How do we hear about suicides?
I don’t know what it was like before, but social media has cornered the market on suicide broadcasts. Suddenly, as these things are, a glance at Facebook will leave me with macabre knowledge — a distant acquaintance is dead. I might have known them in passing, or known of them with 3 degrees of separation.
Maybe I knew them more than as a fleeting connection on Facebook. News that would have been passed directly among an inner circle can now be delivered impersonally through a status update.
I began thinking about our relationship to interpersonal information after I saw a post from a father announcing his daughter’s death by suicide. It was shocking. I knew the family when I was younger, but hadn’t seen or spoken to them for years.
The grieving process for it all was made extremely visible and public. Much of it was broadcast on Facebook — they were a popular family. I immediately wondered whether this was a good thing. Thousands of people who otherwise wouldn’t have received this information and were involved in the aftermath.
They flooded the comments. Lifelong friends and tenuous connections, siblings and college roommates, and the parents themselves were rendered equal by sort by date. A grieving, heartfelt note from a brother is nudged behind Read more comments by a “Sorry for your loss” posted by someone who vaguely remembers passing the deceased in a church hallway.
Following the announcement, the father published a long, poignant memorial that received a similarly tsunamic response. Facebook was his platform for a memoir-for-all, retrieving the cathartic act from book-writing or publishing and sending it directly to whoever will listen, with the necessary condition that they have some connection to the deceased. To share and be heard, and to receive generous quantitative feedback in likes, loves, cares, wows, qualitative feedbacks in people’s own memorials posted as comments, and the ever-branching tree of engagements as those people’s comments achieve Most relevant ascendancy and garner their own feedbacks.
To distill a soul into writing is to eulogize, obituate, or grieve in general — the differences are all consequences of the platform.
One of said differences was how the algorithm decided to treat the subsequent memorials. These posts continued for months, and each time landed directly at the top of my feed, likely from some “tragedy metric.” Suicide surely ranks highly.
And the feed was tuned to my behavior, as even old posts would land at the top because of some new comment threads. It was powerful content, of course. Full of human intimacy, great love and great grief. I am a voyeur in a way impossible in any other age.