Archbishop of Westminster Damns Facebook, Myspace, Ruth Gledhill, The Times, August 2, 2009

Archbishop of Westminster Damns Facebook, Myspace

By Ruth Gledhill
The Times
August 2, 2009

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/08/archbishop-of-westminster-damns-facebook-myspace.html

In an interview today with Jonathan Wynne-Jones of The Sunday Telegraph which we report at TimesOnline, the Archbishop of Westminster makes some extremely critical comments about social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. He suggests they can lead people even to suicide. I'm on Facebook. Someone - not me - even did a page for me, and I have just 48 fans. Jonathan Wynne-Jones is one of my 'friends'. Another friend is someone purporting to be Vincent Nichols, pictured left, who appears to be on Facebook and has 336 friends. I'm checking to see if it is really him, though, as recently there have been a few imposters pretending to be people they are not, and for some reason Catholic bishops in particular have been targeted. So is it possible that these seemingly harmless sites can indeed lead vulnerable people to suicide?

According to Himmelgarten Cafe, the Archbishop has merely made himself look foolish. He says he is 'seriously daft'. Tony Hatfield brings up the obvious: 'There is not a shred of evidence to support the link between suicide and the use of social networking sites. But there is evidence he is the leader of a church in which large numbers of God's chosen priests have, until recently, been involved in physical and sexual child abuse on an industrial scale.'

In an essay that is backed up by research, Herr Horn says: 'I’ve been doing a bit of work on online communication myself over recent weeks. During the interviews I conducted, all interviewees made it very clear that they use Facebook to talk to a few close friends on a regular basis. The rest of the people on their friend list are those who they just met once or were never really that close to. It’s like collecting business cards. You got the person’s details and if at any point in the future you need to contact her, you can.Critics like the Archbishop should realize that not every contact that’s labeled a “friend” on Facebook is a true friend. In fact, many people I talked to said they started a number of separate friend lists to distinguish between those who they care about and those they aren’t that close to.'

Alison Bayne at municipal cupcake is with the Archbishop although sadly she doesn't say why.

Internet consultant Scott Herbert there is at least some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the Archbishop might be right.

He writes: '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).'

What is my own view? It is extremely difficult for me to be objective about this.

My extraordinarily bright and gifted younger brother Owen was in the middle of an architecture degree at Cambridge University when he committed suicide. It is possible he was being bullied. We will never know. He had joined a secretive cult, possibly been expelled from it, and gone to America, possibly to seek out its leader, when he killed himself. Other members of this cult in the UK committed suicide and questions were even asked in the House of Commons about it, but the full truth of what happened to my brother is unlikely ever to emerge. This was more than 20 years ago, well before the age of social networking. I don't think such a thing could happen now. My brother was not a Scientologist, but as the following link to Tampabay.com shows, the Internet means it has become increasingly difficult for veils of secrecy to remain intact.

Today, he would be on Facebook, Twitter, Bebo. His friends would be watching out for him, keeping an eye. It seems to me that social networking can in this way even increase community and thus militate against the insanity that extreme loneliness and despair can engender and that I believe was in the end what killed my brother. The impact of suicide on a family is beyond imagining to those who have never experienced it. This is the first time I've written properly about my brother and even now, the tears are pricking at the back of my eyes.

But there is another side, the Archbishop's side.

As a journalist for three decades in total, before the age of the Internet, it was impossible for me to imagine what it felt like to be written about in a public domain such as The Times, or in The Daily Mail where I worked previously. Children of celebs or celebs themselves addicted to drugs, middle class kids who became prostitutes, drunken teenage doctors' children drowning in their own vomit in gutters and making a page-lead at an inquest, criminality invading the respectable upper-middles - all was and still is game for accurate reporting and 'fair comment'. But how do those stories actually truly 'feel' to the siblings, parents, grandparents of those involved?

I am not sure that I had the remotest idea how what a news reporter does in their daily lives impacts on those we write about until the Internet, and in particular blogging, arrived on the scene. Yes, the actual death, the suicide, the overdose - these are the things impact on the families the most, of course they do, more than the resulting story.

In the grief of some terrible episode, it is often the case that those affected want to 'shoot the messenger'. Archbishop Nichols will no doubt be accused of doing the same.

But the messenger, in our new online era, cannot avoid all responsibility. After my brother's inquest, the story was picked up by The Sun. My parents were doorstepped. Vicar's kid commits suicide in San Francisco at the start of the Aids era - the inference was not overtly stated, although obvious, and although my brother had a girlfriend at the time. It made a page lead in the early, northern edition. When I looked for the story years later it had not even been archived. I telephoned the reporter the next day, wanting to speak to him, find out what he knew, just to talk even. He wasn't interested. He had moved on to the next day's story.

As is inevitable in this job, I get attacked a reasonable amount out there, and there is often something to learn from these attacks. On occasion, there is no doubt, the criticism has been justified. On other occasions, it has been spiteful and has gone over the line into outright bullying.

But if, pushing 50 and toughened by years on 'the street', even I find the rough-and-tumble of the blogosphere hard to cope with at times, what must it be like for the young and vulnerable who've had no experience or training whatsoever about life on a public platform, who join networking sites because everybody does, because if they didn't they would be 'left out'?

The fact is, some people are horrid and always will be, but now there is new horrendous scope for their horridness. I really feel for young people today. My advice to them, for what it is worth, and thinking of the ashes of my brother's huge potential scattered in the corner of our remote country churchyard, is that suicide is never worth it.

Decades ago, Samuel Johnson, on the art of writing, said something to the effect that if you think you've written a particularly fine phrase, full of flowering adjectival prose, strike it out. 'Murder your darlings.'

His wisdom is timeless. If some darling 'friend' turns to foul, follow Dr Johnson's advice, metaphorically-speaking of course. Just delete them. Never forget where that delete button is. It's the best virtual weapon out there. And as friends of mine say - these are 'real' and not the virtual friends - don't give the 'foul friends' rent-free space inside your head.

And if the horrid stuff stays on other people's web and Facebook sites, well it will soon disappear off the bottom of Google searches. Leave the computer alone and go back to painting flowers and playing the guitar for a few days. That's what I do. Thanks to one recent episode of cyberbullying, I now know Carulli's Rondo off by heart on my Spanish guitar. I'll put up an MP3 later, just for proof!

Now where's that b****r who keeps having a go at me on Twitter.....