OVER the past few weeks, I have focused primarily on the positive aspect of social networking. This week, however, I’d like to take another perspective.

There was always an underbelly to the positive side of the Internet, but with the rise of social networking, that underbelly has gotten darker, with the potential for great damage to both the individual and the society of which that individual is part.
The case of American Audrie Pott represents the starkest known case to date of the potentially tragic consequences of cyber-harassment.
In summary, Pott, a fifteen-year-old high school student of Saratoga, California last year attended a party where she got drunk and then unconscious.  Three boys sexually assaulted her, and she awoke to lewd messages scrawled on her body.
The next few days, photos of what happened to her would be circulated among her friends via Facebook, along with negative comments about her character; a week after the incident, she killed herself.
This case, granted, represents one extreme end of a spectrum of cyber-attack, one that is overwhelmingly targeted at young women.  While there are other cases of cyber-attack depicting the sexual assault of the victim, the most common type of this behaviour often comes in the wake of the end of a relationship, during which the pictures and videos featured in the attack were consensually created.
The story is simple: Boy meets girl, boy and girl begin a sexual relationship, boy and girl take pictures of themselves having sex, boy and girl break up, pictures appear on the Internet.
The other day I was watching an Anderson Cooper programme on that very same phenomenon, one which featured an actual website established to indulge in post-breakup vindictiveness, if I remember the term correctly.  It is a site where mostly men go to post nude and sexually explicit pictures of their former partners for the sake of, as it is, pure vindictiveness.
And the reason such a site can gain the sort of popularity it does is because we live in an age where women are almost expected, as proof of their emotional attachment to their male partners, to produce what is, to all intents and purposes, amateur pornography, material that very often finds its way online for mass dissemination after the relationship fails.

When you consider the fact that video production technology that once could only have been afforded by professionals is now in the hands of every hormonal teenager with an entry level smart phone; add that to the increasing sexualisation of society, from videogames to music videos; and then top it off with the increasing popularity of social networks, Facebook in particular; what you have is a recipe for the disaster we are seeing increasing examples of now.
I don’t have access to any empirical data, but I am confident (and this is something some enterprising young sociology student at UG can consider) that were a survey conducted in schools determining the percentage of upper secondary school students who either have taken a sexually explicit photograph of themselves, or are in possession of sexual suggestive photograph of a peer, the results of that survey would be cause for serious alarm.
Of course, there are other dangers that no amount of personal caution by our young people can mitigate.  The power that even the most innocuous or otherwise useful technology places in the hands of those who are bent on mischief is immense and with unpredictable consequences.  For example, in Vietnam, about a week ago, a schoolgirl in Hanoi committed suicide after a classmate ‘grafted’ a picture of her head on to the picture of another woman wearing what can be considered a provocative outfit and posted it on Facebook.

I suppose, therefore, that we may probably need to look at where the built-in safeguards of social networking infrastructure and personal measures at preventing mischief stop, and then seek to create ways of tackling the issue from different perspectives.  The most obvious one, and this has been receiving increasing attention in the United States, is increasingly comprehensive and penalizing legislation targeted at the perpetrators of cyber-bullying, blackmail and other forms of harassment.  The other aspect of it is to ensure that the psychological effects of these actions on the victims themselves are not as dire as they often turn out to be – since social networking multiplies exponentially any single act of harassment, either in reality or simply in the victim’s conception, new ways of counselling dealing with this relative helplessness need to be created, both therapeutic and preventative.
Of course, the question may be asked by some skeptical people reading this column, what does all that have to do with here?   My answer would be that the phenomenon of social networking is a supranational and hence suprasocietal one in that it creates a nation, a society that transcends everywhere and almost everything except quite possibly language – and even the latter is becoming less a factor in that Facebook I understand now offers on-site automatic translation services.
Cyber-attacks against individuals might not have reached the level where any single one incident has shocked us into noticing the dangers of this phenomenon, but in the past few years, we’ve had a handful of cases of cyber-harassment, the most notable perhaps being targeted at a popular former television personality.
And even this itself is just a small part of a host of new social problems that have been created in the advent of the social network, among which we can count socio-political upheaval, public misinformation, the desensitation to violence, the glorification of violence, and the potential negative impact on the family structure – indeed, there may come a point in time when the question may be legitimately asked whether the ills of social networking outweigh the benefits.  My take on it is that while we clearly need to prioritise our handling of the social ailments which currently exist, we also need to be vigilant in identifying the issues of the very near future and proactively tackling them head-on.
(This column, published in our last Sunday’s edition, is reprinted here due to the tremendous feedback it has generated)