How psychologically traumatizing will it be for someone that isn't suicidal to receive the Facebook "someone's concerned about you" message? What happens when several "asshole" kids do this to the same person? Next thing you know, they've got the scarlet letter "S" on them. Nice FB. My wife thinks that it has no potential for harm and because it's the prime source of socialization for kids, it is ideally positioned to help. It was an interesting dinner. Time will tell who was right. I hope she was, but I doubt it. -Kids are cruel.
That's not her fault - most people over the age of 18 have never stared into the abyss. Almost none of them have studied it. I've done both. This is a clusterfuck of epic proportions on Facebook's part. People hear "4chan" and they think "cat pics and disgusting snuff" - presuming they think anything. What they don't think is "school of piranhas stripping an ox to bone in 2 minutes." I was bored one evening and decided to check in on /b/. There was a girl there who had promised to kill herself live on her webcam. She got maybe two entreaties not to do it and maybe 200 demanding immediate satisfaction. She didn't, of course - she was just toying with /b/. Don't toy with /b/. It played out in realtime - they got her name, her address, her school, her parents' names, their phone number, her Facebook, her myspace, her eBay account. They called her, they wrote to her school, they reported her to eBay, they changed her Facebook password and started editing it. This is all as she watched, horrified, her expression on the Webcam. She didn't even have time to turn shit off - inside 15 minutes they owned her life and did everything they could to destroy it. After 20 minutes 4chan shut the thread down but it took less time for these guys to destroy her life than it took for them to order a pizza. ...because she reneged on her promise to kill herself as they watched. The Internet isn't "real" to lots of people. Being able to anonymously send "don't kill yourself" notes to people is a great way to indicate to them they should kill themselves. It even gives you deniability - "I wasn't harassing them, I was honestly so worried they would kill themselves that I had 500 of my friends report her for suicidal tendencies. And look! We were right! She's dead!" And they'll do that. When I was "rude" to someone as a moderator on Reddit, I got about 600 PMs calling me niggerfag jewcunt. most of them intimated that I should immediately kill myself. A good third of them suggested I do so soon, lest the messager rape my mother. This tool bundles two of the Anonymous Internet's favorite things - death and anonymity - into a handy button. This is now three years out of date. Your wife should still watch it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/ http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Frontline_Growing_Up_Onlin... To illustrate how out-of-touch we really are with "online" the font chosen by PBS to represent kids and our online existence? OCR-A, adopted by ANSI in 1977:
Being a teenager is rough stuff, I haven't forgotten. I'll check out the links later, I'm at a bar on my phone. All the talk of "Manhattans" here on Hubski planted a thirst in me. Cheers!
Have one for me. I'm so under the weather with this cold that I slept in 'til noon.