UNLESS you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, camping out in the Nevada desert or hanging out with a group of Eskimos, you will be familiar with the modern phenomenon that is the social networking site.
Websites such as Facebook and Twitter have taken off dramatically over the past couple of years with the number of people signing up increasing more and more all the time. Most might think that catching up with your friends, getting all the latest gossip from your favourite celebrities and being invited to events and parties all on the same website would be an amazing breakthrough in our so called ‘blogosphere’. However, for all the success that social networking websites have drawn, they are matched with a backlash of negativity. Are social networking sites fuelling societies voyeuristic need for gossip in an uncontrollable way? It seems the dark side of the social networking site is rife with bullying, addiction and manipulation.
A survey published last week by the IT firm Morse stated that 59 per cent of office workers in London admitted to spending on average 56 minutes per week reading and sending ‘tweets’ on Twitter. This is costing businesses in the capital £325million a year in lost productivity. This survey and others similar have sparked many London firms to introduce a ban on Twitter and Facebook in a bid to control the seeming addiction which many office workers have demonstrated through their inability to control their obsession in the workplace.
However, it isn’t only office workers who have shown signs of addiction to social networking sites. Recently some of the most followed celebrities on Twitter have admitted defeat and deleted their accounts claiming the websites were taking over their lives. Lily Allen last week stated that her boyfriend had made her choose between her tweeting and him. She signed off with the post, “I am a neo-luddite, goodbye.” Stephen Fry has also claimed he will quit the site with his tweet updates averaging on around one every half an hour. He alone has 949, 906 followers and has tweeted 4, 647 times since he signed up.
To us mere mortals the notion that celebrities are ‘addicted’ to social networking sites may seem ridiculous. Partly due to the fact that all their tweets seem to be about the celebrity parties they’ve attended or the plugging of their new book, it seems a lot like another line of publicity for them and the idea that they are addicted to the attention gained through fame is hardly news to us. However it’s when the addiction leads to more serious ends that there becomes a real problem. There have recently been reports of child neglect which can be traced back to a Facebook addiction and people losing their jobs over posts about their boss have been spotted and taken out of context.
Kelly Moyston who recently appeared on the reality television programme ‘Wife Swap’ has been branded ‘Britain’s worst mum’ by the tabloids after she displayed what can only be described as child neglect after admitting she spends 10 hours a day on Facebook. She claimed her eighteen month old child was too much of a ‘drag’ and admitted she often leaves her sat in front of the TV, feeding her only fast food while Moyston herself feeds her addiction.
Just how much should we be watched and monitored? The owners of Facebook recently lost a legal battle over owning the rights to the photographs which members post on their profile. Just how different are ID cards given to us by the government to profiles, conversations and pictures free for anyone to see on the internet?
Aside from the problems that these sites are causing for businesses and celebrities, the way sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Bebo are affecting the younger generation has presented some harrowing reports. In August this year the first ‘cyber bully’, Keeley Houghton, was put behind bars for sending death threats to an eighteen year old girl she had bullied during their time at school. Houghton searched for Emily Moore on Facebook and even though the physical bullying had ceased, the internet provided a new way of torment. In November 2007, thirteen year old Megan Meier committed suicide after falling victim to a ‘cyber bully’ whom claimed he was a teenage boy on the social networking site Myspace. He actually turned out to be an adult neighbour who groomed Megan via the exchange of messages on the site. She was found hanging in her wardrobe by her father the day after the online ‘friendship’ ended. It seems that social networking sites can be used as much for harmless debate and discussion, keeping up to date with your friends and checking out the latest celebrity gossip as they can for paedophiles and ‘cyber bullies’ to groom and torment their victims, sometimes so badly they can cause depression and suicide.
So, the backlash against social networking sites has resulted in ‘Facebook suicide’. However, research has shown that rather than actual ‘suicide’ the most dramatically an exit can be made from Facebook is by being in a ‘social coma’. This is due to yet another Orwellian example of the control facebook can exert over its members through the inability by members to actual completely delete their Facebook profile. Rather than the deletion of a profile, it stays in cyberspace and can be re-activated at any time….
So far 31 million users have committed ‘mass suicide’ before their profile consumes them and the total is said to be rising. Bullying and addiction are ruining families and posing unemployment for the unlucky. Twitter is consuming so much of celebrities’ time they feel they can’t control their so called addiction and so have had to delete their profiles. We are constantly being watched and it seems the love of all things reality has gone too far. This is a bid for the re-emergence of real life friends, rather than the cyber variety. So, grab your coat, call a friend and arrange to go for a coffee. It might just save your social life. Literally.
