Nicholas Carr says SNS "for better or for worse"

Nicholas Carr speaks at the Seoul Digital Forum in Seoul, South Korea on May 26, 2011 [Seoul Digital Forum]

American technology guru Nicholas Carr has said the emergence of social network services (SNS) such as Twitter has made the world a "for better or for worse" place to live.

Carr made the remark at the ongoing Seoul Digital Forum (SDF) on Thursday while answering to a reporter's question on how to deal with the harmful effects that SNS has on society by citing the recent suicide committed by Korean cable TV anchorwoman Song Ji-seon.

Song, 30, died Monday after apparently jumping from the 19th floor of her apartment building, two weeks after implying suicide on her Twitter account. She admitted to be suffering from depression after becoming engulfed in controversy over a love scandal with a professional baseball player for which she later ended up temporarily losing her job and in the meantime, was attacked viciously for over the Internet.

Song left a note before taking her own life reading, "I didn't know that each and every word I write on Twitter would become food for reporters...... I'm shocked by what the media and netizens have done."

"Whenever a new information communication tool appears, people have to figure out the best way to use it. In some ways, these kinds of problems will solve itself as people learn more about the risks and begin to modify their behaviors to use them more wisely," Carr said.

"The other part goes beyond that, it's so easy now to make everything public that people have the tendency to upload anything that they see or experience in such a hurry. They feel......kind of a reward for doing that and it's very difficult to stop."

Carr then went onto state that the world should be protected with "laws to prevent some of those problems such as abuse of privacy" but added that "it's hard to actually stop those things while we will adapt and act more wisely."

Several celebrities in Korea including the late actresses Choi Jin-sil, Jung Da-bin, U-Nee and Lee Eun-ju have turned to suicide after showing signs of depression caused by online rumors and harassment as well as harsh criticism but this is the first time for such a death to stem from SNS.

Nicholas Carr is a writer that focuses on technology, culture and economics. He has been promoting his latest book "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain" which scored him a 2011 Pulitzer Prize nomination and became a New York Times bestseller.

He is also known for two other publications titled "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google" and "Does IT Matter?" which have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has contributed to various newspapers including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and The Financial Times.

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