From the Telegraph:
A man will become the first person in the UK to stand trial next month accused of harassing a woman on Facebook.
Michael Hurst has pleaded not guilty to harassing ex-girlfriend Sophie Sladden via the popular social networking website.
This, to me, isn’t particularly news. Someone has harassed someone else. They’ve used Facebook to do it. Was it important that it was Facebook? No (so the specific technology in question isn’t particularly important). Is Facebook itself alleged to have done anything wrong? No (so the technology’s operators are not somehow at fault). Is this something that could have occurred without Facebook. Yes (so it is not a “new” crime). Did Facebook make it easier to commit the alleged crime? Perhaps.
And this last bit seems to get everyone very excited, or at least seems to make something into “news” that otherwise probably would not be. But here, the facilitative effect is actually not so much greater than what would be true for existing technologies. Sure, he could harass his victim without leaving his home, but so long as he had a telephone, he could have done that without Facebook. Indeed, the notion of harassment by E-mail is fairly well established in the UK. Harassment by Facebook doesn’t really tell us anything new that we didn’t know already, and, on the whole, the story (as presented) is neither “new” nor “news” in my book.
Rather than looking at the technology, if we instead watch the actions of its users, we’ll have a better idea of what’s new and exciting, and avoid perhaps the temptation to play up that which really isn’t much of anything to begin with. There are interesting things to say here — whether they’re about women online or the lure of social sites, among other possibilities — they simply weren’t said.