Wednesday night, Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old Florida resident, overdosed on a toxic combination of benzodiazepine, a depressant used to treat insomnia, and opiates, killing himself. He did so in front of a live Web audience—some of whom, apparently, were “encouraging him” to go forward with the suicide.
“People were egging him on and saying things like ‘go ahead and do it, faggot,’ Wendy Crane, an investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s office, told ABC News.
This isn’t the first time that suicides have been committed on webcam, apparently with encouragement from live viewers—a British man hanged himself last year after allegedly being goaded to do so by fellow users on Paltalk, another live video site. Still, absent from some of today’s descriptions of Biggs’s death-casting is a sense of disgust about this particularly insidious strain of voyeurism. NewTeeVee, an online-video industry publication, called Biggs’s suicide “a striking display of the power of live video.”
I’d call it something else.


predators and prey
Journalism obsequiousness to corporate media market share grabs by sensationalizing and promoting extremism is part of the societal acceptance and nonchalant reaction to inhumanity and cruelty.
Why are you surprised? The US tortures as policy, and it can't even be bothered enough to impeach those who have dictated the policy.
It's well known that those who torture and witness torture become just as damaged as the recipients of torture.
Posted by Annie on Fri 21 Nov 2008 at 12:47 PM