Notes from a wireframe world

Today the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales claimed Facebook was a Suicide risk, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, said that “I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.” and that “Among young people often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they’re desolate.”

But is their any truth to this claim? Does facebook, MySpace etc lead to transient relationships? And does that in turn lead to an increase in risk of Suicide?

Their is at least some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this may be the case, Just last week for example Megan Gillan, a student at Macclesfield High School in Cheshire, committed suicide because she was bullied via Bebo.

However if you look closer at this sad story, you notice something, yes the bulling happened on-line via a social networking site, however the bulling, according to the telegraph, consisted of posting “spiteful messages online about her appearance and clothing“. Unless throses people know her in real life how could they post messages about her? So this sad case is in fact nothing more than an extension of the bulling that happens, sadly, on a daily basis in most of our schools.

I have a friend in Scotland, some 400 miles away from where I live, I get to see him about once or twice a year, however we keep in contact on a daily basis, via e-mail, text messages, and sometimes via facebook. In years gone by, I would have done so via letter. I wonder if either Archbishop Vincent Nichols or the Telegraph would think letter writing as a gateway to suicide? That’s not to negate the very real issue of bulling (Both on and off line), and their need to be an raised awareness of the issues around this, however facebook, myspace, letter writing and speaking are all just tools to aid communication, no better and no worse than each other (but useful in different ways).

The BBC’s article

The Telegraph Article

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 8:52 am and is filed under Facebook, Myspace, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.