The Internet must be one of the greatest inventions of all time. It makes communication a lot easier, allowing people from opposite ends of the world to send texted e-mails to one another, make phone calls online, or even hold video conferences. People can also find anything they want online, be it entertainment, leisure, the latest headline news, friends, or soul mates! While this may seem entirely advantageous, it isn’t. The rise of a new “world” – or the Internet – brings about more risks, especially in communicating.

Take for instance the case of Megan Meier. She was a 13-year-old girl who committed suicide because of a boy she got to know on MySpace, a popular social networking website. She had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and battled depression, and for years had tried to lose weight because she thought she was overweight, so she was a particularly vulnerable girl. Though she had never met Josh in person, she had seen his pictures and thought he was attractive. It also made her happy that he thought she was pretty. For six weeks, they got along very well, until Josh one day decided to end the friendship because he had heard that she was “not very nice to her friends.” Megan was distraught upon hearing that, and when Josh started saying mean things to her, she got more and more upset. According to her father, the final message Megan saw was, “Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.” Overwrought, Megan hung herself in her closet that very day.

Such an incident makes one wonder: Why was it that what this boy said to her had such an impact on her? Also, why did she even befriend him in the first place? These are the results because of the impact Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) has on our society.

In real life, we wouldn’t ordinarily befriend a stranger we pass by on a street. We are guarded and more aware of the “baddies” that lurk about everywhere. When online, however, we let our guards down and allow almost anybody to become our “friend”. This is because this CMC has caused a dramatic shift in the basic definition of self. It allows people to create an alter ego in the virtual world; someone whom they have never revealed to others. In Megan’s situation, she was probably able to find acceptance that she could not get because of her physical characteristics in the real world online. Having Josh accept her so willingly appealed to her greatly, and it made Josh seem like a great friend. Thus she slowly trusted him more and more, but the more she trusted him, the more potential there was for disappointment. When Josh wanted to end their friendship, he ended up making her feel wrecked, because she had trusted him so much, and thought that he liked her for who she was. Apparently, he only liked the other her – the one he knew online.

However, to make matters worse, Josh never even existed. A month later, Megan’s parents found out that he was a fictitious character made up by their adult neighbours across the street, just to get back at Megan. She had fallen out with their daughter years ago, and the parents thought of getting even with her by getting Megan to feel like she was liked by a boy and letting everyone know this was a false MySpace and have everyone laugh at her. The reason why Megan fell for the whole “prank” was because CMC offers anonymity, and this allows a person to be anybody they want to be online. Just by putting up a believably fitting profile and pictures, a pair of adults became a 16-year-old boy named Josh online. It probably wasn’t their intention for Megan to kill herself, but their harshness drove her to over edge. As a result, they successfully duped a 14-year-old girl, but inevitably caused her death.

So as you can see, though the advances of communication technology are a huge advantage to our fast-paced society, they can also bring about a lot of undesirable outcomes. Access and interaction between people and databases all over the world is now made a lot easier, but if people choose to abuse it, then it seems that we are probably better off without such benefits. Regardless, the only way we can guard ourselves from such dangers is to be more aware of what we do online, and who we get to know online. After all, we can’t expect the virtual world to be that much different from the real one, can we?

 Reference (article):

http://stcharlesjournal.stltoday.com/articles/2007/11/10/news/sj2tn20071110-1111stc_pokin_1.ii1.txt