New media and reality
The Onion
This seems a little unrealistic, but of course people have videotaped suicide notes. And let us not forget Brandon Vedas, who typed away in a chat room in front of his webcam as he overdosed:
Wikipedia
Vedas's last words, typed in IRC, were: "I told u I was hardcore." Stated Vedas' brother, regarding the chatroom: "It seems like the group mentality really contributed to it. These people treat it like somehow it's not the real world. They forget it's not just words on a screen."
I certainly won't play reactionary and blame the medium. People killed themselves long before IM. However, the "unreal" aspect mentioned above seems interesting. Does the medium insulate the user from reality? What then is reality?
Food for thought. Enjoy your Wednesday.
2 Comments:
I'm not sure how these two sites relate. The Onion is a humor site, so it's not intended to be realistic. Are you saying that the Onion's article is mocking incidents like Brandon Vedas's suicide? Could you talk further about what you mean when you ask "does the medium insulate the user from reality?" This seems to assume that there is some "outside" reality that is accessible and knowable to everyone.
7:18 PM
Re: the Vedas suicide and the brother's comments ... In the report included here, there seems enough of an accounting of reality to measure the risk of "an investigation" as somehow a threat and to engage a group decision in a move to abort the phone call. This demonstrates an assignment of reality on some level, including the reality of various oher participating chatters. The question for me is more along the lines ... how did the threat of a police investigation become more real in this environment than the sense of loss one might encounter with the death of a friend? How is the fidelity of friendship that might be presumed among chatters in the "skin world" distributed among chatters in a "cyber world"?
7:18 PM
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