ANGRY MOB

Not only does Facebook raise your risk of getting cancer¹, it now joins many other supposedly 'safe' internet sites on the list of websites that are definitely out to try and kill you or one of your immediate family. In today's Daily Mail is the chilling story of how a woman had an argument with her husband and changed her Facebook status from 'married' to 'single' which led to her husband falling off his motorbike and ending up in a coma.²

I'm sure some kind of link is being implied here. I think the argument is that without the evil Facebook this would never have happened. The headline certainly seems to suggest this: Lauren Booth: I changed my Facebook profile after a row and now my husband is in a coma. It seems that Facebook was the direct cause of the accident, it is a fairly simple post hoc argument: Facebook status changed before accident, therefore accident caused by this change.

Something bugs me about the self-indulgent 'it wasn't my fault' logic being employed by Lauren Booth here. I think what bugs me is that Lauren Booth is a functioning adult (I assume, but judging by this article she is total twat) who is presumably in control of her own body and actions; so to blame Facebook for a change that she made, seems a bit stupid.

The first line of the article seems to confirm that Lauren didn't think through the status change:

 So, perhaps 'Husband falls of motorbike, accident may have been caused by thoughtless wife' would probably be a fairer headline - but one that doesn't fit in with the Daily Mail view that the internet is out to kill us.

Lauren Booth really gets into this 'evil internet' argument with vigour, removing any sense of her own responsibility from the article:

So here with have the distortion of reality that allows Lauren Booth to blame the internet for the accident of her husband. She didn't willfully and thoughtlessly change her profile status (that may or may not have anything to do with her husband's accident) she was instead betrayed by an 'online trap'.

How can anybody seriously believe that this was in any way was a result of an 'online trap'? Lauren Booth is clearly a complete fucking idiot. Staggeringly, she isn't finished yet:

And it’s painful that I’ve become an online statistic, another example of the potential for real-life harm that these cyber-life websites can cause.

The potential for harm to be caused by any tool - online or otherwise - depends solely on whose hands the tool happens to be in. If someone swallows a spoon whilst eating breakfast would we be putting their death down as another 'statistic of the harm that metal objects can cause when placed inside a human mouth'? Or would we instead conclude that the spoon is an inanimate object and the responsibility for any injuries caused by it reside solely with the person using it?

After all, millions of people can use spoons safely, just as millions of people use social networking sites safely. Lauren Booth though, feels otherwise and wants to blame the internet for someone causing her husband's accident. Of course, the accident seems pretty unrelated to her status change. From reading the headline you'd imagine that her husband found out about the status change and immediately fled in rage and at speed on his motorbike. But he didn't.

Instead we are told that:

 So, not exactly conclusive proof that the cause of the accident was even vaguely related to her Facebook page, or the argument that they had. Lauren Booth seems to be reaching out in desperation for someone or something to blame, or at least some reason why this accident happened. 

The conclusion of her article - and I suppose the purpose of it - seems to be this message:

So, a message that seems to make a lot of sense - certainly nothing unreasonable about using the internet as a tool for good. But, and here is what annoys me, she refers to the internet as a 'tool' here, yet at the start of the article she tries to imply that the internet is something more sinister than this. She implies that it somehow 'tricked' her into falling into an 'online trap' and it is this logic that she uses to blame Facebook for the accident suffered by her husband.

She therefore seems to undermine her final point, as how can the internet be considered a useful 'tool to send out love to one another' one minute, but a sinister pitfall waiting to cause 'real-life harm' the next?

The answer is - of course - that the internet is merely a tool like any other. We must take responsibility for how we use it as we would any other piece of technology. Lauren Booth seems to disagree with this, she wants to embrace it with one hand whilst petulantly slapping it with the other. She blames Facebook for her husband's accident where in reality, if the accident was in any way related to her status change, then she only has herself to blame.