The recent spate of suicides in the UK has claimed the lives of 13 young people, mostly in their teens. The culprit is of course the culture of online social networking without which these people would be happy and of course alive.
?
I’m not exactly a fan of social networking sites, I consider them to be a vacuous waste of time, more so than this eminently unreadable weblog I keep here, but I’m not going to blame them for the suicides of young people.
It’s a tenuous link which Bridgend MP Madeline Moon makes between ‘memory walls’ and the desire to kill yourself.
“Mrs Moon said she was growing increasingly worried by the appearance of so-called “memory walls” on networking sites like Bebo, where members leave messages to mark the death of a friend.
“The worrying part about internet sites is it is a virtual world – it isn’t a real world,” she said. “The things that happen there don’t necessarily demonstrate the consequences.”
As much as I’d like to join Mrs Moon in a spate on facespace bashing I can’t really agree with her. True enough I’d link the curse of social networking sites to suicide, but only because they are such a depressingly irritating concept and sometimes when I walk in the library and see everyone plugging away blankly at their ‘wall’ it kind of makes me want to kill myself, but thats just the way I roll. However under the logic of Mrs Moon we should not even have nicely kept graves with flowers, or floral tributes or for that matter any form of memorial just in case someone gets the wrong idea and kills themself in order to get an attractive headstone at the local cemetary. Times change and in the past people would have remembered people in various different ways, something like a ‘memory wall’ is merely an online memorial and nothing more. Perhaps Mrs Moon would also like to ban Remembrance Sunday because after all does it not glorify dead people somewhat.
The fact is we remember people for the obvious reasons that they meant something to us whether those people end up dead as a result of suicide, accident or murder is beside the point because they were important to us whilst alive. If people wish to remember the lives of their friends, in whatever way, it is their right and their business.
A catch all solution to teen suicide would be marvellous but it’s a time honoured problem and what with a rise in the rates of depressive illness it is contrite and fallacious to start blaming the internet, for a start suicide existed long before people worked out how to link local area networks.
This is the traditional cure all solution and what with Social networking sites being blamed for the rise in gun culture, anti social behaviour, teen suicide, bestiality and terrorism (I made one of them up) it would of course cure all our social ills to ban a particular form of website.
Todays clue is fecally themed bovine matter, eight letters, first correct answer gets a free Myspace site.
Not to pick on this particular example of verbal incontinence from a government representative, but a long line of re-occurring offences from media figureheads causes me great annoyance.
So following in Mrs Moon’s footsteps by simplifying complicated situations…
What you really have to ask yourself is, which of the following are true.
1) Madeleine Moon is an absolute moron. (my personal favourite)
2) Moon thinks the working class voting majority are dim-witted gullible fools.
3) Society is falling apart
A sane man would tick all 3 of those boxes.
What you have picked up on here is of course the over simplification of a complex matter, a trait that we might say was conducive to being a politician.
My personal favourite is (1) mixed with a heavy dose of (2) my only bone of contention with (3) is society will constantly be in a state of falling apart, especially if you ask politicians. If it was not falling apart then people would question why we have these idiots with their penchant for the overapplication of Occams razor running the country.