A Twitter chase

“We’re harvesting our lives and putting them online,” Calacanis writes in his piece. “We’re addicted to gaining followers and friends (or email subscribers, as the case may be), and reading comments we get in return. As we look for validation and our daily 15 minutes of fame, we do so at the cost of our humanity.”

I thought this was an interesting quote. I suppose I'm right there with them; putting my life in the public eye; even though I'm doing it anonymously and I don't read comments (not cause I don't care, I just don't remember to). But it's attention-getting all the same.

I got to this site via an interesting article on suicide on the web. It all starts with the @WhiteBentley story which broke on Twitter. A man was leading police on a car chase in L.A. one night, and someone created the Twitter name to tweet as if they were the person. People all over tweeted about #white #bentley, and in the end the man committed suicide. I'm not explaining it well (read the article), but it talks about how people lose their humanity online. People were egging this man on, talking about how he should just kill himself and save the city some money.

It's fascinating to see social behavior. We like to believe in the good of people at their core, but episodes like that and 90DayTania (another piece in the article where people were egging on this woman's suicide - thank God the blog was a joke) show the inhumanity of people online. We all put ourselves out there, and sometimes receive amazing support from like minded folks, but a lot of times the public can turn against you.

Be careful, bloggers.