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.