Two very interesting articles passed across my rss feed this week, both of them dealt with the death of a real life person and how their passing affected the online social networks they were a part of.
The first article was found a theatlantic.com. It was an editorial from The Atlantic magazine entitled "A Death on Facebook." http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/a-death-on-facebook/8177/ This article recounted the experience of a woman who, after briefly meeting a younger woman at work, was drawn to her facebook profile. The photos posted on her page presented an irresistable pictured narrative. When this younger woman slowly began to fall in love, the author of this article was drawn deeper into the narrative provided by facebook. She says, "Here, I had the satisfaction of a love plot unfolding right in my living room, complete with revolving backdrops and the suspense inherent in a long-distance relationship. " But this story did not end happily. The younger woman died suddenly. As the author began to unpack the situation she was left with a rather disconcerting notion. Was her observations of the younger woman's life simply a form of voyeurism, or was it a true friendship. Even though neither of them ever corresponded in real life, or on facebook. As she states it, "How do you cry for someone you hardly know? And for what was I crying? [the younger woman] or her story?"
The second article was posted at The Daily Beast, a news site that also performs news aggregation. This article was entitled "Anatomy of an Internet Suicide." http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-31/reddit-suicide-how-the-internet-can-help-and-hurt/ This story documents a user of Reddit who posted at question about continuing his existence. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't end it right now," he wrote. "Go." While many members of the online community responded compassionately and with sincere pleas for him not to end his life, he committed suicide a few hours later. While many of the Reddit users responded in an effort to help, a few members took a different tack. Some encouraged him to take his life, labeling him a coward or a faggot in the process. It would be almost impossible to know whether or not the responses of the Reddit community could have ultimately saved or doomed him.
How significant is our digital life in comparison to our embodied lives? If you would have asked me a year ago I would have told you that the digital world wasn't really that important. At the most, it provided ever increasingly sophisticated ways of giving us much needed attention. In other words, social networking was simply a way to live in an artificial glass house. Although this distinction is partially false because whether consciously or not, those who use social networking intentionally chose what they want to post and what they don't want to post.
Recently, facebook unveiled "places." This app would allow users to spatially define themselves. One could mark where they were geographically and situationally located in real time and space. This sort of application already existed, though within a much smaller online community called "foursquare." These sorts of developments only highlight for me the ways that online social networking, and online self identification continue to bleed into the embodied world. These two stories of suicide and death only highlight how jarring this seepage can be at times.
A professor at the college I attended once described living in community as throwing a bunch of rocks into a box and then shaking it vigorously. The sheer violence of the continued contact eventually smoothing out the rough edges. But he thought that online communities life facebook were more like the centrifugal force rides like one would find at a state fair. The riders pinned to the walls by the physics of the spinning cylinder they found themselves encapsulated in. Everyone can see one another, but there is no real contact. Each person was contained against the pad that gravity smashed them against.
I would generally agree with this professor's assessment. While the woman from the atlantic article would doubt her own connection to the younger woman who died, the fact is, the author was a silent witness to the unfolding drama of her tragically short life. And while no member of Reddit might have been able to stop the young man who died from taking his life, the emotions many poured into their comments trying to stop him was very real. Whether or not that silent witness, or those heart felt emotions amount to a genuine revolution in the way we engage in community with other embodied individuals is still up for debate.
