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.
