Antonia Kanczula
On Friday 6 January, I was sat at my computer, as I often am, when a tweet popped up from my community website about a burglary in the area;
I clicked back to the site to read more – a neighbour had seen Molly the pug being carried away by two men and reported it to the police;
I then went back to Twitter to RT the owner’s appeal;
Over the weekend, hundreds of people, including celebs like Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton, did exactly the same thing;
A Facebook page was launched. Media outlets picked up on the story, locally and nationally;
It seems all this combined exposure, pressured Molly’s nappers into releasing her and enabled her to be identified by a conscientious member of the public, who found her wandering a couple of miles away in Enfield;
We are constantly hearing about the death of community spirit. And how online networking has destroyed real-life communication. But this pearl of an incident encapsulates why these beliefs are patently untrue. Okay, the modern concept of togetherness might not be the leaning-over-the-garden-fence type of old but what we have today with social media can be just as, if not more, powerful.