The recent YouTube-rehearsed killing sprees in Finnish schools have brought into shocking focus the dark side of Web 2.0 social networking. In the tragic wake of these massacres, not surprisingly, many are calling for restrictions on websites like YouTube.
These rumblings for state control don’t bode well for the libertarian vision of the Internet. But they are a sign that, while Web 2.0 evangelists preach the gospel of a digital utopia, virtual reality can also be a place of hell and damnation where well-meaning designs are easily deformed into a nightmare dystopia.
These tragedies are not limited to cold, dark northern countries with high rates of gun ownership and suicide. Similar incidents are being reported at an alarming rate in virtually every country and culture. Inevitably, the horizontal logic of social networks is clashing with the vertical logic of state control.
The Web 2.0 revolution, it cannot be doubted, holds out great promise for radically new and liberating forms of self-expression and social organization. Opportunities for status achievement, and even global fame, have been democratized by Web 2.0 platforms like YouTube. But as these horrifying school massacres remind us, the Web 2.0 revolution’s disruptive effects can also produce anti-social and violent behaviour, even mass murder.
Following the latest of the two deadly shootings by YouTube-obsessed youths in Finland, that country’s president, Tarja Halonen, warned that Internet sites “are not another planet”. Using language that unequivocally evoked a state-centric logic, she added: “This is part of our world, and we adults have the responsibility to check what is happening, and create borders and safety there.”
These themes are recurrent in our book Throwing Sheep in the Board. The book is being positioned by our publisher Wiley as a “business” title, so you could legitimately wonder why we would be interested in mass murders. My co-author Soumitra Dutta and I are management and organizational specialists, not criminologists, psychiatrists, or sociologists.
The answer is that Throwing Sheep, written for a wide audience, has a thematically expansive scope that goes far beyond strictly management or organizational issues. The book is structured around three key themes – Identity, Status, Power – each with its own section. The first section focuses specifically on the Web 2.0 revolution’s impact on identities – and here we examine a number of issues, including pathological behaviour.
In a nutshell, our thesis is this. Traditionally, our identities have been essentially “social” and thus constructed by institutionalized values (family, church, school, nation etc). In the virtual reality of the Internet, however, identity construction has become an intensely “personal” ritual of self-fabrication that is disembodied from real-world social contact and unplugged from institutional values. Identity construction is no longer organized by vertical institutions, but rather by horizontal networks. Many of these networks operate on the Internet. Identity construction is shifting to the virtual world.
Let’s return to Finland, where following the most recent killing spree criminologist Aarne Kinnunen warned that many teenagers plugged into the Web for social interaction suffer from a distorted notion of reality. When troubled youths like Matti Juhani Saari commit indiscriminate murders, they actually feel validated by their horrifying conduct. “The Internet creates the image that there is a crowd of people that respect this type of behaviour,” noted Kinnunen.
We are witnessing not only mass murders, but also mass suicides inspired by social websites. Earlier this year in the Welsh town of Bridgend, a rash of youth suicides shocked and baffled the whole of Britain. While the origin of these suicides is not certain, the morbid pacts that inspired these tragic gestures apparently had been conceived on popular social networking sites like Bebo.
As we recount in Throwing Sheep, this phenomenon is called the “Werther Effect”, after Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. In Goethe’s 18th century sturm und drang novel, the melancholic hero Werther shoots himself in the head over his unrequited love for a girl called Lotte. When the book first appeared in 1774, it triggered an epidemic of similar acts of despair – the first known examples of “copycat suicides” in modern history. Today, the “Werther Effect” is plaguing the MySpace generation as adolescents struggle with identity construction between real and virtual worlds.
In the United States, the heart-wrenching suicide of a pretty 13-year-old American girl from Missouri provided yet another example of the tragic dangers of online identity construction. Megan Meier had become emotionally attached on MySpace to a cute 16-year-old boy called Josh. She was instantly smitten by the Josh’s gorgeous photo, showing a teen-idol hunk with blue eyes, chiselled features, and brown wavy hair. Then Josh suddenly turned on her, calling her a “slut”. He also sent her a note saying: “You’re a shitty person and the world would be a better place without you in it.” Megan hung herself with a belt in her bedroom closet.
