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The dark side of net communities

A few weeks back I was on a panel with Clay Shirky, who spoke eloquently on a serious drawback of the internet as a basis for community. One of his students had been working for the online wing of a popular magazine for teen girls; she told him that the magazine ended up having to shut down its health chatrooms because girls were using them to trade tips on starving themselves.

I was reminded of this when I stumbled across a "pro-ana" (that is, pro-anorexia) website the other day. Ana's Underground Grotto is full of twisted self-help tips to "thinspire" readers to reach their weightloss goals: "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels "The thinner the winner!" and "hunger hurts but starving works." The site is loaded with pro-ana jokes, poetry, links to related sites and, naturally, diet tips. Did you know that the right portion of grilled fish is about the size of your checkbook? Or that drinking ice-cold water will help you burn more calories because it makes your metabolism exert extra energy? (Lighting yourself on fire will probably do the trick as well.)

Shirky's point was that the internet doesn't discriminate when it comes to community-building: people can use it to form unhealthy alliances just as they can healthy ones. A reporter for the Guardian made the same point recently in a story on consensual incest; a woman named Karen told her fiance he was "overreacting" when--after coming home and finding her having sex with her father--he hit the roof. Karen had so fully insulated herself in an online "community" of incest advocates that she wasn't able to see how truly freaky it is to hump your dad.

The best thing I've read on the paradox of internet support groups is still Carl Elliott's "A New Way to Be Mad," from Atlantic Monthly (December 2000). Elliott writes about otherwise healthy people who yearn to have their limbs cut off.  The diagnosis--apotemnophilia--has blossomed in the internet age. Sites geared to amputees and "wannabes" such as Ampulove and Overground in many ways resemble pro-anorexia sites, with jokes about lost limbs, inspirational stories, photos, and tips on how to chop off your arm. Elliott later turned his article into a book; and filmmaker documentary Melody Gilbert used it as the basis of her documentary Whole; neither work is as good as the original article, but they are nonetheless welcome windows into a very strange place.