The disturbing story of the very young Australian boy feeding small zoo animals to larger ones, raises all kinds of questions and parallels.

In the past year more than 20 teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling parents, police, experts and the authorities.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and some with the virtual world of Second Life.

Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers.

Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

John Evans

I’ve been on Twitter for a few weeks now, so I should give some sort of account of it, especially as I said I would.

I have remained very wary about “following” too many people — with good cause. So far I’ve only added 24, but already when I logon in the morning there are pages and pages of back messages, mainly by a handful of scribes who tell me what they had for breakfast, how many cups of coffee they imbibed yesterday, and then list all the meetings they’ve got throughout the day, before embarking on a marathon to ‘n’ fro with obscure individuals with names like Plodoff, CrankyAss and LowFalutin’ (I made those up to avoid embarrassing real people).

I’ve taken to skimming deftly through those Tweetaramas now, allowing around 5 seconds per page.

The most valuable facility is the “Replies” folder which holds all messages aimed directly at you (@Syntagma) which are very much fewer than the general river of Tweets. I could easily get by with a few Tweets a day, plus references to the Replies cache.

However, I’ve also enabled my cellphone/mobile to receive mobile Tweets. I’ve no idea what they are, but suspect they are “direct messages” which are sent as texts. I seem to have a limit of 250. Maybe after that they will charge my account. Who knows? I’ll be sure to turn it off when they do.

I do have some rather prestigious “Web 2.0″ people following me. Check the list. Some of them are quite interesting in a Web 2.0 sort of way. So far no Web 3.0 followers — maybe they’re too busy semanticizing about the future.

The real problem with Twitter, as with all social networks, is its addictive qualities. It’s so easy to drown in the stuff. If you work for a living online, as I do, it’s vital to rein in your expressive tendencies. Tweets pay no bills (pun not intended).

Indeed, Tweeting will undermine your ability to post content on your sites as it can drain away your creative juices before you’ve even begun the day’s work. Faced with a long, detailed piece to write, the ease of a <140 character post spoils you for the harder task. Better to Twitter in 5-minute spurts two or three times a day.

If, as many do, you attempt to document your entire day as it passes, you are a gonna. As in "gone with the birds" -- no pun intended.

I'll stick with it for now, highlighting the occasional post, like this one -- using tinyurl.com to reduce the character count of the link -- and see where it takes me. As the numbers of my followers mount, I see dimly the name of Alfred Hitchcock materializing in my mind's eye.

I’ve just joined Twitter — for technical reasons, I hasten to add.

A pair of lovebirds twittering

The technical reason is that I discovered that the username “Syntagma” had not been taken, so I secured it in perpetuity — or as long as any social network lasts, whichever is the shorter.

I’ve sprayed my entire Gmail address book with invites, so you may get one. Since it’s still over 300 addresses long, even after drastic pruning, I’m awaiting the results with some trepidation.

So far, I have one tweet on my sheet, a brilliant piece of literature about what I’ve been doing today. Please don’t all rush at once to view it or you may bring the server down.

If anyone wants to follow or be followed, just send a tweet to Syntagma. I’m sure the system will handle all the techie stuff. I still haven’t found my way around it all yet.

I will, naturally, produce a comprehensive analysis of the service soon. In under 140 characters, of course.

You know, maybe that’s where they’re going wrong.

The twitter is beginning to sound a bit strangulated now. Like a flock of birds flying through a cloud of grapeshot.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon sending up Twitter mania

It seems both Hugh Macleod (the gaping void — see cartoon above) and Robert Scoble are coming off Twitter, that maddeningly insistent waster of time for busy professionals who regularly protest about email-overload but tweet happily throughout the day to thousands of “followers”. Jeremy Wright too has whipped the twittering hierglyphics off his blog. At last sense has returned to the Techmeme crowd.

It’s becoming clear that the much derided New York Times article last Sunday, which pictured exhausted bloggers stumbling to early graves, has had an effect. Here at Syntagma we responded to the piece by suggesting a flight from Twitter as a first step to sanity.

