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In chatrooms and message boards, Madeleine hysteria grips the world

HOMEPAGE NEWS REPORTS INDEX BLOG DAY 25 NEWS MAY 2007
Original Source:  GUARDIAN: 19 MAY 2007
Emma Brockes Saturday May 19, 2007 The Guardian
 
If you logged on to your computer yesterday, you may have received an email that looked, at first, like spam. Forwarded many times and with crazy punctuation, it may have carried a preliminary message along the lines of "please help us!!!!!!!", before scrolling down to the original email: a sober address from Phil McCann, uncle of Madeleine, the missing four-year-old, asking for your assistance.

Madeleine McCann has been missing for over two weeks and responding to her plight doesn't rely on being able to do anything about it. But if you went online yesterday, seeking an outlet for your sympathy, you would have been confronted by a confusing and in some quarters horrifying array of options. The dozens of sites and subsites that have sprung up in the last fortnight - findmaddie.com, help_find_madeleine_mccann.com, givemaddieback.com, hopeformaddy.com and the misspelt findmadeline.com - were of such breadth and randomness that by yesterday morning, the appeal set up by the McCann family, ww.bringmadeleinehome.com, was forced to identify itself as The Official Website To Find Madeleine McCann. It is noticeable that, bar in the context of an abbreviated text message, nowhere on the site is she referred to as "Maddie".

In these days of mass media sophistication, no one needs it explaining to them that where a child who gets kidnapped is news, a pretty child who gets kidnapped is headline news and a pretty child who gets kidnapped and whose parents save lives for a living and go to church is rolling news. Even so, in the days since she disappeared, the Madeleine campaign has, for scale of involvement, outdone anything we've seen before. There are 90 different Madeleine-related groups on Facebook alone, circulating her photo to user communities of between six and 76,000 members. The official website has registered 60m hits and posters of her have been seen in campsites as far away as Bulgaria, translated into local languages via appeals put out by bloggers. At least four premiership football stars have made TV appeals and there is reward money on offer totalling some £2.5m.

It was the point at which big business started to get involved, however - BAA, the British airports operator, is carrying the "help find Madeleine" message on its website - and yellow ribbons began appearing on all benches in the House of Commons, that people started to feel a little uneasy. While the BBC flew out Huw Edwards to look apocalyptic, live from Praia Da Luz, people started to ask how much of this was actually helping, and why people were doing it.

Partly, it is a function of resources: when Holly and Jessica, Sarah Payne and James Bulger disappeared, there weren't the online communities available to power this kind of grassroots response, and for that response to have a knock-on effect in loftier quarters. But that doesn't quite explain the tone of the outpourings. Some MPs privately voiced concerns about the bandwagon aspect of wearing yellow ribbons last week, but more offensive were the homemade video tributes to Madeleine, posted on YouTube to soundtracks by Christina Aguilera and N Sync, and indistinguishable in tone and relish from the regular pop-star fan tributes.

There have been mutterings that this is a post-Diana thing. But much of the response seemed to have more to do with the News of the World's erstwhile anti-paedophile campaign, and the general hysteria that governs "right" versus "wrong" parenting. On the parenting websites, so riven along sectarian lines, here at least was something everyone could get solidly behind.

No wonder the stampede to share the McCanns' pain has been so thunderous - although before the family's impeccable credentials became clear, one imagines there was a conflict in some tabloid newsrooms over Parents who left their kids alone while they had dinner, versus Evil Paedophile Under the Bed, he's coming for your kids next.

The most unsettling aspect of the case has been the juxtaposition of hysterical language with huge pictures of the child, redolent of the Onion's spoof front page after 9/11 - "holy ****ing shit!" read the headline, across the blazing towers - which satirised the undisguised relish of much of the coverage.

Of course, at root, people only want to help. But their exaggerated responses look from some angles like self-gratification. "Help us," wrote one group of people who had never met the McCanns, to another group equally remote from them. "Missing for two weeks now please forward to anyone abroad - she may be as far away as Bolivia or Colombia or the USA," wrote someone else, hyperbolically, and lots of people pondered and responded to the indefensible posting "imagine what she's feeling?" And everywhere reproduced the picture of Madeleine's unusual right eye, in close-up, presented as a helpful distinguishing mark.

This is not how it came across, however. At this stage, we are so absurdly far removed from the point of the exercise that it is is only a matter of time before someone superimposes a big cartoon tear beneath it and, appealing for further help in a world that doesn't exist, posts it on Second Life.

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