Recent mass shootings in Virginia Tech USA, and just yesterday in the sleepy village of Jokela, Finland have highlighted to me the clear dangers of the increasing power of web 2.0 phenomena such as blogs, social networking spheres and websites such as YouTube to enable people to voice an outrageous and often extremely radical viewpoint. But perhaps more alarmingly is the capacity such websites have to enable individuals to project their dangerous viewpoints to a wider public, and most frequently to an open-minded and highly impressionable youth (as, after all, these are the most common users of such sites as MySpace and YouTube).
For those unaware of the most recent horror: the 18-year old pupil Pekka-Erik Auvinen recently shot dead 8 people at his high school, before turning the gun on himself. Previously he had posted a video on YouTube where he described the warped logic behind his killings as some attempt to redefine the process of natural selection. But in this video he detailed his “philosophy” behind the massacre and the plan of what he was intending to do, even labelling the video ‘The Jokela High School Massacre’ and ending with an image of him pointing his .22 calibre handgun at the camera.
6 months earlier a similar incident happened when 33 students were shot dead at Virginia Tech University in the US, by a killer who once again had previously posted radical videos on YouTube and even sent a video to a main news channel detailing the massacre he intended to carry out.
The question that immediately springs to my mind is whether websites such as these, rather than encouraging an innocent form of free journalism, in reality provide the perfect canvas for people to put forward radical, often racist, viewpoints and misguidedly empower them to feel celebrity status and a justification for their actions. You only have to trawl through a page of comments on almost any video on YouTube and you will immediately see offensive comments, either about the video content or about other fellow commentators, in some instances it is possible to follow a whole thread of an argument between two users that frequently strays into the realm of racial harassment. This is because the users are placed in a bizarre position of absolute anonymity while at the same time a form of celebrity status, as their pseudonym/alias can become known across the whole website. There is a strong feeling of power that is granted when you know people are listening to you and responding, and where you are given as good as free reign to voice whatever opinion you choose. You may well argue that they monitor the website regularly, attempting to stamp out such instances of abuse but it is obviously an impossible task given the rate of video-loading on such websites, it is impossible for the administrators to keep track of all that is going on across their website.
The same applies for blogs (perhaps it may seem hypocritical given I am writing this in one) but the main feature of a blog is that people subscribe to them - people register their interest in the blog content. The fact that blog users have a captive, often responsive audience, not only gives them a sense of empowerment but more alarmingly, if they have people registering support (behind their respective masks of anonymity), this can instill a sense of justification in the mind of the blogger. I am in no way in a position to say this (given my lack of knowledge of the psychotic mind) but it is highly likely that without support and interest, Auvinen may never have been pushed to perform his unspeakable massacre. It is precisely the fact that he had a captive audience, and that he was able to “advertise” himself and to project his ‘extreme Darwinism’, that put his thoughts into action.
This is yet another danger of social networking, while in one case it brings like-minded people together, perhaps in the form of a shared intellectual pursuit, on the other side of the coin it also brings extreme radicals together. Who is to say whether there are dozens of followers of Auvinen, or Cho Seung-hui (the Virginia Tech shooter) still out there, waiting to replicate their idols’ actions in another innocent high school in some other corner of the world? People talk of viral advertising, as being the mass distribution of particularly exciting advertisements, but what about viral serial killing? The power of the Internet today is something that makes this an all too plausible reality.In December 2006 Time Magazine voted “You” as the person of the year due to the rise of community journalism and websites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace but the question I put to you today is whether, come 2008, Time Magazine’s “worst serial killer in history” will be the World Wide Web it so rigorously supported two years ago. For it is undoubtedly certain that the Internet is a two-headed monster, and recent trends seem to suggest that the ugly head of that monster is in danger of devouring the good…
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