Recent social networking news has me thinking and I’m really getting pissed off.
There’s the 13 year old girl named Megan who took her life because she met a person she believed to be a real boy on MySpace, which is a “social” website. When he broke it off with her, she killed herself. What she didn’t know was the boy was
…created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of Megan’s.
Run a search for kids who kill themselves or are killed due to Facebook or MySpace incidents and you’ll find plenty of horrible stories. Not only are young people committing suicide, but in some cases, their own parents punish social site users by killing them. This was the case for this poor Facebook girl shot by her father.
Recently a young man announced he was going to kill himself, and in front of a live cam, took an overdose of pills, laid down on a bed and proceeded to pass away while viewers watched.
Biggs’ family was infuriated that no one acted sooner to save him, neither the viewers nor the Web site that hosted the live video, Justin.tv. The Web site shows a video image, with a space alongside where computer users can instantly post comments.
Thinking all this was new, I discovered this event from 2005, in which a teenager posts a suicide note and kills himself but first, leaves instructions on where to find him in his MySpace page. Two hours after he died, he was being eulogized on his web site.
What the hell is happening?
Who is responsible?
I keep thinking that the CEO’s and inventors of social media and social networking never imagined their ideas would cause the deaths of so many people, especially young people. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something I put online was an instrument of death. I’d take the web site down.
But, the owners of MySpace and Facebook are making millions in revenue. I wouldn’t expect them to let that money stop flowing even when the blood of innocent people is spilled for it.
What about dating sites? How many people live and die or have good days and bad days depending on how many people respond to their profile?
What gets me is how the Internet is helping sick people find outlets for their bad behaviors. It’s easy to sound intelligent and place a veil over mental illness. Social conversation is the perfect way to spread hatred, conduct revenge, control conversations through covert editing and playing out every possible drama. There’s always an audience of inexperienced people who can be snared and trapped. There’s always going to be unstable people with no self worth willing to place their lives in the hands of people who merely type words.
I find myself saying the same thing I do when children are scared by movies or TV shows.
“It’s all fake. It’s all pretend. None of it is true.”
I wish more social site owners were compassionate enough to remind their users that their sites are not reality. Before you go any further with this so-called “social” experiment, I suggest you STOP, STEP BACK and consider what people are doing with your web site experiments. They’re abusing them.
What are you going to do about it?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not sure the venue matters. I wouldn’t expect a movie theater to shut down because a murder occurred there, or all Walmarts to close because an employee was trampled to death at one of them, or cars, trains, buses, boats, and planes to no longer be manufactured because so many people drove them drunk, causing many fatalities. The actions of people go beyond the venue in which they take place. Close a venue, and you’ll likely find the people simply act elsewhere. The bigger question in my mind is what can we do about the negative actions of people?
Speaking of Walmart, how about that poor man who was killed on Black Friday by insane shoppers? What could possibly make people kill for sales?
What could possibly make people kill for sales? Simple; the sense of urgency and false security said products are supposed to offer us…. only if we buy them NOW. The psychological affect of advertisements are profound if done on a commonly used thread; look at the current environment the target audience is living in (currently belt tightening and trying to be frugal) and then flip it around to make the company appear to be acting on their best interest with products that help the audience acheive this zen. Then add in the time tested method of announcing early opening and/or extended hours to give off the impression that this is gonna be one hell of a shopping bonanza and there you have it… panic via the sense of urgency.
More back to the topic though, the online world is reflecting the uglier sides of culture on a whole. Any sicko with a checkbook, a laptop and a net connection and buy his/her way into any community to extend their illness and sociopathic bereavements on anyone who happens to cross the path. But the people who stand by idly watching and not acting are just as guilty in some regards.
If you wanna see what’s happening and what to expect moving forward, go research “lulz”. That is what the younger generation, and some older folks too are introducing to the global villages. Sad, sad world.