The Night We Live-Tweeted The Suicide of A Desperate Man
The white Bentley stopped in front of a Toyota dealership near Universal City after a three hour chase on Hollywood Freeway and Interstates 5, 10 and 405. The stand-off began at around 11:00PM PST, with hundreds tuning in to the FOX11, ABC7 and KCAL9 live feeds online.
Before long, Twitter streams were on fire with commentary from people around the world about what was happening. People watching gave in to speculation about the identity driver, debating whether it was hip hop singer Chris Brown, charged earlier with assault—allegedly against his girlfriend, the singer Rihanna or rapper DJ Khaled, as well as the reason for his fleeing.
As time passed with no action, the public became more and more irate. Jokes followed, including the creation of the fake account @WhiteBentley, which ran a stream of comments as though he was the driver inside the car.
The jokes soon turned sinister, with many expressing someone should just shoot the driver down and save the LAPD thousands, and still others suggesting the driver end his life to avoid repercussions of the extended chase. Then, after news reports began coming in that the driver might indeed have shot himself and the ABC7 cameras zoomed out to avoid exposing the public to a gruesome scene, the disappointment was almost unanimous.
“They aren’t going to zoom in and show us the possible brains, bullshit!” a chilling tweet read.
The driver and law enforcement personnel involved were no longer human to those of us watching. Moving around inside our computer screens, they had become characters in a play put on for our entertainment.
DEATH OF EMPATHY ONLINE
In a recent e-mail to his mailing list which he later posted to his blog, Jason Calacanis talked about the death of empathy on the internet. Speaking about his friend Josh Harris—the mastermind behind “We Live In Public,” an art project that involved the constant surveillance of Harris’ loft and exposed his collapsing relationship with his then-girlfriend—Calacanis reflected on the attitude changes people undergo online:
Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.
… Internet Asperger’s Syndrome (IAS): I’ve come to recognize a new disorder, the underlying cause of Harris’ Law. This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost.
In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.
… In IAS, screen names and avatars shift from representing people to representing characters in a video game. Our 2600’s and 64’s have trained us to pound these characters into submission in order to level up. We look at bloggers, people on Twitter and podcasters not as individuals, but as challenges–in some cases, “bosses”–that we must crush to make it to the next phase.
The dual nature of Asperger’s, from my understanding, is that it makes the individual focused on very specific behaviors–obsessively so in many cases–while decreasing their capacity for basic empathy and communication. It’s almost as if you trade off intensity in one area for common decency and communications in another area–not that the person has a choice.
Well, trading off people’s feelings for page views and Twitter followers sounds familiar to me.
When we began connecting on Twitter via the hashtags for the chase and bouncing off each other’s comments with retweets and replies, we became more and more committed to the race to break developments as quickly as possible and one-up the clever comments and simultaneously began to disconnect from the gravity of the situation for those involved.
“i want at least 10 new followers out of my #chase coverage” someone tweeted as the chase was first unfolding.
As the FOX11 link that we’d tr.immed for the live feed was passed along the Twittersphere, my friend Atherton Bartelby updated me on how many click-throughs it had received.
People were engaged in a deadly stand-off and we were looking at metrics.
BLOODSPORT IN MEATSPACE
“We’re harvesting our lives and putting them online,” Calacanis writes in his piece. “We’re addicted to gaining followers and friends (or email subscribers, as the case may be), and reading comments we get in return. As we look for validation and our daily 15 minutes of fame, we do so at the cost of our humanity.”
People who meet Calacanis in person, he recounts, are quick to apologize for what they’ve written to and about him. This, he says, shows “normal folks will lose their empathy online, only to regain it the instant they face the ‘object’ (aka real person) of their scorn.” But he worries about the patterns we’re establishing.
“Writing about a person turns them into a character,” my friend Becky recently told me. “The character does not have the final dimension which gives life.”
As we blog, tweet and report about one another, we draft ourselves as characters. We cease to be human and become accessories to our story. Having been objectified, we become easy targets.
“Today, we’re destroying each other with words, but teaching ourselves to objectify individuals and to identify with aggressors will result in more than psychological violence,” Calacanis writes. “This behavior will find its way into the real world, like it did when Wayne Forrester murdered his wife Emma over a change in her Facebook status, from married to single.”
He’s not wrong. On the same day Calacanis’s post went live on his blog, Michael Arrington blogged about being spit on after leaving the Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich, Germany.
