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I have often wondered whether the so-called social media could be as accurately described as the anti-social media. In restaurants, for example, you often see people, even lovers, attending to their screens rather than to the person opposite or next to them. As the grass is always greener on the other side so, apparently, is the conversation more interesting on the screen than at the table. Perhaps we prefer virtual people to real people.
Moreover, many of the sentiments expressed on the social media are distinctly unpleasant. According to a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry[1], when a young man aged 21 announced on a Swedish forum that he was going to live-stream his suicide by hanging, a contributor to the internet forum write:
Stupid fuck, strangulation is no pleasure. Don’t you have a car… carbon monoxide rules.
There were far more posts after the suicide than before or during it. According to the authors, 49 per cent of people who expressed an attitude to the suicide thought it was tragic, but 24 per cent thought it was exciting, interesting or funny. One post read:
Call me sick, but have never laughed so much in my life lol [laugh out loud].
It seems that the social media have not so much abolished censorship as abolished (at least some for some) not only self-censorship, but awareness that it is sometimes or often desirable. Common decency cannot survive incontinent self-expression in public.
Nearly half of the posts that discussed responsibility for the suicide indicated that those who participated in the forum before and during it bore some responsibility, either by urging the young man on (‘Good luck then!’), or by being too passive. But the manner in which these posts were written hardly suggests that the milk of human kindness ran strongly through the veins of the writers:
All these disgusting idiots… who incited him to do it. Hope you will suffer for the rest of your lives. Filthy bastards!
Or:
Sincerely hope that you will carry this with you for the rest of your lives… Are you satisfied now, you fucking idiots!
Note that this is not mere moral condemnation and the hope that the people concerned (and others) will learn from the experience: it is, rather, the vengeful hope that they will suffer greatly.
Of those who discussed the opportunity to have prevented the suicide, 38 per cent (36 in number) thought that it could or should not have been prevented. Among the posts of those who thought it should not have been prevented were the following:
Ha-ha, awesome, if you want to kill yourself it’s your own decision, no one should interfere.
Or:
This is sick, but as I said, why stop the guy? If he doesn’t feel like living any longer, it is up to him to make the decision whether to do it
or not.
Or:
There are many reasons to commit suicide, but I respect people who want it, after all it is their own life and body, and I think they should
be allowed to do what they want with those things.
In other words, they have an inalienable right to commit suicide.
The crudity of this way of thinking is not only obvious, but is characteristic of those whose moral philosophy is largely confined to the enumeration of rights. The utilitarian jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham once called talk of rights ‘nonsense on stilts,’ but irrespective of their philosophical justification, the belief in their existence, especially when they multiply, has the effect of blunting moral reflection. For example, when I hear someone say that people have a right to health care, I ask him whether he can think of any reason why people should have health care other than that they have a right to it: and generally they can’t think of such a reason.
Let us suppose, for a moment, that there really is a right to commit suicide. Would it follow that you had a right to commit suicide in public, wherever you liked, by whatever means you liked? For those who, like the writer quoted above, believe that ‘after all, it is [the suicide’s] own life and body, and… he should be allowed to do what he wants with those things,’ the answer must be ‘Yes:’ you can dispose of your life wherever, whenever and however you like. But, if this attitude were universally accepted, it would entail a society in which someone could sue you for infringing his rights by preventing him from jumping off a bridge or in front of a train. Such a society would be a very callous one.
Or take the concept of owning one’s body and life. One does not own one’s body or life, for such a relationship implies that one can exist separately from one’s body or one’s life. But even if such a relationship of ownership existed, it would not imply a right of disposal any way one liked. I own my house, but I cannot dispose of it just as I like; there would be both moral and legal objections to my pulling it down on a whim if I so decided. Ownership does not automatically entail a limitless right of disposal.
For the record I believe that suicide may be rational and in some circumstances laudable: but this is not because suicide is a right. Talk of rights coarsens moral reflection, and I suspect that in some unspecified number of persons the social media coarsen it further.
[1] Westerlund, M., Hadlackzy, G., and Wasserman, D., Case study of posts before and after a suicide on a Swedish internet forum, B. J. Psych., 2015, 207, 476-482
