Are social networking websites dangerous?

After seven teenagers committed suicide in South Wales in the past year, people are starting to feel social network website can be quite dangerous. Many of the victims were using Bebo, a social network website where friends of the victims have posted “memory walls”. Wayne Davies at icWales sees it this way:

In my opinion some of these tragic young people might be alive today if the internet didn’t exist. (…) We are naïve about these sites, we fail to spot how destructive they can be because we have never been threatened by them ourselves ¹.

Mr. Davies is certainly not the only one to feel this way. Bridgend MP Madeleine Moon has also expressed worry that social network websites could be romanticising suicide.

“I’m particularly concerned about this false romanticism of the memory wall that seems to have set up on Bebo giving some sort of romantic idea of suicide and not conveying the huge tragedy and wasted lives that we are looking at here,” she told BBC Radio Wales ².

In a debate linked to a BBC article, posters seem to think the Internet is blamed too quickly. One poster points out that the memorial sites can help some people deal with grief while another feels social network website can’t be held responsible “for how people choose to interact with each other” ³. Other ideas put forward include that the phenomenon of one suicide sparking another is not really new and that suicide has been romanticised in film, music and literature long before the Internet ever existed. Should we ban Romeo & Juliet?, asked one user. But the discussion is not completely one-sided. One poster shares her experience of seeking support through the Internet:

I used to go on support sites on the Internet and while they were useful in some respects I found that I got more bogged down in my problems thru using them. Some aspects got worse, like by reading about people that self-harmed I was more inclined to do it myself or it made that type of behaviour seem acceptable and normal ⁴.

To read the full discussion, follow this link.

REFERENCES

1. 1. Davies, Wayne. Fears grow over social networking websites, icwales.co.uk, Jan 27 2008, Retrieved on January 28 2008.
2. 2. Web worries after suicide spate, BBC News, Jan 23 2008, Retrieved on January 28 2008.
3. 3. Do social network websites romanticise suicide?, BBC News, January 23 2008, Retrieved January 28 2008.
4. 4. Ibid.