“The event was over and I was on my way back to my hotel,” Arrington recounts. “The last thing I wanted was another product pitch as I hurried to the car that would drive me to Davos for the next event. So when I saw this person approach me out of the corner of my eye, I turned away slightly and avoided eye contact. Sometimes that works. But in this case all it did was make me vulnerable to the last thing I expected.”
What happens when seeing one another in the flesh is no longer enough to humanize us?
“We’re training ourselves to destroy other people, and there’s a generation growing up with this in their DNA,” Calacanis says. “They don’t remember a world when communications were primarily in the real world.”
THE SILENCE
By the end of the night #chase was the top trending topic on Twitter, registering 1,199 tweets in just five hours.
Immediately after the last live news feed went off the air, an eerie silence descended on Twitter. As the reality that the driver of the car had killed himself sank in, along with the knowledge that I had watched it all unfold, I stared at my tweets. A sense of shame fell over me as well as I realized that I, too, had objectified the people involved in that situation.
Is Calacanis right? Does technology dehumanize people? What does this mean as more of our lives shift to the web? Can we reverse the process somehow?
I don’t have answers.
As I take a moment of silence for the yet unidentified man, I pray too that we’ll find a way to bring humanity back.
RELATED
Bentley driver in chase was a former luxury car dealer in Chicago by Andrew Blankstein, Jeremy Gorner and Noreen Ahmed-Ullah on the L.A. Now blog at The LA Times.
Suspect leads police on low-speed pursuit in a Bentley, kills self during standoff by Carol J. Williams and Andrew Blankstein at The LA Times
Twitter *kills* Google in real-time search by Dave Winer
Why Twitter Is Bad by Jason Rosenberg
#chase on Twitter Search
We Live In Public, the 2009 Sundance Festival award-winning documentary about Josh Harris’s project
OTHER VIEWS
Adventures in Hyperreality: Live Suicide and Why It Doesn’t Matter by Jason Quackenbush
Twitter Is Killing Your Soul by Amber Rhea
The White Bentley Chase Did Not Happen by Bonni Rambatan
Suicide Hashtag Livetweeting by Sandra Kiume
Internet Hate – Not So Much With the Relevance of Anonymity by Liz Rizzo
Special thanks to Ryan Kuder, who brought Jason Calacanis’s post to my attention.
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February 10th, 2009 at 8:54 am
I have found that using my own name in social networking helps hold me accountable for my words and their results–and constantly reminds me of who I am.
Excellent article!
OMG, Roberta Murphys last blog post: Considering Loan Modification for Your San Diego Home?
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AV Flox Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Calacanis mentions in his post–which I strongly recommend you read as well–how Korea is dealing with cyber-bullying by requiring people to use their social security numbers to sign up for social networks:
“This lack of anonymity is one of the most enlightened things I’ve heard of from one of the most advanced–if not the most advanced–Internet communities in the world. Ownership of one’s behavior? Who knew?!?!?
“I’m sure some of the wacky Internet contingents will flame me for saying that anonymity is a bad thing, but the fact is that anonymous environments create the environments in which Godwin’s and Harris’ Laws apply. What’s the point of starting these communities if they eventually end in pain and suffering? Anonymity is overrated in my book. (Whistle-blowers are an exception, and last time I checked, anyone can anonymously drop an envelope in a mailbox, so it’s not like the Internet needs to be there for that).”
I think you’re right that using your name or otherwise identifying yourself goes a long way in making you responsible for your actions. It’s definitely something to keep in mind.
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February 10th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I think it is disingenuous to point fingers at technological tools. People have been bloodthirstily curious since the dawn of time. Consider printed broadsheets in the early days of printing presses, or how people behave in a news room or for that matter watching TV. Why the particular pearl-clutching over Twitter? We are in the society of the spectacle already. I don’t think that the Internet adds to dehumanisation.
I would like to disagree also about anonymity. We need anonymity to ensure political and personal freedom of speech. It is all very well to say that using your name makes you responsible, when you are speaking from a position of immense privilege.
Cheers and thanks for an interesting post!
OMG, Lizs last blog post: Programming languages and science fiction!
