Roy Greenslade points us to a column by Janet Street-Porter in the Independent which makes the extraordinary claim that Internet chatrooms cause suicide. Her argument appears to be that "the Internet's true negative power is to replace real relationships and friendships with cyber pals", who may convince other vulnerable children to kill themselves. What is so extraordinary about the claim?
(a) It ignores all of the evidence we have of teenage suicide epidemics that owe nothing at all to the Internet. One high-profile epidemic of teen suicides befell the islands of Micronesia in the 1970s and 1980s and is highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Another befell late C18th Europe as an estimated 2000 readers of Goethe's masterpiece Die Leiden des jungen Werther ("The Sorrows of Young Werther") killed themselves in emulation of the novel's hero.
(b) The best evidence I have suggests that every time the mass media reports a high-profile suicide, according to the British Medical Journal, it inspires additional suicides. Drawing on the BMJ report and Robert Cialdini's wonderful book Influence, Scott Adams summarises the current understanding of this phenomenon as
"Every time the media makes a big deal about a high profile suicide there’s a 100% chance it inspires additional suicide."
Is this true? I've no idea. It looks plausible. If anyone knows a counter-argument I'd be fascinated to hear it.
It is a tragedy when anyone elects to take their own life. It is culturally remarkable when the phenomenon takes on the mimetic qualities of an epidemic. Since there is a substantial body of evidence that both of these phenomena considerably predate the Internet there is no good reason to write a newspaper column blaming the Internet for people killing themselves - unless you have some evidence that there are additional instances of suicide since the advent of the Internet amongst those exposed to it and/or establish some sort of causative link. And since there is pretty good evidence that writing about suicide in a newspaper really does cause additional suicides there is exceedingly good reason not to do so.
(I should probably make more explicit than usual on this occasion that these are my own views and may not represent those of my employer.)
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