“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”
One of the many horrific aspects of the suicide of the Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi was the fact that he posted his intentions as a Status Update on Facebook. To me this act epitomized the very worst of the distancing effect that the web has had, not just between one person and another, but a person and his or her true self.
It's impossible to track the thought process that caused him to pause between the decision and the act long enough to type that up for all his friends in such an impersonal/personal forum. Did he want someone to find and stop him, as they say with many suicide attempts? Or did he simply decide to get the most attention for it, paying back his tormenters in the same public way? (They are now facing criminal charges).
Tonight I attended a screening of The Social Network, followed by a Q&A with my longtime friend, sometime employer, and unparalleled writer Aaron Sorkin.
As the credits rolled, with the theater still dark, little flashes of light started popping up all over the room. People had whipped out their BlackBerrys and iPhones to see what messages they had missed during the one hour-57-minute running time. (Actually, one woman couldn't even wait that long; she took out her phone and started texting during the last five minutes of the movie. I went over to her seat and told her it was distracting. She seemed amazed at MY gumption.)
Aaron entered at the back of the theater, and I pointed out the sea of phonescreens, and he said "I know. What's become of us?"
Aaron kept his personal feelings about the Internet out of the movie
