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Webcam suicides the new Kitty Genovese?
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Kitty Genovese Case, All Over Again
On Tuesday night of last week, a 19 year old boy from Florida, trained a webcam on himself, took a handful of pills after posting a suicide note, and was pronounced dead 10 hours later.
In the interim, as he lay on his bed dying, hundred of people, while watching this happen at an online site called Justin.tv commented with such things like: “Bah, he’s faking it” and “That’s not enough to kill yourself”. For 10 hours people watched and commented as a dead boy flickered across their screens. Finally, at the tenth hour, people began to say things like “he’s really not breathing” and one contacted the site moderator to alert police.
10 hours.
If no one has ever heard of the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964, this could not be a better modern day example. Kitty Genovese was returning to her apartment in New York City at about 3am, when Winston Mosley stabbed her several times. She cried out that she had been stabbed and attacked. One of the 38 witnesses yelled at the man to get away from her, but no one called the cops. When the police did finally receive the call, it was reported with such a lack of seriousness, that by the time they arrived, Ms. Genovese was dead.
This case sparked a social psychological debate in this country highlighting the gravity of urban and possibly human apathy. Bystander Disorder, or sometimes known as Genovese Syndrome is the idea that when someone is in trouble and many people are around, one person is less likely to get help. Wide spread reporting and outrage over this case permeated the national consciousness for nearly a decade. Now it seems, the time has come for a new national dialogue on this subject.
When a young boy kills himself on a webcam, and for 10 hours people watch, comment snarkily, it’s time we begin to look outside our “Small Circle of Friends” (as Phil Och’s once commented in a song about Kitty Genovese), and try, just for a second, to pay attention to the people in the world around us, what a difference it could make. It might even save a life.
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