There have been a number of tragedies of late (e.g. the suicides in Bridgend) which supposedly featured the Internet in some capacity or another.
Of course, when such things happen people who didn’t grow up with the Internet put the blame on that relatively new medium for such tragedies.
While such views are misguided, it’s still worth wondering what the role of the Internet is in influencing the decisions made by the people concerned.
It’s also worth considering what the Internet tells us about the way we respond to such tragedies today.
Megan Meier killed herself after being bullied via MySpace
A young man is killed in horrific circumstances and people respond by leaving messages of condolences on Facebook.
To leave such messages can be a positive way of expressing sadness, grief and disbelief that someone could lose their life in such a fashion.
What’s concerning is the trend of people (yes, this is the opinion of someone who’s old enough to be the mother of a teenager) leaving aggrandising statements or comments that romanticise suicide on the Internet after a young person has taken their own life.
Twenty-four individuals have given the thumbs-up to “Now he’s free” on one YouTube video dedicated to a young man who shot himself.
Perhaps the “romance” of his death is heightened by the claim the poor boy did it because of a girl (this claim is really unfair on the young woman he was apparently so distraught about).
Although it must be said that some of the other messages attached to that video are so repulsive you have to wonder why people allow the comments threads attached to such videos to be left open.
After the Megan Meier case was reported in the press, one girl said the following on the Megan Meier Memorial MySpace site:
May you rest in peace. U made the ultimate sacrifice … now hopefully other who (especially adults) that use words to hurt – WILL have to pay for it. You will always be remembered & forever a very important girl who changed the way. Bless You Always!
Someone has created a tribute MySpace site for the two girls who hanged themselves in Victoria last year.
After all the commotion that followed their deaths, the site only has seven friends, which may indicate how quickly people forget.
Of course, forgetting is a not an unreasonable response for those who weren’t loved ones of the victims.
Some young people are leaving suicide notes on social networking sites, presumably because they believe the people who read them will actually care and leave comments in response.
Any thoughts on what the use of the Internet in this way means?
Darlene,
one of the most repulsive sites to emerge from this phenomenon is mydeathspace.com, a site where people who are interested in myspace deaths, go to to read and comment voyeuristically on the death of the person. The lack of respect for the deceased is quite horrific, minute details of the death are pored over, and should a relative protest, their emails are posted up for all to see and jokes are often made. Its quite a disgusting offshoot of this phenomenon.
MySpace deaths? Well it says something that there is such a thing called “MySpace deaths”.
The site tells people on its home page to be “respectful”.
I’m perplexed about the motivation for such a site and I’m confused about what people are trying to do by contributing to it. We all want to remember the dead, but yes there is a nasty undercurrent to some of this stuff. Honestly, some of the stuff you can find on line about the very young Meier churns the stomach.
There’s articles about people we don’t know and we can comment on their deaths as if we did know them. I’ve just read about a young woman called Jade, who incidentally has got no opportunity of responding to the view that “Jade always did what Jade wanted to do”. Who’d want to be remembered in such a way, given how complex all of us are?
I wonder how desensitised to death you could become from reading such stuff and I wonder how those people who are leaving nasty comments would feel if it was someone they love that was featured?
Yes, and because the people who die who use myspace are so young, you can rest assured the death is not often from natural causes (at least they are the ones that dont get commented on on mydeathspace.com), so the excitement over the lurid nature of the deaths (murders, suicides etc) suggest that the sorts of people who would come to post, dont seem to have a lot of empathy going for them or anyone else. Rather something else, something quite dark and nasty is going on.
As for the kids leaving messages on their deceased friends pages, I dont think its too bad. One girl I know of, who suicided, has her friends go to her page to keep her up to date on the developments regarding love lives and holidays, jobs and uni etc. Everytime one of their pets dies, they ask her to look after them. Its winding down now and I suspect it will wind down and lessen over the years to nothing, but its ok for now in a poignant kind of way. Kind of like a cyber grave where people go to leave notes and messages.
It’s good to make a distinction between friends leaving comments on their deceased friend’s page and the myspacedeath thing, which seems to be about something else entirely. One just feels so sorry for the families who have enough to cope with as it is, and then they have to deal with people condemning their dead children or making jokes about them (and we are talking about young people here). I’m sure many PhDs could be written about the topic. I guess the only way for those people to cope would be to log off and make sure they stay close to their memories.
It is inevitable that such page would wind down after a period of time, just like people stop going to graves after a certaim amount of time. Just the time to move on, I guess.
But really, how is this any different to what’s already done? People have always been fascinated by death (how many people read through the obituaries despite not knowing anyone listed? Do you fear desensitisation from them?). Furthermore, people always want to feel a connection to any momentous event that occurs — witness how many people appear to know someone who perished in the 9/11 tragedy. Either those 3,000 were the most popular people ever, or some of us are stretching our links a bit. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just how humans are.
Really, all that has changed is the medium through which this occurs. Throughout history, people have been simplified and deified after death (‘he was loved by everyone’ ’she had her whole life ahead of her’ ‘had no enemies’ etc, etc). For some, this deification helps them to mourn. For others, making crude and perhaps rather inappropriate jokes helps them to deal. MySpace or not, this hasn’t changed.
I guess I’m just highly sceptical that what appears to natural human behaviour that has survived numerous shifts in society is going to changed in a decade of teh intarwebs.
And as a side note, I think it’s also worthwhile to keep in mind that there is a huge difference in how Americans and Australian react to death. Per my post above, the deification of people after death seems to be far more prevalent here in America than I ever recall it being in Australia. This tendency has not really changed; instead of a mention in the obituaries, silly ‘news’ coverage on the telly and idle gossip between friends over lunch, it’s being done on MySpace.