It was later discovered that Josh did not exist. His photo has been stolen and pasted on a fabricated MySpace profile. Everything about him had been made up. He was a false persona maliciously concocted by 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former classmates. She later confessed to police that she had used the false Josh profile to harass Megan as revenge because Megan had dropped her daughter as a friend – not online, but in the real world.
Another dark side of Web 2.0 is terrorism. A research project at the University of Arizona, called “Dark Web”, tracked Jihadist extremist groups using Web 2.0 media. The study, published earlier this year, came across an alarming number of Jihadist posting on sites like YouTube, where videos featuring explosives, attacks, bombings, and hostage-taking were being uploaded.
“Although YouTube has made efforts to control video content, the site is still heavily used by extremists for video sharing,” noted the study.
On Second Life, meanwhile, a “Terrorist of SL” attracted 228 members and another group called “Liberation Front” counted 65 followers. The Dark Web study concluded: “Many of the Web 2.0 content providers may only act as Jihadist sympathizers or information dissemination agents for radical extremist materials. Most of them may not be the original content creators, i.e., the groups who performed the violent acts. However, their role and importance as online information dissemination agents or resource hubs cannot be underestimated.”
These disturbing forms of anti-social behaviour on the Web won’t likely disappear – indeed, we can expect them to continue and accelerate. We should therefore be prepared for a serious debate about how much control states should assert over virtual reality.
Tags: anti-social behaviour, violence, Web 2.0
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September 28, 2008 at 9:38 am
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September 28, 2008 at 7:14 pm
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September 28, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Laurel Papworth
Oh my god, from the first paragraph - a guy makes youtube videos then kills himself and ten others and it’s YouTubes fault? As in, if there had been no YouTube it wouldn’t have happened? What about the fact that YOUTUBE alerted the police, who questioned him and let him go? Do you think that Lori Drew wouldn’t have used email or - a century ago - poison pen letters? Doesn’t the web make everything more exposed and trackable?
The real shame of Web 2.0 is that people like you can use profoundly distressful tradegies to selfpromote their books. Shame. On. You.
*tired of people trying to make money out of negatively portraying social networks*
September 28, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Mathew Packer
It’s obviously the internet’s fault, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with society, parenting, or anything else going on in the world.. Damn those internet kids, they’ll be the death of us all.
Wow. This article is just bizarre.
September 28, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Paul Roberts
Sure, we’ve known about the dark side of the Internet from Web 1.0 days. There are psycho’s, criminals and other bad bastards online…just as they are offline. The Internet afterall is a social phenomenon. It is not some kind of virtual paradise. Some controls are necessary. The days of every bit being free are gone.
Noentheless, your posting seems like an overly hard hitting critique of social networking. You use the phrase “…intensely ‘personal’ ritual of self-fabrication disembodied from real world social contact”. Really - where is your evidence? Neuro-scientists would say online experiences are similar to offline.
The social impacts of online experiences do need to be better understood - just as people continue to research offline experiences. But your posting indicates a lack of understanding about online effects.
September 28, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Sam Flemming
“Anti social behavior” on the social internet is not a problem–it is a symptom. The social internet is perhaps an accelerator, but addressing the “real world” problems (i.e. why do terrorists want to attack the United States? Why is the finnish kid so unhappy and where did he get the guns?) will be more effective than addressing the virtual world.
September 28, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Walter Pike
I suppose that its to be expected.
Its like blaming a genre of music for murder. We once had the story that if you played a rolling stones record backwards it was satanic.
People are responsible for their behavior - not music nor the internet.
