I often see code like that which is shown here, ie where an object is allocated and then used as a "lock object".

It seems to me that you could use any object for this, including the event itself as the lock object. Why allocate a new object that does nothing? My understanding is that calling lock() on an object doesn't actually alter the object itself, nor does it actually lock it from being used, it's simply used as a placeholder for multiple lock statements to anchor on.

So my question is, is this really a good thing to do?