Social media come of age
Three stories in the news which show how social media have gone mainstream
1) How students across the US have turned to Facebook to grieve after the shootings at Virginia Tech. Social media have also spawned countless rumours and conspiracy theories - but the outpouring of public grief online has been monumental.
2) The 17-year old girl who advertised a "skins unofficial party" on her MySpace page, which promptly attracted up to 200 teenagers, who caused £20,000 worth of damage to her parents' house.
According to 24dash.com,
3) The British Diplomat's (partly ghost-written) blog which has been withdrawn - because the comments section wasn't quite on-message.It was understood the teenage host was lying low today, but has not been reported missing by her family.
In fact several of the comments referred to seeing Mr Proud in bars in Bangkok's red light district. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said:
The blog has been withdrawn. Ian was the victim of malicious accusations about his personal life and he has rejected these accusations.
Read into that what you will - several of the quotes reported in the Washington Post and elsewhere tell a slightly different story.
The moral: social media can't be controlled, or even anticipated. Not new news for people reading or writing blogs perhaps...I'm certainly not the first person to state the obvious online.
