"A Deranged Dexter Fan"

Throughout our Electronic Communications class we have discussed topics ranging from Facebook, to SecondLife, to Online Dating, and beyond. I would have never thought, though, that sitting through my Abnormal Psychology class we would cover a horrifying case that included all of these topics and more. We have heard of people becoming addicted to their online lives, but did you know these people do not only get wrapped up in these things via the internet? TV shows can also have a horryfing impact on their fans as well.

The case is of a man named Mark Twitchell who was a crazed fan of the show Dexter, which is about a forensic expert who is also a serial killer. Twitchell claims to be an aspiring film maker, who has already filmed his own remake of the Starwars movies (a hint that he might be a bit off the wall!). According to investigators, Twitchell is being accused of first degree murder after attempting to reenact an episode of Dexter by luring a 38-year-old man to his garage (descriped as more horrifying than all 5 Saw movies combined) and cutting the man into pieces just like he saw on the show. Heres the catch: The man was lured to Twitchell's house via an online dating service where he was pretending to be a woman. Similarly, Twitchells Facebook page explains how he feels he and the Dexter character have far too much in common. On his Myspace page, where he oddly enough only has 13 'friends', he posted an eerie quotes stating "The world is getting bigger and so is my influence on it." Keep in mind that Twitchell is a married, otherwise 'normal' man who would have never been suspected of these crimes.

I feel that this case is sadly an excellent example of the impact technology can have on people. The crimes committed by Twitchell were undoubtedly influenced by a TV character, which was obviously not the intent of the producers of the show. Twitchell's crimes may have been prevented if his online activity had been observed more closely. Had someone found out about him impersonating a woman in a dating service, some questions would have been raised. Perhaps if someone had noticed earlier his strong connection with Dexter's gruesome character, which he made clear on his Facebook profile, someone could have stopped his future actions. Also, had someone explored his MySpace page and noticed how ironic his quote was, his insanity would have been seen beforehand. Sadly, use of the internet has become so common that people often overlook odd behaviors online. It seems as though eerie actions are more acceptable via the internet than they are in the real world, which is why people often get so involved in online worlds. It is time we begin paying closer attention to what types of behaviors certain people are taking part in online. If we continue to ignore peculiar behaviors online that we would not accept in society, acts of violence and crime could begin to skyrocket due to lack of law and observation of these types of behaviors.

Facebookography Addiction

This week, my group presented to the class our findings for the Facebook project we have embarked on. We were to research addiction and identify various personality traits along with behaviors of an addict. We focused greatly on addictions outside of substance abuse such as gambling, the internet and pornography. In great relation to this, I came across an article on Time magazines website titled “Facebook: More Popular than Porn.” This immediately grabbed my attention because we identified in our presentation that porn is undoubtedly one of the biggest addictions identified in internet users. I was interested to see, then, why this author would compare Facebook to porn, and what types of people he identified to be such avid users of Facebook.

The article begins by discussing the popularity of Facebook among college students. He then points out that for the general population, pornography sites rank first in the most visited sites, followed by search engines. For the age group 18-24, though, this is not at all the case. Studies have shown for this group of users, social networking sites rank #1, followed by search engines, then e-mail based sites, with porn falling in fourth. Over the past few years, rates of users in social networking sites such as Facebook continues to increase, while visits to porn sites is decreasing at a steady rate. He proceeds to point out that not only has Facebook well exceeded pornography, but it has also put e-mail websites and even instant messenger use down. Users of all ages are logging onto Facebook. In fact, just the other day one of our classmates pointed out that her mom had just added her on Facebook! I’m sure she isn’t the only one who has had someone outside of our so called “Y Gen” (young generation) contact them via Facebook, I know I have!

This article was extremely enlightening for me and also kind of amusing! When I think of the internet and addiction, the first thing that comes to mind is undoubtedly pornography addiction because that’s what we’ve always heard of. Perhaps I need to modernize my way of thinking because clearly pornography isn’t the only serious addiction that has actually been empirically proven. In light of all this, it makes me believe that if Facebook related sites truly are the #1 visited sites in the age group we will be surveying, we are extremely likely to find significant results confirming that we at Westminster College have an epidemic of Facebookography addiction among us!

(http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1678586,00.html)

Another You-niverse

I decided for this week’s blog, after having actually experienced Second Life, to really dig into the publicity followed by the statistics for this phenomenon.

First, I decided to look into how other forms of entertainment illustrated such virtual worlds as Second Life. I happened to stumble across a summary of an episode of Law & Order SVU entitled “Avatar;” how suiting. The episode included a young girl who would have sex with men via the internet in exchange for the murder of her mother. The online sex-world the characters engage in turns into a real life rape and murder. As I continued my search, I then came across an actual website called www.virtualworldnews.com. Here, among many articles, I found a seemingly beneficial article entitled “Sci Fi Channel Partners with Trion for Interwoven TV Show and Virtual World.” (http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/06/sci-fi-channel.html) The article discusses a possible future TV show where individuals in virtual worlds actually compete and interact to predict what will happen on next week’s episode. Interestingly enough, the article happened to mention an episode of CSI, similar to Law & Order, which discusses a crime being committed like the one mentioned earlier. After seeing all this recurrent talk about Virtual Worlds, especially second life, in correspondence with major TV shows/stations one would assume that the popularity of Second Life and the like were constantly on the rise. My following research found a much different answer, though.

According to a recent study conducted by Yankee Groups, the use of Second Life is staggering as user growth reached its peak in October of 2006. Similar studies show statistics such as “users visit Second Life for only 12 minutes on average--per month” (http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-second-life-overhyped) and “The number of active users — defined as those who spent at least one hour in Second Life during the month — fell 3.8 percent to 540,151” (http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/09/25/second-life-user-hours-drop-in-august/). It is surprising to see these statistics as we have recently been viewing Second Life as an extremely over populated social network. Researchers propose that this decline in users could be accounted for by the increased use of mobile devices rather than people sitting around at PCs.
Regardless of these findings, though, we must still keep in mind that there are approximately 157,289 active users of Second Life in the United States alone which is a good number of individuals devoting extended amounts of time to the virtual world. As we all experiences in class, it takes some time to get used to Second Life. I know I personally spent at least 15 minutes trying to fix my appearance, and let’s just say I didn’t differ from the default character I chose more than just my eye color. This just goes to show the amount of time these active users commit to this website in order to be successful. Its also important to keep in mind that although use of the Second Life may be declining, that can only mean that other uses of technology are being created and may result in even more severe anti-social behaviors. Lets just hope we all don't end up living in another you-universe!