Faking your own death, and other interesting details about social networking

Social networking does have a purpose.
I know that now.
There have been times when I've doubted it, times when I've wondered if all it was really doing was keeping people prisoner to their computer screens.
But no, there's something powerful in social networking groups.

Last month, a friend of mine (out-of-work and a little bored) decided to fake his own death via mySpace. He asked one of his buddies to follow suit and post a farewell letter on his mySpace.
The ensuing madness was something he never intended (I think). People caught wind of it and, suddenly, there was support and prayers pouring in from all angles. Individuals to which this guy had barely spoken were breaking into tears, leaving sorrowful messages on his mySpace page. The whole thing seemed kind of absurd, but it was real... I think. It should have been apparent to all of us that something was up. After all, the picture had been changed slightly to reflect a memorial photo and the information came up rather abruptly, some guy even posted funeral arrangements. It should have appeared concocted, but that's the thing it didn't.

It got so big that someone even called his death into the newspaper. Not officially, of course. They had heard, from a friend of a friend who had read it on mySpace, that he was dead.
When he finally announced that it had all been a hoax, many of those people who had once left sad messages mourning the fellow's life, now left him brutal, downright nasty messages. Some even wished he really were dead.

Those who knew the guy left nothing except, maybe, a jovial reply. "Ah, you got me." Something like that. A few were a little irritated over all the hooplah, but nothing as dramatic as tears.

In light of this, it occurs to me now how dangerous, yet how useful social networking can be. The word "armchair activists" is quite familiar to many people. It was coined by Michael Wood, vice-president of Teenagers Unlimited, to describe teens who will engage in community service only if it's served up to them on a silver platter. Social networking, especially Facebook, has allowed friends living far away to keep in contact with each other. It has, also, created opportunities for people to become gregarious without making the effort and taking the risk of engaging in actual social interaction. It's a truly malleable power that really folds in the palm of the holder.

Clive Thompson wrote in a June 2007 issue of Wired Magazine that a phenomenon he referred to as "social proprioception" was happening in online communities. "When I see that my friend Misha is 'waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,' that's not much information," writes Thompson. "But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me." This, notes Thompson, gives "a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination."

He was talking about Twitter and Dodgeball, but it can easily be assigned to Facebook, especially since software introduced in 2006 that posts allows a user's friends to know everything he or she does on Facebook. It creates a "third place", as Fred Gooltz said in an Advomatic article last year, a place outside of fantasy and reality, a hybrid between the two.

Now, let's return to my friend and his online "death". Imagine what it would take for people to accept such a hoax that was, pretty much, confined to mySpace. They would have to accept the internet as real and maybe even this guy (who they now thought was dead) as their "friend" even though, technically, he really wasn't. People know the internet's not "real", but how do we define "real"? Think about the movie "The Matrix" or William Gibson's prophetic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. The "net" wasn't real only to the point that it didn't affect our lives outside the computer.

Maybe my friend only played his death because he was bored, maybe we wanted a little attention, but what he did was invoke a little reality into a mainframe that wasn't used to supporting it. Maybe the truth that came out left people feeling a little fake for having emotions for a "mySpace friend" as they would a "real friend". Maybe fake isn't even the right word. I'll say that if I was them, my anger would be partly because he had faked his death and partly because I wasn't sure why I was sad in the first place over a guy I barely even knew.

What I'm heading toward is this: it occured to me that online communities and actual communities are no longer easily separated into "fantasy" and "reality". I believe that the availability of details about people's lives are creating something new, a second life (pun intended) that is as real as the world outside of it.

Although a blog post isn't the place to really dive deep into this subject, I think it can open an interesting discussion. What do you think about online communities? Are they helpful? Are they hurtful? Are they, in some ways, reality? Or, are they an escape from reality? Where do you think they're heading?

Log In | Register as a new member