Online Suicide

[MacDavid]

A 19-year-old young man that lives near me committed suicide live on Justin.tv on Wednesday November 19, 2008. His name is Abraham K. Biggs. The report is in my local online newspaper at Sun-Sentinel.com.

While this is not the first incident of live online suicide, it is still a new aspect of reality that surrounds the virtuality of the web. Comments were made by live chatters that were emboldened by the anonymity that the web brings in the young man's chat room, thinking it was a joke. I'm saddened by this event and have only the deepest condolences for his family.

[Mayank]

I read about this too.....i felt really bad....apparently he had posted on some discussion board saying he was planning to do this....but the moderator acted too late....very sad.

[Tsuko]

hmm, cry wolf too many times and when it's real you'll be ignored.
There was already a famous scam or two of online suicide, so when one is actually real, shit happens.

[mix is the place (tubejay)]

i've been to what seems like a hundred places online where people seem to think they're in a virtual reality, including the people.

the reality may be virtual, but the people are very real. as the novelty of interacting with people on a screen becomes a way of life we take for granted, hopefully people will stop treating each other like video game characters. then again school shootings are blamed on video games and television, you never see television and video games blamed on the hate in the world, like in mumbai today.

it's odd how there are more suicides now that we are civilized and living in such an advanced, intelligent culture, and probably because we don't spend quite enough time giving a shit about people. i always liked the song "long, long way to go" by phil collins. it would be easier to swallow if he wasn't a. rich (no problem) and b. evading taxes that would actually feed the hungry, but even if he's a hypocrite, it's a really damned good song.

you can't care about people all the time, we're much too cynical for that. i'd be very happy if we spent at least enough hours of the day caring about each other that people stopped killing themselves in such great numbers. obviously there are clinical things like depression, too, but i don't think it's all explained by chemicals or all fixed with medicine.

modern medicine is a significant help, but we still spend our lives building a society that (for example,) 1 of every 150 americans just don't think is worth living in. (it's much more than that, that's the number of people that actually kill themselves, not the number that entertain the idea.) despite being a misogynistic culture, 3 times as many men kill themselves as women, so at least we know women know how to care about each other. what the fuck are we teaching our men?