Thank you Sandy Banks!

The past few days I have been trying to put into words my feelings about the recent suicides that have occurred among gay students. Calling it an issue of gay students didn’t seem right to me. It was too neat of a political bow for me because as I read more into some of the cases, questions emerged that you couldn’t just brush off as gay bashing, bullying or any number of scenarios that have been put in the press.

Sandy Banks, a writer for the LA Times, did a story that talked about the Rutgers case and the movie out called The Social Network, which is about the formation of Facebook. Her whole article can be summed up in this situation she wrote about:

It hit me as I walked out of the movie theater, behind a gaggle of preteen girls complaining that a friend had posted an angry message on her Facebook page about being left behind while they were watching the Facebook film.

"I texted her and told her we were going, and she didn't text back, so we left," one girl said. And I wondered if any of them thought to use the same phone they used for texting to actually talk to her instead.

The girls never thought to use the phone to call instead of text. That’s how impersonal we have become. Now, I'm not naive enough to feel we should get rid of the technology. In the article Banks talked about how in the early years if someone had a grip they would have to get a paper and pen, write a letter and mail it in to a person. A few years ago, and in our electronic age it sound crazy to think of it as old fashioned, but people used to send emails to folks, which at the time was thought to be this rapid way of communication and warning at the time talked about the loss of civility with people. Now I see people on the tram and buses texting away to friends, not even thinking about picking up the phone. A month or two ago I saw two people texting to the same person, yet not talking to each other. They were texting to someone else and responding, by text, to the person next to them.

The tragedy in the recent suicides is not that the people were gay. To put the issue in the context of gay only marginalize the issue when a straight person, like the girl from a few months ago from England, killed herself, or when another student a year or so ago killed herself, revealing a string of suicides on campuses because students were unable to cope with the stress of college life. Even by focusing on the gay college student suicide doesn’t put into focus the other gay teenagers, and when I say teen I mean from 13-16 years old, who came from different background, different environments and endured different time frames of bullying. What they all had in common was we finally knew about their pain and suffering because authorities found their writings on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

The irony is we call these sites social networking sites and little social interaction happens. I was on MySpace and ended up with close to 1000 ‘friends.’ I personally knew about 20 of them. A few others, maybe 50 might have been some sort of celebrity I was following (and I use the word might because there was no way to verify they were who they said they were) and the rest were strangers that either requested to be a friend or I asked to be a friend just to grow my numbers. Why did I want larger numbers? I think it was to feel more wanted than I am.

A strange thing about the social networking sites is you have a tally of people who are part of your group and you know how many people are a part of everyone else’s group. There’s a nasty new option on Facebook right now that shows when a friend gets a new friend. I have friends, and by friends I mean people I actually talk to by phone on a regular basis and see in person, who will have 5 or more people become their Facebook friends every few days. Like Sandy Banks mentions, I have seen friends I talk to on Facebook, I have called them and can wait weeks to hear from them. They are on Facebook every day, I see them, but to make a phone call or, heaven forbid, respond to an email can take weeks.

The social in social networking has become a joke. We are more isolated than ever. I have talked time and again about people who will hit a button thinking it will end world hunger but won’t go out and make sandwiches for the homeless. I have seen more missed accidents because people aren’t talking on the phone but are texting on the phone. How crazy is that? It’s illegal to use a phone in the car, but instead of breaking the law and talking to someone on the phone, these geniuses think it’s better to text someone, who probably is also on the road and has to read the text.

The tragedy of the recent suicides isn’t that the person was gay or even that they were bullied; the tragedy is when they needed help, there was no one in their ‘social network’ they could go to for help, because the social network is a joke. The people who bullied them are so impersonal to the harassment they caused they could escalate the punishment. They didn’t see the other person as a person because they interacted with keyboards. Even now, with all the moving tributes and talk of doing something, I read and saw there is a Facebook page dedicated to the Rutgers student. There are over 100000 people who have signed up, yet in real life the student had no friends. With the trouble he had with his roommate the notion of talking to his roommate about the camera issue seemed foreign to him. The student would rather vent to anonymous people online rather than talk to the person across the room. That is the tragedy of social networking.