For the majority of us, Facebook is a way to communicate, make new friends, make plans, engage in arguments, threaten others with their lives and even taking someone’s life. I was watching the WPIX news last night and came across this outrageous story about a young college graduate who loaned $20 to her boyfriend’s sister to use for her child but instead, the sister used the money for something else. Yes, a very complicated story that soon ended up on Facebook with the exchange of harsh and threatening words of “who is going to have the last laugh” and later ended in one of the girls being stabbed to death.
The argument escalated and took a turn for the worse, when it was made obvious that the argument wasn’t about the $20. Unfortunately, its too late to know what this argument was really about especially from the other person’s point of view. The story shows one of the many ways people utilize “social networking”. This was a negative way that affect communities and societies of varying ages of people. It is really sad that, as humans our ability to lose control and engage in minor misunderstandings sometimes gets the best of us. In this case, something as simple as repaying $20 would have been the best thing to do and someone’s life would have been spared.
http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-women-dead-after-facebook-fight,0,6781648.story?preview=true
When i read this story in the news, it really was sad to me. I think that the whole substance and nature of the story however is probably way deeper than facebook could have known. Although the argument was on facebook i think that despite its presence these things still do happen very frequently and over a small sum of money. I do not think in any way that facebook contributed to this horrible tragedy because the girls could have exchanged those words when they saw eachother on the street or through texting. I think that facebook will play a role in the court case against the individual because it will help provide evidence as to what was said between the girls. But i think that looking at this snippet on facebook may not tell the entire story that only the victim and assailant knows. Again the tragedy behind this story is sad and shocking because a lot of people lost loved ones. A family lost their daughter and a sister and on the other end a child lost their mother over a petty argument for a small sum of money that many of us use in one day for lunch.