I pretty much agree with that. I think Heather’s onto something here – we’d be much better analysing all this in terms of cultures of death, memory and grieving than ascribing all of it (or even a lot of it) to teh intertubes.
Everyone on the net is a troll. Some get their kicks from making inappropriate ghoulish comments about myspace deaths, and others get their kicks from commenting on those comments.
Everyone IRL is a troll, etc
I was trolling in real life way before the internets.
On a more serious note, perhaps embracing suicide as a live option for young people is a good thing.
If we’re ever going to seriously question dominance, aggression and competition as valid underpinnings for society we have to create ways of demonstrating our dissatisfaction with those ideals in ways more dramatic that simply opting out and not competing, as that simply leads to irreleavance.
Committing suicide does have an impact, especially when young people have the opportunity to create the narrative of their own death on the web, which will be available to both a peer group and wider society, without intervention from the state, which has has an interest in downplaying suicide as irrational and singular, when it could actually be a coherent rejection of the constraints of society.
It’s true that we humans have always had a fascination with death, Heather, and also that we have always dealt with it in different ways, although usually in more respectful ways than leaving LULZ (did if for the laugh) comments on the web for one’s own enjoyment (and f**k the family and friends of the deceased). While doing some research for something I wrote about the Meier case I found that there are people who trawl cheesy and often misguided tribute videos to dead young people on YouTube to leave repulsive comments (did if for the LULZ and all that).
The making jokes is a different thing. It’s not the way the people making those comments deal with the death because they don’t know or care for the person that died. They didn’t know the person that died: that person is just a photograph on the Internet.
While I agree about human nature, I think the Internet has influenced that nature and channelled it into different styles of communication.
“If we’re ever going to seriously question dominance, aggression and competition as valid underpinnings for society we have to create ways of demonstrating our dissatisfaction with those ideals in ways more dramatic that simply opting out and not competing, as that simply leads to irreleavance.”
Could you speak more to that point, Adrian?
My, my you must be psychic Darlene
Lori Drew has been charged over the Megan Meier suicide
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/lori-drew-charged-over-myspace-suicide/2008/05/16/1210765091402.html
Oh my word, thanks for letting us know about that, Casey. Quite shocked about that because the authorities had previously claimed there was nothing they could charge her with. Obviously they’ve accrued enough evidence to finally go ahead and charge her (which is something I doubted would ever happen given the nature of Internet anonymity). A nice lesson that bullying on line does have an impact, not just for the bullied but also for the bully.
Here’s part of what the article says:
“Lori Drew of St Louis, Missouri was indicted on Thursday on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorisation to obtain information to inflict emotional distress.
Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.”
I don’t believe the internet is responsible for suicides. I’ve known a few. If they really want to kill themselves and are not slashing their wrists or ODing on pills for attention, which is terribly sad in itself,you’d never know they were contemplating it. Serious suicides don’t tell people because for whatever reason they really want to die. There are no phone calls to friends after they’ve swallowed a handful of pills.They want it to work and they don’t tell anyone. And this is going to happen, internet access or no internet access.
And they get very angry if people stop them by reviving them or bringing them back to life.
I agree with you, Paul, I don’t think anybody would kill themselves because of the web.
However, as I said earlier I think the Internet has influenced human nature and channelled it into different styles of communication (re: suicide).
“Serious suicides don’t tell people because for whatever reason they really want to die. There are no phone calls to friends after they’ve swallowed a handful of pills.They want it to work and they don’t tell anyone. ”
Paul, thats not been my observation. You can never say defitively what people will and will not do. Plenty of suicides have a long history of para-suicidal behaviour and will threaten it and talk about it before they do it. And plenty don’t. The of the trajectories to successful suicide and the warning flag posts or lack thereof are as multitudinous as are the reasons why people kill themselves.
casey,
I agree with you that there are lots of people who attempt suicide and fail. Buut I wonder when these people do succeed, whether its accidental. I rather interpret those people as making a serious cry for help. The two attempted suicides I know were both bipolar and when attention was paid to them and they received the proper medical treatment, they seemed to lose their suicidal tendencies.So far as I know.
In my experience there’s nothing like a near death esperience to stop suicidal thoughts. Many years ago I went through a seriously depressive episode and thought I wanted to kill myself. In this state I went down the coast with some friends to go swimming and got caught in a rip, but was rescued by my friends. I’m not a strong swimmer. But I really thought I was going to die by drowning. I’ve never had a suicidal thought since.
Darlene wrote:
I dunno. I once thought “why would anyone try to kill themselves over a bloke”, yet found a woman in my workplace many years ago semi-comatose in her office after a relationship breakdown, bottle of pills on the desk and several packets of others in the bin. That guy managed to cause a suicide attempt with a paper note, the web is just the same thing really. I guess it’s not the medium, but the message.
What a horrid experience, Paul. Can you describe what about the near-death experience changed your thinking?
David, bloody hell. She obviously took the break-up really bad. I wonder what she’s doing these days and what she thinks about trying to take her over a bloke way back when. Perhaps it wasn’t just the note, but a lot of other factors, Most folk would be upset about being dumped, but wouldn’t think about killing themselves over it. You’re right, some people would kill themselves over something on the Internet. Different people respond to things in different ways.
What I find so shocking about this case is Lori Drew’s age. She’s 49, FFS and has engaged in such cruel and sustained assault on this child of 13! Isn’t it our role as adults to stop this sort of behaviour?
Her lame excuse was that she wanted to know what Megan Meier was saying about her daughter after the two girls had a falling out. In fact, she has behaved far worse than any of the teenagers involved in this sorry affair, particularly as it seems that Megan didn’t say anything derogatory about Drew’s daughter. 20 years, if she’s found guilty doesn’t seem adequate to me.