September 28, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Matthew Fraser
Some of the comments posted so far have formed that view that I am blaming Web 2.0 and, as Laurel Papworth put it, that I am “negatively portraying social networks” for the violent tragedies cited. This is not the case. A careful reading will have grasped that I don’t state my own opinions; I point out that others are forming certain views and I pose the question of controls and restrictions as a debate. Nowhere do I assert a normative position, much less propose a remedy.
If I am “self-promoting” our forthcoming book, I suppose that I’m as guilty of that as many bloggers who write books. The issues raised in my blog post are examined in greater depth in the book, so I don’t necessarily agree that referring to the book is necessarily crass or venal. Indeed, the blog is embedded in the book’s website. That’s the funny about writing books: authors generally want other people to read them.
I do reject the view that I am negatively portraying social networks to “make money”. Laurel Papworth will quickly discover, if she reads the book when it comes out, that our general approach to Web 2.0 is neither evangelical nor negatively critical. Though as Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle note in the Foreword, the book is generally positive about the future of Web 2.0 and online social networking. And by the way, no “money” has been made on the book, though it can be wondered if Laurel Papworth would approve if I “made money” from positively portraying social networking. I sense that her disapprobation is based not on the alleged venality of the enterprise, but rather on the supposed normative positions that she believes inspired it.
September 29, 2008 at 2:02 am
Laurel Papworth
nope, no problem with people making money but you chose the most blatant and outrageously negative cases that you could find and then used it to promote your book. I prefer balance myself. Or even a personal thoughtful view. And selecting those particular examples - and not including things like the guy who watched a webcam on a bloggers site and reported in a car theft - shows a tabloid mentality.
But you are right, as long as you cite lots of predators and rapes and child killings you’ll sell lots of copies of your book. Good luck with your promotions.
September 29, 2008 at 2:22 am
Russ Weakley
Well, I plan on a killing spree later this month. I’ve already talked to my lawyer who says that it “can easily be blamed on YouTube (or heavy metal) and that I should go for it!”. Thank you internetz.
September 29, 2008 at 2:35 am
Matthew Fraser
Laurel Papworth will be gratified to discover that we have a chapter in the book that examines precisely what she cites — how Twitter and other Web 2.0 media are being used in crime-prevention and disaster relief. She will also be reassured to learn that, in the book, we critique point-by-point some notable anti-Web 2.0 polemicists, like Andrew Keen, who have published books assailing the negative social effects of the Web. Finally, she will understand that one blog post can’t deal with every issue from every possible angle; and that there will be further blog posts that will address the very issues she identifies.
September 29, 2008 at 2:50 am
Ajay Ranipeta
Personally, i think the whole W2.0 has brought us together a lot closer. And there is a dark side to everything. I just think maybe W2.0 has just brought it up so to the surface, so maybe people can help each other!!
@russweakley i’ve got some trench coats for us btw. How does mid-november sound tho’? i’ve checked with our lawyers and they are ok with it to blame it on the new Facebook too.
September 29, 2008 at 2:59 am
Laurel Papworth
@matthew Laurel Papworth will indeed be gratified and in fact Laurel Papworth is supremely happy with any book that puts Andrew ‘your family videos are killing our culture” Keen in his place. heh.
September 29, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Jye Smith
Outlandish statements like:
“into shocking focus the dark side of Web 2.0 social networking.”
“..while Web 2.0 evangelists preach the gospel of a digital utopia, virtual reality can also be a place of hell and damnation where well-meaning designs are easily deformed into a nightmare dystopia.”
“But as these horrifying school massacres remind us, the Web 2.0 revolution’s disruptive effects can also produce anti-social and violent behaviour, even mass murder.”
“Another dark side of Web 2.0 is terrorism.”
This type of commentary generated negative hype surrounding the subject of social media - it may have been much more effective to communicate your opinion through terms that don’t strike fear into the hearts of marketers, web users and parents alike.
My opinion, based on this article, is that you do not actually fully understand the implications of social media and the associated mind sets of the users.
I draw a comparison to your post and that of many current affairs programs that simply propagate fear/anxiety to the community for commercial purposes
- in this case a book.
People are responsible for their actions. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.