The Dangers of Inviting People to a Party Over the Internet

Every few months there is a new incident reported where Myspace creates some sort of physical damage. Many of these incidents involve party invitations being sent out digitally. The news stories read quite simply, a young (under 20) girl or boy decides to have a party when his or her parents are away, sends the information about it out to a few friends on Myspace.com, and then these friends forward it to their friends. When this happens it is not uncommon that hundreds of people show up at a single house expecting some sort of crazy party.

The most recent event like this that happened was in London. Apparently, a young girl performed the preceding procedure and ended up doing tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage to her parents' house. She is no longer living with her parents as a result of the incident, and police are unable to locate most of the partygoers.

This very same event has happened in America, Canada, Australia and probably most of the non English speaking world as well. Despite the fact that some media sources have a tendency to demonize Myspace in this context, the occurrence has in fact very little to do with Myspace.

In this case, Myspace.com simply makes it easier for people to create stupid actions. Before the computer existed something that is quite similar probably happened. This phenomenon was caused by fliers being posted in the local area. Anyone that saw these fliers would then try to come to the party.

This further goes to prove that the internet itself is not responsible for many of the "bad things" that it is getting accused of, but it is simply doing its job of enabling people to perform tasks more efficiently. In this case the flier is more efficiently passed out to more people through a website. More people read it, and as a result such small mishaps are often escalated.

The mass computational power of the internet has proven to have great synergy with the young oppressed teenager. It is able to broadcast stupid decisions to the entire world, but before we go on demonizing the internet it is probably a better idea to analyze why the people making the stupid decisions make such decisions. If we can change that, then we won't need to further alienate certain users from the internet by giving it a dangerous image.