Rutgers Suicide

With what has happened at Rutgers a few weeks ago it is still fresh in my mind. What really draws my attention is the fact that technology played such a large part in the way the events led a young man to take his own life. Aside from his roommate viewing him with a web cam and the fact that government in the state of NJ is pushing for new privacy laws with harsher penalties, it is the reasoning this young man decided to let everyone know he was about to kill himself on facebook right before he jumped. Honestly, is that what it is all coming down to? Yes, the correlation between writing a suicide note and leaving a quick response on facebook may seem similar but their not. Emoting your suicide right before you do it is a lot different then the police finding you somewhere and then they break the news. In this day and age it is almost insane how much our culture has changed in the last decade. Everyone is so wrapped up in Facebook, Twitter, and even Myspace still to a degree. It is literally taking human interaction and turning it on its head. In our last class we just watched how on Youtube an Anthropological professor at KSU has stated as we stray from human interaction yet we appreciate it more, really? I really can not say one way or another but here is some "food for thought." With the way divorces have been going up is it fair to say that this can be linked to the way people have been finding relationships from dating websites to even Facebook once again? Going back to this young man from Rutgers all I can truly have is pity for him. I am in no way trying to be mean when I say I pity him but I do feel that his generation which has revolved around this new way people interact had deceived him. When he found out everyone in his personal world was beginning to realize he was gay and because he was not emotionally stable enough to tell anyone yet, when this happened it must have been like his whole world came crashing down around him. The despair this kid must have felt must have been surreal because like I have said a lot of time and energy in the younger generations today go into keeping their profile in shape. This event to me has let me realize one thing very important and that is that a lot people really have come to label their profile as a completely new extension of their physical being. Culture certainly does move fast towards change.