Growing Up Internet Addicted

[chunga1]

Teen Commits Suicide Live on Web
MIAMI (Nov. 22) -The family of a college
student who killed himself live on the Internet
say they’re horrified his life ended before
a virtual audience, and infuriated that
viewers of the live webcam or operators of
the Web site that hosted it didn’t act sooner
to save him.
Only after police arrived to find Abraham
Biggs dead in his father’s bed did the Web
feed stop Wednesday — 12 hours after the
19-year-old Broward College student first
declared on a Web site that he hated himself
and planned to die.
“It didn’t have to be,” said the victim’s sister,
Rosalind Bigg. “They got hits, they got
viewers, nothing happened for hours.”
Biggs announced his plans to kill himself
over a Web site for bodybuilders, authorities
said. He posted a link from there to
Justin.tv, a site that allows users to broadcast
live videos from their webcams.
A computer user who claimed to have
watched said that after swallowing some
pills, Biggs went to sleep and appeared to
be breathing for a few hours while others
cracked jokes.
Some members of his virtual audience encouraged
him to do it, others tried to talk
him out of it, and some discussed whether
he was taking a dose big enough to kill himself,
said Wendy Crane, an investigator
with the Broward County medical
examiner’s office.
Some users told investigators they did not
take him seriously because he had threatened
suicide on the site before.
Eventually, someone notified the moderator
of the bodybuilding site, who traced
Biggs’ location and called police, Crane
said. The drama unfolded live on Justin.tv,
which allows viewers to post comments
alongside the video images.
As police entered the room, the audience’s
reaction was filled with Internet shorthand:
“OMFG,” one wrote, meaning “Oh, my
God.” Others, either not knowing what they
were seeing, or not caring, wrote “lol,”
which means “laughing out loud,” and “hahahah.”
His father, Abraham Biggs Sr., told The Miami
Herald he didn’t want to watch the
video.
“We were very good friends,” he said. “It’s
wrong that it was allowed to happen.”
An autopsy concluded Biggs died from a
combination of opiates and benzodiazepine,
which his family said was prescribed
for his bipolar disorder.
“Abe, i still wish this was all a joke,” a friend
wrote on the teenager’s MySpace page,
which he described himself as a goodhearted
guy who would always be available for
his pals, no matter what time of day.
In a statement, Justin.tv CEO Michael
Seibel said: “We regret that this has occurred
and want to respect the privacy of
the broadcaster and his family during this
time.”
It is unclear how many people watched it
happen. The Web site would not say how
many people were watching the broadcast.
The site as a whole had 672,000 unique visitors
in October, according to Nielsen.
Biggs was not the first person to commit
suicide with a webcam rolling. But the
drawn-out drama — and the reaction of
those watching — was seen as an extreme
example of young people’s penchant for
sharing intimate details about themselves
over the Internet.
Montana Miller, an assistant professor of
popular culture at Bowling Green State
University in Ohio, said Biggs’ very public
suicide was not shocking, given the way
teenagers chronicle every facet of their lives
on sites like Facebook and MySpace.
“If it’s not recorded or documented then it
doesn’t even seem worthwhile,” she said.
“For today’s generation it might seem,
‘What’s the point of doing it if everyone
isn’t going to see it?’”
She likened Biggs’ death to other public
ways of committing suicide, like jumping
off a bridge.
Crane said she knows of a case in which a
Florida man shot himself in the head in
front of an online audience, though she
didn’t know how much viewers saw. In
Britain last year, a man hanged himself
while chatting online.
Miami lawyer William Hill said there is
probably nothing that could be done legally
to those who watched and did not act. As
for whether the Web site could be held liable,
Hill said there doesn’t seem to be
much of a case for negligence.
“There could conceivably be some liability
if they knew this was happening and they
had some ability to intervene and didn’t
take action,” said Hill, who does business
litigation and has represented a number of
Internet-based clients. But “I think it would
be a stretch.”
Condolences poured into Biggs’ MySpace
page, where the mostly unsmiling teen is
seen posing in a series of pictures with various
young women. On the bodybuilding
Web site, Biggs used the screen name CandyJunkie.
His Justin.tv alias was
“feels_like_ecstacy.”
Bigg described her brother as an outgoing
person who struck up conversations with
Starbucks baristas and enjoyed taking his
young nieces to Chuck E. Cheese. He was
health-conscious and exercised but was not
a bodybuilder, she said.

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