Virtual Knife Crime? Facebook.com, for those few who may not know of it, is a social networking site frequented by millions of users on a daily basis. It offers users the ability to make friends, send them messages, post photographs and images, contact fellow users with similar interests, and form groups to discuss them, as well as inform friends about and invite them to social events. In addition to this Facebook also features numerous interactive entertainment games. Facebook, however, does also have a darker side.
Facebook has become well used to controversy. In the recent past it generated undesirable publicity from medical and health awareness charities who complained that it was hosting unregulated virtual groups focused around eating disorders. These groups were created by Facebook users to discuss and promote extreme fasting and other unhealthy dieting techniques as methods for teenagers to achieve the ‘size zero’ figure flaunted until recently by so many catwalk models.
Now once again Facebook is courting controversy, this time for allegedly indirectly promoting knife crime on its website.
One of the applications featured on Facebook, an application called SuperPoke!, which allows users to send greetings as well as humorous images, started a fresh media debate surrounding the social networking site.
Applications such as SuperPoke! are designed to supplement the website’s basic functions with interactive elements that can include sending graphical messages, rating users’ images, and games. The SuperPoke! application includes the option to send messages with graphics such as hugging, laughing, and now, worryingly, virtual ‘shanking’ to other Facebook users.
The colloquial term ‘shanking’ denotes the act of stabbing someone, and is a term more often finding use in relation to prison violence or street gang rivalry, than virtual entertainment.
Given the rising prevalence of knife crime in the UK, and the ever-increasing media coverage given to the problem, Facebook’s choice to broadcast virtually violent actions, even if in a supposedly light hearted and entertaining way, is seen as a slap in the face by those working hard to combat knife crime.
Given the millions strong user base of Facebook, many of whom happen to be children and young adults, the inclusion of this virtual ‘shanking’ can be seen to be adversely indirectly advertising knife violence and suggesting that it is an acceptable element of society; a message that directly contradicts that which organisations and individuals opposed to knife crime are trying to convey.
Facebook’s use of the street language term ‘shanking’ is being seen as an attempt to appeal to those teenagers and young adults who may actually already be familiar with the term, those for whom such violence is not just virtual, but a way of life.
Although the specific game involving the controversial element has now been removed from the website, the incident has once again forced Facebook into the unwelcome centre of critical media attention. Perhaps it is time for this incredibly popular social networking site to start asking itself whether it can use its influence over millions of young people to positively influence virtual youth culture, instead of just reflecting it.
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