All over the news this week has been the tragic story of Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old Canadian teen who took her life on October 10th. It’s been determined that the thing that ulitmately provoked her death was extensive years of bullying from her fellow classmates, in person and online. The bullying caused her to change schools several times, and after being assaulted at her second school, she attempted to take her own life multiple times in various ways until she finally succeeded.
On September 7th, Amanda posted a video to youtube outlining her tragic story. It all began when screenshots of her nude taken by a stranger on a chat site got forwarded to her classmates through Facebook a facebook page made by that same stranger, who stalked her to the point where he knew the intimate details of her life (the names of her friends and family, her address, etc). She was then ridiculed in public and through the private sphere of social media, and even physically assaulted. Videos were posted on Facebook of the fight, and kids encouraged her to kill herself through websites such as Formspring. She took it to heart.
She was diagnosed with depression and was being treated by anti-depressants to help her cope with the terrible anxiety caused by the constant bullying of her classmates, which finally ended in her deciding that she couldn’t cope with it anymore.
It’s pretty clear that without the involvement of social media, Amanda Todd’s story would be very different. There’s even more than that. It’s been much discussed that today’s youth doesn’t much value privacy. Is it possible that the lack of this value is what caused Amanda Todd’s problems in the first place? Exposing oneself on webcam for random strangers isn’t something that exactly reflects the value of privacy. Or is it more of a reflection of how today’s youth are deeply effected by low self-esteem, and approval of online strangers can supposedly remedy it?
Before reading your post, I hadn’t heard much about this story. I heard something about a tragic suicide, but I hadn’t yet looked into the case to see that it was related to our study of online privacy.
Hearing stories about suicides is always heartbreaking. We can only wish, after the fact, that someone had done something to help her. I find it disgusting to hear that the opposite was true–that people were encouraging her to hurt herself. It’s almost as if people don’t realize that the people they see online are real, the things they say online aren’t just in some game, they’re real words that can be taken seriously, as they were in this case.
While I feel that this young lady may not have valued her privacy by exposing herself to a stranger on a webcam, I think it is largely because of your second point: approval, even from strangers, allows for an increase in self-esteem which is often times what teens need/desire the most. It’s heartbreaking that she had to endure so much pain during her lifetime, and even worse that she saw no escape other than to end it.
Kristina,
I found this to be incredibly sad. Like Laura, I had not heard about this story and I believe that it should be heard. This provides a good example of the things people will do and say behind and because of their social networking walls. I agree that as a result of the lack of privacy surrounding sites like this, Amanda felt as though she had no escape. She was only 15 and driven to the brink by her own peers. You can see through Amanda’s example and personal cost that social networking creates a herd pact and also induces a mob mentality where the individuals involved do not feel responsible for their actions, in this case the bullying that ended Amanda’s life. I am glad that you brought this to the attention of the class because I feel as though you did an excellent job portraying this problem as well as the significance of Amanda’s situation. We can only hope that with the development of these stories, more will be done in order to prevent further tragedies such as this one from reoccuring.
It’s very interesting that you considered low self-esteem as a factor in what started this whole tragedy in the first place. People often claim that technology is what’s creating issues, but I hadn’t really thought about people’s low self-esteem being the underlying cause for the up and coming “need” to be acknowledged online until after reading the articles from class and your post. I like that you took into consideration two possibilities, that it may be changing privacy values OR low self-esteem creating these issues. Because it is clear that some aspects of technology are creating problems, acknowledging more than one potential source of these problems is important to eradicating them. It seems as though it’s time we take examples like the Amanda Todd story, and use them to promote changes that will start us on the path towards implementing changes that will prevent things like this from happening in the future.