Reading Disorders: Online Suicide and the Death of Hope

Abstract

This article examines the representation of cybersuicide in the popular media. Taking as its starting point two cases, those of Abraham Biggs and the so‐called “Bridgend suicide cult”, it analyses the moral panics that circulate around online suicide to suggest that the representation of youth suicide involves a mobilisation of “the death of hope” in both news reports and academic theorising, which is typical of media effects models more generally. The article uses Abigail Bray's notion of “reading disorders” to explore the ways in which such an account of online relationships constructs some forms of engagement with digital media as pathological, excessive and dangerous. This popular account of online interaction thus entails a call to a collective work of despair, in which “generation 2.0” are represented as beyond help and hence figured as already lost to hope, as already dead. The online subject is portrayed as monstrous, as tainted with death, and hence no longer belongs to the world of the living. Through a close reading of newspaper coverage of online youth suicide, the article argues that this narrative of disordered reading forecloses more hopeful ways of thinking through our relationship with media texts and hence ignores the potential of digital media to facilitate connection, functioning as a technology of hope.

Notes

1. In making this statement, I am suggesting that it is objectively true that none of the victims had looked up suicide or related topics: it is unlikely that the media would have been able to investigate these questions carefully and thoroughly or would have access to the full record of Internet use by these young people. What is remarkable, however, is that the press felt able to first argue for, and then accept the existence of, an online cult without feeling the need to identify or present any such evidence: that the mere fact of being seen to use social networking sites was considered evidence enough to suggest the existence of something sinister, even if that activity could not be established.

2. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that one of the biggest moral panics in recent British history — the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine scandal — literally concerned state vaccination programmes. In many ways, cultural anxieties about the MMR, which focus on a supposed government cover‐up of its negative effects as a possible cause of autism in children, can be seen as a very reductive application of ideological critiques of the mass media — ironically, since the explicit politics of such a critique is often far from Althusserian, being rather centre/libertarian in tone. Also, there is considerable intersection between the supposed effects of digital media — such as social disengagement, narrowness of interests and fixation on technology — and some of the most common (and largely unrepresentative) cultural stereotypes of subjects with autism.

3. In the 2005 edition of his classic text Moving Experiences, for example, David Gauntlett (2005, p. 1) writes of the media controversy caused by what the press interpreted as a claim — at the height of the hysteria over the murder of James Bulger — that children were immune to violence on television.

4. I do not have the space to reflect on the content of the ‘toxic’ texts mentioned here, but the themes of the press coverage of suicide often resonate with literary tropes: there is some continuity between the experience of Werther, rejected in love, and Abraham Biggs, and between Julien Sorel's failure to sustain a belief in the necessity of social mobility through hard work, humility and respectability and some of the assumptions linking hope with aspiration and individual achievement that run through the accounts of the Bridgend suicides.

5. The idea of online reading as disordered is not confined to moral panics, nor is it solely a component of the mass media's appropriation of academic media effects discourse. In theory, as well, ‘the media’ have been imagined as toxic to hope: indeed, in her collection on hope, Mary Zournazi quotes Julia Kristeva's contention that intervention is needed into the ‘new maladies of the soul’ that characterise everyday life in the modern world. These include ‘the destruction of the psyche and the imagination in contemporary media‐oriented and performance‐driven cultures’ (Zournazi 2002, p. 65).

6. In fact, Sofka (2009, pp. 164–166) identifies a number of potential causes for concern, which include isolation, erosion of boundaries between public and private, danger of deception, and the possibility of cyberbullying. Indeed, it is this measured approach that makes Sofka's work such a valuable source of ideas, in contrast to some of the canonical cyberculture literature in cultural theory, which can tend to be polarised between wholly utopian and wholly negative stances. There is an important conclusion to be drawn here between hope (which, in the legend of Pandora's box, is what remains after the evils of the world have been confronted and experienced) and the utopian, in which hope is always deferred to a longed‐for but impossible future.

7. In fact, the inquest into the death of Megan Gillen found that she had undergone months of bullying at school, and that she had previously discussed suicide with her school coordinator. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death since it was possible that she had taken an overdose with the intention of being too sick to attend school the next day. However, during the inquest, it was noted that some of the girls who bullied Megan may have posted comments about her on Bebo: the findings of the inquest were hence reported in the Daily Telegraph (2009) as ‘Schoolgirl Took Overdose after Bebo Bullying, Inquest Hears’ and in the Sun as ‘Teen Suicide over Bebo Posts’ (Taylor 2009). Despite the sad story of a depressed and frightened girl that emerged in the inquest, the same story is repeated again and again.

8. See, for example, Cheyette (1996) for an overview of the way in which the hunchback Sara in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas is associated with both the weight of physical labour and the ‘outsider’ status of both ‘woman’ and ‘the Jew’ in a ‘society of outsiders’.

9. This notion of repetition recalls the recent screening on YouTube of the death of Neda Soltan during a demonstration in Tehran over the results of the Iranian general election. In the case of Soltan, the widespread viewing of the violent and traumatic scene of death has been imagined differently, as a source of identification, exemplified in the slogan ‘I am Neda’. Whilst this viewing of death is seen very differently, as a source of consciousness raising and an impetus to political dissent, this again supports my central point: that digital representations of death, with their assumed immediacy and unmediatedness, are imagined as having the power to draw the viewer out of the day‐to‐day world of the living and into an intense and potentially transformative identification with the dead.