The kind of thing I hate to acknowledge

Some days it's really better to just avoid the news. But here I am at work on a Saturday morning, without having had any coffee or tea, with nothing to do (or at least no willpower to make myself do anything useful). So I started looking at news sites to keep myself updated on the world.

And I read about Abraham Biggs. Go ahead, Google it, then come back. I'll wait...

...aaaand Happy Saturday, everyone! Are you depressed already? Welcome to the weekend!

This poor kid. I know nothing about his personal or family life, so I'm not going to make any wild speculations about why he might have done this. Personally, I try not to bother the memory of those who have taken their own lives by digging into their private matters. I think suicides are necessarily sad, but it seems to me that it's well within one's rights to do what one wants with one's own life. I have no right nor reason to intervene.

But the facts of the case on a superficial level beg to be analyzed. This kid decided to end his life publicly by streaming it on the internet. And not in some gruesome or violent way that might just point to the last screaming moments of an adrenaline junkie with too much video gaming experience. He chose to overdose on Xanax, then quietly fell asleep on his webcam until his breath ran out, and 12 hours later was found dead by police, who covered up the webcam and ended the spectacle. No numbers yet on how many people actually watched it happen on the body-building website hosting the streaming spectacle, but there were comments and viewers in some quanityt up until the end.

What it says to me is that this person didn't want to go out in a blaze of glory. He wasn't looking for spectacle or martyrdom or fame. He just wanted his life - his memory - his last moments - to have some sort of meaning and he chose to validate it by sharing it with others over the internet. Others on the site had helped him decide what method to use, how much to take, and whether or not to go through with it when he'd announced his intentions. His watchers, for the most part it would seem, assumed he was faking it, typing in "lol" and "hahaha" and "OMFG" as he lay still on his bed for hours. It seems most of them watched the webcam tragedy half-heartedly, like an absurd funny-cat creation on YouTube.

The internet is such a bizarre mixture of raw communicative power and creative irony, dashed with a sprinkling of those intense assholes who always have to pop up in the comments with no mastery of the English language and an inability to hit "shift" simultaneously with "1" (11!1!!!!). It has become a platform for many to express their deepest feelings and thoughts in what seems like a safe environment, in which their faces can stay anonymous but their words can speak what is in their hearts. Simultaneously, for many it is the opposite: a place to make their faces famous while protecting what is inside them by building a false sense of self to show to the world. For a lot of us it's just a place to waste time in endlessly entertaining ways. For some it's a way to get news and cooking tips. But no matter what role it fills in our lives, most of us with a web presence often feel an odd sense of removal from reality in it. We can make ourselves pretty much whatever we want online. We can invent personas for fun or for evil (Google "Lori Drew"), we can write and re-write our profiles to seem as intelligent or witty or cool as we want. It's a space to connect with emails and messages and Twitters, but it's also looking through a lens of bizarre porno sites and Photoshop.

But then there are others out there, like Abraham Biggs, who lose that sense of removal, who let themselves be seen fully and intimately by their webcams or MySpace bathroom-mirror shots, who forget to keep that degree of separation from the computer screen and the people on the other end of the tubes. People whose identities have become wrapped up with their keyboards and whose Facebook photos don't have 'angles.' While most of us can look on while turkeys get killed right behind Sarah Palin with a little smirk on our faces because she seems so clueless, typing "OMFG what a moron" into the comments box, othersjust see the turkeys kicking and fighting to the bitter end and think, "Wow, that's intense." And maybe that thought connects, just like links on our sidebars, to thousand of other sites and thoughts that connect to... "Hey, I could do that to myself online. People will remember me that way."

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's the kind of thing I hate to acknowledge publicly for fear of glamorizing something so sad, but at the same time I find the psychology in it so fascinating and the implications about internet culture so endless that I can't help it.

Here's where I wish I had a readership to comment and help me pick this apart, but then again, maybe it's not something we should hack up.