Oh, calm down - it was dead when I found it.Death: there's a lot of it about. Seven Welsh kids commit suicide and Bebo gets the blame. Heath Ledger swallows enough pills to give Keith Richards pause and promptly shuffles off, his passing marked by ten thousand tasteless Brokeback Mountain jokes. Aged chess champion Bobby Fischer dies of being old and mad and gets the same treatment. All life can be found on the web including, apparently, that uncomfortable bit at the end.
Which I reckon is fair enough. People live their whole lives through the net these days so it makes sense that they'll die there as well. I'm less sure that, as has been stated in the press, the internet can make you spontaneously want to kill yourself but I suppose 'Internet Death Cult' makes for better copy than a sober, reasoned analysis of why seven perfectly normal, perfectly healthy teenagers would decide to take their own lives.
(Incidentally - six boys kill themselves with nary a peep from anyone; one girl joins them and suddenly it's all over the press, a national fucking tragedy. It's almost like society doesn't care what happens to young men. Oh, hang on... it doesn't, unless there's a war going on that we need some corpses for. Sorry about that, the memo has only just reached me.)
The net seems to be to be just another aspect of this huge, gigantic mess we call life, one that reflects stuff that's already there. If you're going to top yourself then you'll have found the reasons and rationalisations elsewhere; the only thing the internet will do is confirm or deny what you're already thinking. Possibly the realisation that, despite Myspace's claims that you have 250 friends, you have not one single person to go to the pub with might do it, although it seems unlikely. But if you are thinking of killing yourself (and, frankly, I'd rather you didn't) then you should read this. It might help.
Which I reckon is fair enough. People live their whole lives through the net these days so it makes sense that they'll die there as well. I'm less sure that, as has been stated in the press, the internet can make you spontaneously want to kill yourself but I suppose 'Internet Death Cult' makes for better copy than a sober, reasoned analysis of why seven perfectly normal, perfectly healthy teenagers would decide to take their own lives.
(Incidentally - six boys kill themselves with nary a peep from anyone; one girl joins them and suddenly it's all over the press, a national fucking tragedy. It's almost like society doesn't care what happens to young men. Oh, hang on... it doesn't, unless there's a war going on that we need some corpses for. Sorry about that, the memo has only just reached me.)
The net seems to be to be just another aspect of this huge, gigantic mess we call life, one that reflects stuff that's already there. If you're going to top yourself then you'll have found the reasons and rationalisations elsewhere; the only thing the internet will do is confirm or deny what you're already thinking. Possibly the realisation that, despite Myspace's claims that you have 250 friends, you have not one single person to go to the pub with might do it, although it seems unlikely. But if you are thinking of killing yourself (and, frankly, I'd rather you didn't) then you should read this. It might help.
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