Week 11 - Poke

A poke has gained new meaning after the popularity of Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, you mostly likely are aware of the poke feature. If not, you can just check out Facebook's long list of questions and answers about the poke feature, which, to me, essentially seems pointless. It's kind of random and funny but it serves no real purose. Awhile back, the application SuperPoke! became popular on Facebook. It was like a poke except that you had to add the application and there were way more random things to do to your friends other than poking. For example, you could dance with your friends, throw random objects at your friends, or even high fiiiive your friends. It's a virtual way of doing things with your friends without having to actually do them.

Back to the simple poke feature: What seems like an innocent gesture caused a Tennesse woman to be arrested for violating a protective order against her by poking the person who had the order against her. It's being determined if the poke was done by her from her computer or by a hacker. It's also being determined whether or not it was an imposter's site that did the poking. I don't really know what to say about this. Is a Facebook poke a violation of a protective order? I found the legal definition of it and one thing it said on there that caught my attention is that usually protective orders have a specified distance one party must stay away from the other party. But what about "virtual distances"? With the growth of social media, does that need to be considered in writing laws like this? According to the original news article, a poke is still a form of communication. What do you think? Should this woman have been arrested? Was a poke a violation of the protective order? Should it be?