Is this for real?
25/11/08 17:21
The tragic story recently of a 19 year old student who killed himself live on the internet while 1000s of people watched via their computers - and did nothing - shocked us and got us thinking about the implications of this story.
Technology is changing us. You can’t imagine 1000 people standing around outside doing nothing, while a young person committed suicide in front of them. So why is it possible on the internet?
Perhaps people don’t or can’t distinguish between what is real and what is not real on-line.
Or is technology changing our moral compass? Why didn’t anyone watching do something? And if they wanted to do something, what should they have done? Who do you call? There are no internet emergency services. In the end someone did call the police who turned up - on camera - but too late.
Is it that we don’t feel connected via the internet, despite all the talk of a more inter-dependent world; we don’t really think of these people as part of our ‘communities’.
This very sad story shocks, and raises more questions than answers. But we owe it to ourselves and the future to try and grapple with the hard questions.
We’ll be launching our interactive discussion on the place of technology in the future and its impact on education, and looking forward to your contributions on these sorts of difficult questions.
Technology is changing us. You can’t imagine 1000 people standing around outside doing nothing, while a young person committed suicide in front of them. So why is it possible on the internet?
Perhaps people don’t or can’t distinguish between what is real and what is not real on-line.
Or is technology changing our moral compass? Why didn’t anyone watching do something? And if they wanted to do something, what should they have done? Who do you call? There are no internet emergency services. In the end someone did call the police who turned up - on camera - but too late.
Is it that we don’t feel connected via the internet, despite all the talk of a more inter-dependent world; we don’t really think of these people as part of our ‘communities’.
This very sad story shocks, and raises more questions than answers. But we owe it to ourselves and the future to try and grapple with the hard questions.
We’ll be launching our interactive discussion on the place of technology in the future and its impact on education, and looking forward to your contributions on these sorts of difficult questions.
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