Read Online The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michael Harris
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always the video. If she hadn’t made that video, you wouldn’t be sitting here.”
She was right, of course. We have all, in some way, become complicit in the massive broadcasting that online life invites. But occasionally someone—usually a digital native like Amanda—will shock us awake by turning a banal thing like YouTube into a scorching confessional.
And everyone wants to hear a confession. On the evening of Todd’s death, her mother looked at the video and saw it had twenty-eight hundred views. The next morning, there were ten thousand. Two weeks later, the video had been watched seventeen million times .
It was uploaded to YouTube on September 7, 2012. The picture is black and white. Todd stands before the camera, visible from just below the eyes down to her waist. She holds up, and flips through, a series of flash cards that detail her travails of the few years previous. I still remember adolescent angst and bullying as a deeply private struggle, so for me it’s uncomfortable to watch her feed her trauma into a system like YouTube, to watch her give over so much of herself. The song “Hear You Me” by the band Jimmy Eat World plays softly in the background. Todd flips silently through her flash cards. The script on her cards is simple and, by adult standards, sentimental. It is also a naked cry for help that the YouTube community responded to with unavailing praise and cool scorn. The girls who physically assaulted Todd posted their own cruel comments within hours of the video’s being uploaded.
• • • • •
Extraordinary as Todd’s suicide may have been, we should pause here to note that the violence of her reaction to online harassment is not an anomaly. Recent research from Michigan State University found that, for example, Singapore children who were bullied online became just as likely to consider suicide as those who were bullied offline. In fact, researchers found that cyberbullying produced slightly more suicidal thoughts: 22 percent of students who were physically bullied reported suicidal thoughts, and that number rose to 28 percent in the case of students who were bullied online.
Todd was hardly alone in all this. The stories of a heartless online world keep coming. I recently read about a University of Guelph student who decided to broadcast his suicide live online—using the notorious 4chan message board to attract an audience willing to watch him burn to death in his dorm room. (The twenty-year-old man was stopped midattempt and taken to the hospital with serious injuries.) His message to his viewers: “I thought I would finally give back to the community in the best way possible: I am willing to an hero [commit suicide] 6 on cam for you all.” Another 4chan user set up a video chat room for him. Two hundred watched (the chat room’s limit) as he downed pills and vodka before setting his room on fire and crawling under a blanket. As the fire began to consume him, the young man appears to have typed to his viewers from beneath the covers: “#omgimonfire.” Some users on the message board egged him on, suggesting more poetic ways to die. These desperate actions make for an extreme example, but I think they speak to something common in us, in fact. Most of us don’t wish to give our lives over entirely to the anonymous Internet, but there is yet a disturbing intensity to the self-broadcasting that most of us have learned to adore.
To some degree, we all live out our emotional lives through technologies. We’re led into deep intimacies with our gadgets precisely because our brains are imbued with a compulsion to socialize, to connect whenever possible, and connection is what our technologies are so good at offering. Some of my friends literally sleep with their phones and check their e-mail before rolling out of bed, as though the machine were a lover that demands a good-morning kiss. E-mails and tweets and blog posts might easily be dull or cruel—but the machine itself
She was right, of course. We have all, in some way, become complicit in the massive broadcasting that online life invites. But occasionally someone—usually a digital native like Amanda—will shock us awake by turning a banal thing like YouTube into a scorching confessional.
And everyone wants to hear a confession. On the evening of Todd’s death, her mother looked at the video and saw it had twenty-eight hundred views. The next morning, there were ten thousand. Two weeks later, the video had been watched seventeen million times .
It was uploaded to YouTube on September 7, 2012. The picture is black and white. Todd stands before the camera, visible from just below the eyes down to her waist. She holds up, and flips through, a series of flash cards that detail her travails of the few years previous. I still remember adolescent angst and bullying as a deeply private struggle, so for me it’s uncomfortable to watch her feed her trauma into a system like YouTube, to watch her give over so much of herself. The song “Hear You Me” by the band Jimmy Eat World plays softly in the background. Todd flips silently through her flash cards. The script on her cards is simple and, by adult standards, sentimental. It is also a naked cry for help that the YouTube community responded to with unavailing praise and cool scorn. The girls who physically assaulted Todd posted their own cruel comments within hours of the video’s being uploaded.
• • • • •
Extraordinary as Todd’s suicide may have been, we should pause here to note that the violence of her reaction to online harassment is not an anomaly. Recent research from Michigan State University found that, for example, Singapore children who were bullied online became just as likely to consider suicide as those who were bullied offline. In fact, researchers found that cyberbullying produced slightly more suicidal thoughts: 22 percent of students who were physically bullied reported suicidal thoughts, and that number rose to 28 percent in the case of students who were bullied online.
Todd was hardly alone in all this. The stories of a heartless online world keep coming. I recently read about a University of Guelph student who decided to broadcast his suicide live online—using the notorious 4chan message board to attract an audience willing to watch him burn to death in his dorm room. (The twenty-year-old man was stopped midattempt and taken to the hospital with serious injuries.) His message to his viewers: “I thought I would finally give back to the community in the best way possible: I am willing to an hero [commit suicide] 6 on cam for you all.” Another 4chan user set up a video chat room for him. Two hundred watched (the chat room’s limit) as he downed pills and vodka before setting his room on fire and crawling under a blanket. As the fire began to consume him, the young man appears to have typed to his viewers from beneath the covers: “#omgimonfire.” Some users on the message board egged him on, suggesting more poetic ways to die. These desperate actions make for an extreme example, but I think they speak to something common in us, in fact. Most of us don’t wish to give our lives over entirely to the anonymous Internet, but there is yet a disturbing intensity to the self-broadcasting that most of us have learned to adore.
To some degree, we all live out our emotional lives through technologies. We’re led into deep intimacies with our gadgets precisely because our brains are imbued with a compulsion to socialize, to connect whenever possible, and connection is what our technologies are so good at offering. Some of my friends literally sleep with their phones and check their e-mail before rolling out of bed, as though the machine were a lover that demands a good-morning kiss. E-mails and tweets and blog posts might easily be dull or cruel—but the machine itself
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