Does anyone in real life speak in batches of 140 characters? I thought not. It’s so obviously an artificial way of communicating. And the way each twit begins with @fredbloggs as if a gun is being fired at his head, is very disconcerting.

The whole thing has got out of hand and GapingVoid’s cartoon gets it in a nutshell.

In recent months seventeen teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling the nation.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers. Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

Suddenly, there’s a raft of blog posts pointing out changes in the blogosphere caused by its dumb lovechild, social networking. Some bloggers are even heading for the exit. Here’s a quick roundup :

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void make this interesting point about thought leadership, one of the traditional drivers of the tertiary blogosphere : “Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the ‘A-Listers’ having to act like ‘Hubs’ [or 'Human Social Objects', if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate ‘Who the Cool Kids are’ [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.!”

Robert Scoble has a go too : “One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.”

So traffic is moving from relatively coherent writerly patterns to the kind of bullet point messages we used to send in telegrams.

Rex Hammock highlights the dumb-down effect of social networking : “When you set up a Facebook account, you’re not weighted down with the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit or whatever it is that keeps most people from setting up a blog.”

Goddam those writers, publishers and pundits! What do they know? Let’s all babble together!

David Jaffe, a games designer and blogger sighs : “I’m going to go dark. … For me, it’s always been silly, stupid fun…you know, giving what I get, talking like alot of folks on geeky message boards do, trash talking, etc.”

Is this a trend? Well, I’ve been writing this stuff for ages here on Syntagma — which ceased being a blog yonks since.

The catalyst for all this angst, of course, is the unstoppable rush to social networks, like Twitter, Facebook and now Pownce. Geeks genuinely feel they have to keep up with this trend or they’ll be left stranded behind the curve. Kids just have to do it or get confined to social outer darkness. All this crosses over the endless debates about “new media” (I prefer “popular media”) and the mainstream media, the future of newsprint … etcetera.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the medium matters less than we suppose, assuming it doesn’t carry some self-limiting factor, like 140-character max output range, in which case it’s unfit for most purposes.

For example, some newspapers incorporate an occasional poetry spot, where decent poets can publish their verses. Does that make the poet a journalist? If writers use blog platforms to publish the kind of article that could easily appear in a broadsheet paper or specialist magazine, does that make them bloggers?

The medium isn’t the message, the quality and form of the writing, or broadcasting is. Good reportage is just that, wherever it appears. So is commentary. So is any other form of expression. We’ve been confusing the medium with the message for too long — since Marshall Mcluhan in fact.

Nowadays, shopping lists, quick notes, annotations, reminders, and so on are rapidly becoming the discourse of choice in the online world. Even A-Listers are getting dragged into it. Coherence is losing out to the babble of Babel. Quality to quantity.

Rex Hammock talks of “the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit …” Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The idea that everyone has a novel in them, or could be a published author, was never a runner. In any originative profession, only 5 percent of aspiring entrants ever truly succeed. Some bloggers use their blogs as their identity, promoting consultancy work or their offline writing.

What particularly interests me is online content production. We shouldn’t confuse this with instant messaging, which is what the social networks are doing. You don’t IM an op-ed on world economic prospects.

Content production is done for two reasons :

1. As hobby, amateur production, fun.
2. As a professional activity aimed at financial returns.

People often start out as #1 practitioners then, if they think they’re good enough, they might move on to #2.

That’s where most of the people engaged in this debate are. They are pros in an increasingly amateurish media space. That’s why there are now dozens of books getting into print, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Andrew Keen’s tirade against the negative effects of popular media, The Cult of the Amateur.

The way to survive all this hype and arm-twisting is The Low Information Diet, severely limiting your consumption of news and gibberish, and concentrating ferociously on what matters to you. If it’s income you’re after, productivity and targeting are the keynotes of performance.

It’s true, though, that most of us like to sound off about this and that — join the “conversation”, as it’s called. But the conversation is largely spurious unless you’re doing it for genuine economic or social reasons, in which latter case you’d be better off in the real world.

If you’re an originative intellectual worker on the internet, discipline and focus are the watchwords. Anything else is professional suicide.