Do the recklessness and violence seen on websites such as Bebo and YouTube tell us more about today's teenagers or society itself, asks Fionola Meredith.
As teenage kicks go, it could hardly be more extreme. A video uploaded to the Bebo social-networking website shows a boy in his late teens clambering beneath a railway sleeper, then lying down under a section of track while a 90mph train rattles over it inches above him. It's thought that the footage, now removed from the site, was filmed near Monasterevin, Co Kildare, and Irish Rail says that the young man in question is lucky to be alive. Yet, while it was clearly a breathtakingly risky act, this video is not unique. Rather, it's just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate pranks being enacted and recorded in homes, schools and streets, then posted on the internet.
The web is full of Jackass-style images of teens spreadeagled on car bonnets as they careen wildly around empty car parks - a practice known as "car-surfing" which has already claimed lives. Meanwhile, a recent BBC Panorama investigation found that films showing brutal fights between teenagers are regularly uploaded to sharing websites.
It's part of our accepted cultural mythology that teenagers seek out risk, revelling in social disapproval and sensation-seeking antics, often involving drink, drugs and sex. Recent research indicates that teenage risk-taking may well be biologically driven - and possibly inevitable. Yet it seems that the new forms of daredevil behaviour being uploaded to the net far exceed the tamer stunts that teenagers might have got up to in previous generations. Or does the increased visibility offered by the internet mean that we are simply more aware of the issue these days?
"The internet and technological media have raised the stakes considerably," says child psychotherapist Colman Noctor. "Teenagers used to jump off 12-foot-high bus shelters for a thrill. Now there is a worldwide audience for these stunts, which increases the temptation to make them all the more dramatic. This latest incident on the train tracks will encourage some others to do the same - only one notch more."
Yet it's also true that most teenagers wouldn't dream of getting their thrills by stretching out under railway tracks or indulging in similar, potentially lethal antics. A report by Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa) cautions against the mass demonisation of adolescents: "Young people as a group are portrayed as mad or bad, yet young people themselves are most likely to be victims of accidents, crime and anti-social behaviour. Most young people don't commit crime, behave anti-socially or take illegal drugs, but the public perception of the prevalence of these behaviours is greatly in excess of the actual prevalence."
Many teenagers resent the implication that, simply by virtue of their age, they are part of a wild-eyed gang of thrill-seekers. Ben (17), says: "It's a case of all young people being tarred with the same brush. I use Bebo, but only for talking to my friends and looking at concert videos. I would rarely come across the more extreme stuff." Ben believes that intense peer pressure is likely to be behind many of the wilder stunts, such as the railway incident. "I bet there was a lot of pressure put on the person who did that. It was probably done for a dare."
This view chimes in with research by US psychologist Laurence Steinberg, who found that the presence of peers increases risk-taking substantially among teenagers. He says that "in one of our lab's studies, the presence of peers more than doubled the number of risks teenagers took in a video driving game. In adolescence, then, not only is more merrier - it is also riskier."
But has risk-taking really increased among teenagers? According to Noctor, "the movement of adolescent rebellion remains the same as it always has been. After all, recklessness is almost the cultural language of adolescence. But it's the context and quality of that recklessness that has become much more intense".
Perhaps there's a need to take more collective responsibility for extreme teenage behaviour. As 18-year-old Connor Scullion points out, "if there is an audience for this stuff, if hundreds of thousands of people want to view it on the internet, what does that say about society? We have to face up to the fact that this is what many people want to see".