But we love drama
What once used to be just on usenet has sprang up on every other website over the last few years. Forums.
Easy to have your own forums these days. Plenty of free software, online support, technical documents. Download some software, throw into a server, stir and add users.
It's hard to even grasp the idea of just how many online communities there must exist these days.. and every single one thinks it's unique in its membership and closeness. I'm sure they all are unique.. after all we're all unique as human beings go.. so we all form unique communities.
What is not unique to any particular forum is dramas. This article at the Register is what brought up today's topic. This is something I've seen several times now.. a user's brother/sister/mother/significant other/dog posts in a forum that the user has died.. few months later turns out it was a joke/hoax/whatever you want to call it.
The online world has finally brought us something every teenager wanted at some point. Who has not thought, in a moment of teenage angst and hormone driven self-pity, "I'll kill myself, that'll show them!".. Of course the major flaw in this plan is that if you do commit such act you cannot be around to watch the results.. The crying, the pain, the guilty feelings "Oh, look what we've done, what we've driven him/her to".
Internet to the rescue! Once again, the virtual reality has provided us with something true reality cannot.. Well, at least I think reality cannot.. for all I know ghosts of suicides past are hanging around my desk right now with disapproving looks on their faces (hm, can ghosts have faces?).
Steve has once coined a perfect term for this behaviour.. dramacide.
This brings me to my good deed for the day, mainly this declaration:
I do solemnly swear and declare, that if I ever decide to kill myself (online or in reality) I will not commit dramacide.. I will quietly go and none of my cats will come back to post about it.
You're welcome.
Comments
Yes, this has happened before on a newsgroup I used to belong to. Apparantly the real dude was the one that reported the death, because he played the dude that died before for his daughter's psychology class, and just couldn't do it anymore. He was giving his wife recipies to exchange with other people at the NG and everything. From that point on, whenever someone goes on the net and says they died, I say its crap unless the person doesn't post for 6 months afterwards...
Posted by: Techie2000 | December 7, 2002 12:51 PM
PopeMatt committed suicide last week. This is his cat writting in his place. Send me many cans of tuna to help me deal with the grief of loosing my kind master who isn't around to feed me anymore.
Posted by: PopeMatt | December 7, 2002 06:16 PM
I know this one all too well. I used to work for a dot-bomb which hosted what was at the time one of the largest online gaming forums in the world. We had several fake deaths a year - the worst one ended up with a group of people from our community attempting to attend to funeral only to find out the church didn't exist. It was pretty sick.
Posted by: Simon Willison | December 7, 2002 07:22 PM
OK - I just read the linked story and that "suicide" happened in the community I was talking about, at the time I was working there (I remember it well). Talk about a bizzare coincidence.
Posted by: Simon Willison | December 7, 2002 07:29 PM