This one perplexes me.
Facebook signed up its 500 Millionth user. With the population of the world fast approaching 7 Billion, that's a SIGNIFICANT percentage of the population. Something like 7%.
It seems like that every single incident as a result of people meeting or interacting on Facebook that ends in death appears on the front page of news sites.
Now, if we were to cast a large bubble over the planet till we covered an area that equated to 500 million people and then compared the crime stats of that area against those as a result of online interaction on Facebook with each stack of stats sitting on Lady Justice's scales, the poor bitch would need 14 container ship cranes to hold up the real world side.
So why is it, that Facebook tragedy is getting a disproportionate representation?.
Thursday 22 July 2010
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As I understood it that's not 500 million unique individuals - that includes multiple page users, fan pages, company pages etc. But your point remains and the obvious answer would be the media love to demonise stuff that the Great Unwashed don't understand and hence despise (refugees, Twitter, climate change science etc). Even more so when it's a chance to pour liquid molten shite on online stuff and by extension New Media which will, eventually, bring about the end of the media industry as the current propagators of it know and exploit it. And of course the munters are more likely to click through to the story if it's something they think is related to their own lives.
ReplyDeleteI despise facebook. Very bad experiences are a far more common reason for loathing Facebook', Dr Yobbo.
ReplyDeleteMy bad experiences did not end in death. They could have. My neighbour's bad experience also did not end in death, but could have. My sister-in-law's bad experience did not end in death, but could have. I only know a handful of people who use Facebook, but know of three crimes that were not mentioned in the paper.
Not every negative Facebook experience ends up on the front page, Moko. You may need to consider that when you're weighing up the results.
Heya, thanks for the input. Please use a regular name if you're commenting just so we get a familiarity going on.
ReplyDeleteYou're right though, I FKN hate FB. I get nothing positive from it. Haven't had any major bad experiences but I don't tolerate alot when it comes to online stuff.
Doc, think you're spot on.