News for the Week of September 3, 2006
Life and death on the social Web - suicide prevention, eulogizing online, and Web obituaries - has gotten considerable attention in tech news of late...
MyDeathSpace encouraging suicide?
Some see social networking about the death of a friend or family member cathartic. Some as a means of detecting suicidal tendencies. Others are concerned it might reinforce such tendencies. In any case, "the world's first generation to double-click its way through elementary school is using the Web to stay connected - even in death," reports the St. Petersburg Times. Dr. Ilene Berson and other faculty members at the University of South Florida's Mental Health Institute are seeking funding to research that question, to see "whether social networking web sites create a suicide contagion effect." They'll analyze the conditions surrounding the deaths of MySpace members who committed suicide, as well as behavior on MyDeathSpace.com (see NetFamilyNews on this last April ), where the activity isn't all about eulogizing. "Anger, curiosity and bravado reign on MyDeathSpace forums, where strangers pick apart the writings of MySpace members who die," according to the Times.
Suicide prevention
The positive side of such public display of death is suicide prevention. At a recent conference on social networking, representatives of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline said that referrals from MySpace users have become the largest source of calls to the hotline. During research for our book, MySpace Unraveled, Lifeline director John Draper told us, "Increasingly, kids are using their profiles "to in some ways convey that they had suicidal intent. There is very much the potential for saving lives because the first people to hear about kids at risk are other kids." The Lifeline is setting up federally funded suicide prevention profiles on MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook. Here are more reports on grieving online in the Boston Globe and the Lexington Herald-Leader. As for online obituaries, see this article at the Washington Post.
In other news...
- MySpace's mini music stores. It's great news for musicians and more bad news for Tower Records. Not only can young musicians and garage bands introduce their music to millions of fans everywhere via MySpace, now they can sell it to them too - right from their own pages. "Assuming that the songs for sale do not violate a copyright, the artist or label can set a price and allow Web users to buy songs the way they might with services such as iTunes and Yahoo Music," the Washington Post reports . Fans get a piece of the action too, quite remarkably: They can "sell their favorite bands' tracks on their own MySpace pages, with a portion of the proceeds going to the artists," the Los Angeles Times reports . The service is being tested now, with full availability by the end of the year, according to the Post.
- 'Storytexting' on phones. It's a little like a soap opera for the teeny screen - that of a cellphone. Each scene in the text novella "Ghost Town" is "about 160 characters long, just enough to fit into one text message," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports . The story has eight characters and "revolves around a high school football star, 'Ghost,' who has a secret. He's homeless." The characters all have backstories that subscribers can read at YouthNoise.com, a youth-activism site and online community that's a project of Save the Children. The other partners in this project are Stand Up for Kids , a nonprofit organization supporting homeless young people, and Virgin Mobile USA, providing its platform. The Star Tribune says 12,000 people have signed up to receive the novella's twice-daily "episodes" for a month, ending Sept. 15. All of the story's characters have blogs at YouthNoise and the main ones have profiles on MySpace, where readers can add them to their friends lists (illustrating how the line between fiction and real life on the social networks is never totally clear).
- Not-so-virtual advertising Videogamers will soon be seeing - or interacting with - pretty sophisticated ads in their games. This is not the static product-placement advertising of the past, of course. These are being called "dynamic" ads "because they are built into the virtual landscape of the video games and can be updated by advertisers via the Internet," the San Jose Mercury News reports . Just as in real life, gamers will see this advertising on billboards, buses, storefronts, etc., right in the games' environments - urban, suburban, or rural, maybe on virtual TV and movie screens!
- Woman charged in boy's assault. A disturbing reminder that girls aren't the only victims of online predation: "A 23-year-old Massachusetts woman is facing a sexual assault charge involving a 15-year-old Connecticut boy she met on the Internet," WFSB TV in Hartford reported. They reportedly had "'met' online through a friend of the victim. The arrest warrant showed the two began chatting through MySpace.com and MSN Messenger," which led to cellphone conversations, the exchange of photos, and a sexual encounter in a motel. The boy's mother reportedly learned of all this when she found the two together the next day.