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AV Flox Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
I agree that anonymity is important in certain situations. But a lot of times on the web, we’re not engaging in the name of our political or personal freedom. We’re simply engaging. There is a difference between the measures that must be taken by a whistle-blower and the everyday interaction of individuals. Owning our behavior goes a long way in curbing cruelty.
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February 10th, 2009 at 10:59 am
I missed this news story until this post. It’s a really sad one and I’m sorry to hear about it.
That said, the first thing that popped into my head was yellow journalism, the oeuvre of Weegee, and every joke I heard about the OJ Simpson case.
As far as the death of empathy online–did it ever live here, as a whole? Or are there just pockets of it due to individual choices?
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AV Flox Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I remember when I started blogging, before it was about views or links or fame or anything beyond simply connecting with someone who got you, there was a bigger sense of community. Circles were smaller, we clustered around those with whom we had things in common, and we shared a lot, including some of our deepest hopes and secrets.
Now, many of us have stopped blogging about our personal lives–at least publicly. Feeds have been pulled off Google and key entries password-protected. It reminds me of growing up and never locking your door as a child, then waking up one early dawn and opening your six locks and bolts on your apartment door to take the dog out for a walk.
Things change.
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February 10th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I am often amazed by the words and actions of others in cyberspace, and I don’t really understand why things like this happen. So I suppose I have to be open to other’s explanations.
But I don’t consider cyberspace differently than I consider real life. I don’t act differently here, and I don’t feel freedom or a lack of responsibility that I wouldn’t feel in real life. So it’s difficult for me to understand these things.
I will say that the people twittering like that are the same people who would be sitting in a bar saying that stuff – it’s just different on Twitter because it lives in print and doesn’t just evaporate into the ether where you can pretend you didn’t say it.
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AV Flox Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Excellent point, Liz! This is very true–there is a degree of permanence to tweets that is not present when we engage in conversation.
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February 11th, 2009 at 11:51 am
[...] as easily as they might connect – as with all forms of media. I’m glad to see #bentley #chase criticized for that, but jerks will keep being [...]
February 15th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
[...] Flox has a post entitled, “The Night We Live-Tweeted The Suicide of A Desperate Man,” and I could not disagree with it more. The premise is that social media is making us desensitized [...]
February 15th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Internet Asperger’s Syndrome: because it’s impossible to criticize people’s online behavior without being ableist. Sort of makes me think it’s the neurotypicals (not Aspies like me) who really lack empathy.
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AV Flox Reply:
February 15th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
I apologize if you found the use of the phrase on this blog rude or discriminatory.
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March 2nd, 2009 at 9:59 am
[...] in the past two months. I knew of the story just a while ago from my good friend A.V. Flox, who blogged about it herself. Five days later Amber Rhea responded rather harshly to A.V.’s post, saying that [...]
March 14th, 2009 at 9:29 am
This is not at all inevitable. Some people are more inclined to sociopathic attitudes and behaviors and some technologies are more enabling of this pathology. Low-brow, shallow, and pathetically opportunistic people may (or may not) make up a large percentage of those who use Twitter, but this is neither a reflection on technology nor on humanity as a whole. If you have a problem with this, it is time to admit that it is YOUR problem, not OUR problem. Of course, you could argue (and you seem to) that your problem could become our problem, but the blame does not lie with the technology. Digital communication can no more eliminate empathy than it can create it. In other words, if you use it as an excuse to act inhumanely, then that should tell you something about your “humanity.” I suggest to anyone who was involved in this scandalous behavior: put down the digital devices for a while and do some critical self-examination. I mean, really, you seem to identify yourself with them so completely as to confuse your own incapacity for ethical behavior with theirs.
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May 17th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I agree with others here that the Internet or Twitter have nothing to do with the underlying pathology of humans in general and their automatic hostility and fear of the “other.”
I site those people who shout, “Jump!” at the scene of a suicidal person on top of a building, or the result of the famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment.
OMG, Gregg J Wanciaks last blog post: Sanborn Skyline Park
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December 14th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I think that when we view these events unfold in a medium that we generally associate with entertainment (TV) then I do believe there is a precondition to be desensitized to the reality of the situation. There is a safe distance between ourselves and the actual event. That distance plays a role in how we react to what we see. In person, we may not have the opportunity to view something like this under an entertainment lens, nor would we have the chance to discuss on a wide scale using a tool like Twitter.
Do these things make dehumanize us? No, I don’t think so but they do present a different way in which we process situations and events.
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