Read Online The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris - Free Book Online Page A

transformed into a meme and a hashtag, bandied about online in a series of suicide jokes and vandalisms on her memorial pages. She is taunted in death even more than she was in life.
    What interests me more than the common tale of online abuse, though, is the outlet that Todd turned to as a balm for her wounds—the video she posted as a final creative act. She turned, against all reason except perhaps that of an addict, to the very thing that made her suffer so. She turned to an online broadcast technology. When I first read about this tortured girl, I kept wondering how much we all subvert our emotional lives into our technologies; how much of the pain and suffering we each live with is now funneled away from traditional outlets (diaries, friends, counselors) and toward an online network that promises solace.
    Two weeks after Todd killed herself, her mother, Carol, sat on a black sofa and spoke to the media. “It’s not about a child who . . . just sat on her computer in her room,” she said. She spoke with a soft and uncertain voice. She did not look into the camera . She tried to describe her daughter’s state of mind in the days leading up to that final act. “She realized the error in her actions, but that error couldn’t be erased. . . . She tried to forget, she tried to make it go away. She tried to change schools. But wherever she went, it followed her.” The footage is hard to watch; Carol Todd looks understandably distraught and annoyed by the attention of the media. In the end, she bites her lip, says to the scores of imagined “bad mom” accusers, “Amanda was born into the right family.” And then she asks for the camera to be turned off.
    When, months later, I asked Carol Todd for an interview, she deferred or canceled our meeting a half-dozen times; her reasons sometimes seemed genuine and sometimes not. I’d resigned myself to not meeting her at all when she had an apparent change of heart and asked me to lunch. So I traveled to her hometown and sat myself down at a restaurant she likes called Earl’s, where pretty, polished girls, about the age Amanda would be by now, brought us our sandwiches and coffee.
    Carol Todd—in thick-rimmed glasses and a black hoodie—seemed a sedate woman, though a determined one. She was guarded when she met me, having already grown hardened by the treatment of media following her daughter’s death. And she had another reason to be suspicious: In the wake of everything, she’d become a victim of cyberbullying herself. A few committed individuals from around the world send her messages, attacks on her daughter, attacks on herself. They are relentless. In several e-mails she sent me before and after our interview, she expressed her anxiety about the “haters” who were “out there.”
    Like her daughter, Carol responded to such harassment not by retreating, but by broadcasting herself more. She began to maintain a regular blog, where she advocates for reform in schools and governments. She set up a legacy fund to support her cause and speaks to politicians or packed gymnasiums about her experience. She has even produced a line of clothing and wristbands, emblazoned with her daughter’s name, to raise funds. When YouTube took down Amanda’s video in the days following her death, Carol requested that the video be made live again because “ it was something that needed to be watched by many .”
    She tells me that something in the world was stirred following her daughter’s death. “Amanda put herself out there. I mean, she wasn’t an angel; I’m the first to admit that. But she did what she did, and I do think it woke up the world.” The media outlets that picked up the story include
The New Yorker,
Anderson Cooper 360º,
and
Dateline
. Vigils were held in thirty-eight countries.
    “Amanda wasn’t unique in having all this happen to her, though,” I said. “Why did she become such a rallying force?”
    “Well, it was the video, obviously. It was