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I think, the issue is - we're still figuring out how to have conversations in crowds. This is still relatively new to human society. Twitter provides a way to

by lwhi 16y ago

I think, the issue is - we're still figuring out how to have conversations in crowds. This is still relatively new to human society. Twitter provides a way to shout out sentences to the world in general - and to listen out for voices that we care about. Forums allow us to converse with multiple people and actually form relationships - relationships which might eventually cross over into meatspace. The ability to converse in this way - in a 'third space', provides a lot of opportunities to encounter things that we're not used to encountering. This is an example of that. What will happen in the future? Well - if there's a sharp increase in communication with people who are choosing to end their lives due to suffering, my guess is we'll all learn more about what those people are feeling and thinking. We'll all be a lot more educated and a lot more understanding as a result. It will be a positive thing. I suppose that there's a chance that we'll become desensitized - but I think, when the stakes are this high and the subject is so earth-shatteringly significant to every one of us, it probably won't ever become so. I really think that our society is worse off by treating death as a taboo. I don't particularly enjoy thinking about it, or talking about it - but I think it's worthwhile.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
It's interesting that right now on HN there's another post about Facebook and how having one place for all of your conversations is harmful. I think the two topics are related. It's not a matter of ignoring or running away from death, it's a matter of treating every piece of conversation that comes from my keyboard as all being the same. There's been no time in human history where we had such a "flat" model of interactivity. Even in small hunter-gatherer societies it's common for information to be withheld from some, shared with only a select few, etc. Man is a social animal, and these types of channel-selection and social posturing are a critical part of his healthy existence. We programmers have created the internet, and to us all of that social posturing stuff is just nonsense. Everything is just a bit on a disk somewhere. While that's true in a physical sense, it's tragically false in practice. The way we discuss philosophy, death, religion, politics, science, history, and the rest of it varies according to the crowd and the mood. It's not all just bits. But your point is spot on: we're still trying to figure out how to have conversations online. I think we are making a LOT of mistakes that are going to come back and bite us one day, one of which is thinking that democratic metaphors are applicable in all situations, but that day may be many decades off, after I'm dead myself, so aside from complaining about it I'm really not worried about it too much :)

by lwhi 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

It's interesting that right now on HN there's another post about Facebook and how having one place for all of your conversations is harmful. I think the two topics are related. It's not a matter of ignoring or running away from death, it's a matter of treating every piece of conversation that comes from my keyboard as all being the same. There's been no time in human history where we had such a "flat" model of interactivity. Even in small hunter-gatherer societies it's common for information to be withheld from some, shared with only a select few, etc. Man is a social animal, and these types of channel-selection and social posturing are a critical part of his healthy existence. We programmers have created the internet, and to us all of that social posturing stuff is just nonsense. Everything is just a bit on a disk somewhere. While that's true in a physical sense, it's tragically false in practice. The way we discuss philosophy, death, religion, politics, science, history, and the rest of it varies according to the crowd and the mood. It's not all just bits. But your point is spot on: we're still trying to figure out how to have conversations online. I think we are making a LOT of mistakes that are going to come back and bite us one day, one of which is thinking that democratic metaphors are applicable in all situations, but that day may be many decades off, after I'm dead myself, so aside from complaining about it I'm really not worried about it too much :)