the whole thing on tape, the victim realized that something could in fact be done about it. After uploading the video to social media-sharing site YouTube and iCNN, the police were able to pursue the case based on the evidence in hand. Not to mention, having the crowd-sourcing ability to leverage social media communities to help identify people in the video is yet another way in which online networks are being utilized towards finding justice for all.

While this isn’t the first time something like this has occurred, it did make me think about the future of teens in our technology era. Digital cameras were cumbersome and still detached from cell phones when I was a teen. Video recordings of my friends and me were limited to the computer camera and the hand-held camcorder. Posting videos on the Internet was unheard of, and even the thought of uploading a photo online made you cringe because you knew how long it would take to scan it in, crop it, and wait for it to fully load onto the Net.

But now cameras are as readily accessible as any other pocket-sized device. Combining them with mobile phones that are fully equipped with unlimited data plans makes for almost thoughtless sharing capabilities, leaving anyone prey to the wiles of fellow members of society.

Nearly everything that takes place in our offline culture can now be replicated and repeated in our online culture, making it all the more difficult to escape the events (and mistakes) of our lives. Pretty soon we’ll have facial recognition coming standard on all uploaded media, with options for auto-tagging, alerts and redistribution of content through the newly tagged’s network. If that’s not contributing to our impending Big Brother, I don’t know what is.

As teens growing up in a time where any photo or video can lead to public praise or disgrace, the pressure is increasing for behavioral conforming in order to avoid social consequences. An intangible influence on our actions, the delineation of intent and shared social media will be more deeply drawn in the sand.

The upside of such circumstances is the increased hope that teens will think before acting out, knowing the potential of getting caught and being put into an undesired social position. The downside, of course, is the increasing potential to be put on super blast by those people and devices around us.

It all reminds us of our changing culture, the effects of technology, and the consideration needed behind any technological implementation moving forward. Used as a form of behavioral control, social media could be a very dangerous mechanism, taking on some of the responsibilities previously left to the family, religious and political institutions. Where our teens will land in this flurry of cultural changes remains to be seen, but is ultimately left to their devices (pun intended).