Kieran Healy

Rorschach Test

What’s your reaction to this story?

It demonstrates the worst of the web and anonymous relationships…there is more meanness and more objectification of others. People do and say things they’d never do and say in their “real lives”.

However, I don’t think this sort of crowd mentality is unique to the web. It’s also the equivalent of the crowd yellng “jump” at the guy on top of the building.

Sick and depressed.

Is the crowd really the issue here? All indications to me are that this was a guy looking to commit suicide somehow, and this just happened to be the method that he used.

“…like an Internet version of the notorious 1964 Kew Gardens, Queens, stabbing of Kitty Genovese…” Only, Genovese’s neighbors weren’t egging the rapist on…

Sad. that’s it.

A look at some typical victims of our atomized, individualistic society. One victim dead, a lot of other victims bereft of the ability to value life. A national tragedy unaddressed (except by budget cuts…).—LC

Sickened and saddened.

And, yes, Maynard, the crowd is the issue. The Web provides a lot of promiscuous social interaction. It’s not always easy to recognize the shallowness of connection that allows for, even encourages, anti-social behaviors ranging from littering to Freeping to horrors like this.

Good grief, to read the above posts in aggregate, you’d think absolutely none of the IRC “onlookers” had a single humane impulse, or tried to help.

But according to the news story itself, that’s not the case. Some of them seem to have tried quite a bit to help.

I suspect most of the commenters upthread, and most readers of the story, don’t grasp just what a noisy, jangly, theatrical medium IRC is. There’s an enormous amount of chain-yanking and role-playing there. I suspect that even some of the “onlookers” who said cruel things may have genuinely believed the kid was engaged in the usual IRC horseplay, bullshit, and general acting-out. That may well have been foolish of them, but given the nature of IRC I would want to know a lot more specifics before convicting them of Kitty Genoese levels of depraved indifference.

And maybe, given all the details, I would convict them. But the story doesn’t provide anything like enough information.

I think people have to have a certain measure of sociopathy in them already in order to be callous to people they interact with on-line.

But really, it just goes to show that drug addicts aren’t really true friends to each other.
Like when drug addicts interviewed claim they have buddies and they “watch out for each other”… if they were watching out for each other, they wouldn’t be letting each other do that to themselves, and usually it’s quite the opposite.

I was a drug addict for 28 years. Seems to me I experienced true friendship, and was capable of extending it. “Chloe”, of course, may know better.

Alternate Rohrsach test here.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden :
You really knew drug addicts that YOU were more important to than their fixes?
You really NEVER treated anybody poorly because of your drug addiction?
Your drug buddies were REALLY the best friends you’ve ever had? They treated you with respect, love, caring and honour?
You were very caring, honourable, trustworthy, and loyal when you were high on whatever drug you were obsessed with?
I find that very hard to believe.

And why exactly did you put my name in quotations? Is that supposed to mean something?

Between stories like this and Fox’s evening lineup, i’m seeing the separation between reality and Stephen King’s (writing as Richard Bachman—The Running Man and related stories) macabre vision of the future become ever thinner.

FDL: Maybe that’s why “reality television” is more popular than ever. ;)

You people are all a bunch of crying leftwing nut jobs. There is ONE person at fault and ONLY one. The jack*ss that ate the pills. Last time I checked, IRC did not give you the means to physically force pills into the mouths of unwilling victims…