Suicide: Real and Imagined

Suicide is not funny or cute.  The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, however legitimately it proposes to extinguish and extricate the prisoners of social networking sites, has a cute Hello-Kitty-style logo that is actually a goodbye noose.  Yes, social networking can be a real waste of time.  Yes, it is ridiculous that someone would have 800 virtual friends but no real social life.  And, yes, it is true that many people avoid social networking for the same reasons that others wish to disentangle themselves from their online relationships:  too much data, too accessible, too perpetual, too much blah blah blather.

The cease and desist letter that Facebook sent to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine suggests a more sinister issue however:  their ownership of your "stuff."  They own it, not you, and you are not permitted to allow scripts such as those employed by the W2SM to operate as your agent.  Only a person can make those actions.  Of course, there are good reasons that websites don't want automated agents running through their servers and deleting things.  Imagine what kind of unintentional damage could be done.  On the other hand, people want those agents because it is too time-consuming to do the deletion yourself.  In an example cited on the W2SM site, one person with 1000 friends took 9 hours to delete manually and 52 minutes to delete using the W2SM site.

Make new friends and delete the old -- one is silver and the other was a mistake you made when you thought you wanted a thousand imaginary friends.  Perhaps you should pay for that the old fashioned way:  one click at a time.  The use of a flippantly-named, brilliant and rebellious site might be just another mistake, this time in social un-networking. 

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention