The Media and Suicide

     After reading "Suicide contagion and social media/ The dangers of sharing 'Genie, you're free,' " I realized that the social media and the media in general has had a tremendous impact on our youth, particularly in the last ten years. When I was a sophomore in high school, MySpace was the newest and coolest form of social media. I now have younger siblings who are the age I was then when social media was still in its infantile stages. I can remember my parents being skeptical of my MySpace account and frequently accused me of "oversharing." Texting was just beginning to emerge and become commonplace, and if you didn't have a Sidekick or a Razor, you might as well have gone and joined the Flintstone family back in Bedrock. My younger siblings have even mocked my Facebook account I acquired the year I graduated high school in 2007, which has not helped me to feel less like a dinosaur. With Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc., it is extraordinarily difficult to be disconected from current events and the sharing of emotional responses to some of these events. The suicide of Robin Williams was extremely publicized, and while he was a phenomenal artist and his legacy rightfully should have been memorialized, I think there is somewhat a glorification in his death that goes hand and hand with the continuous coverage of it. I feel that our youth lives within a realm of confusion between actual reality and cyber reality filled with pretty filters and glossy finishes they can apply. In the last ten years, I have sadly known several people who committed suicide and who remain immortalized in a sense by their last cryptic post or a social media account that remains active well after their death. I feel that this has to be confusing for our youth, as there is no sense of finality for the grieving of those who have departed; therefore making the consequences of a selfish act skewed. It seems with the emergence of social media and media in general, we all have become human time capsules unbeknownst to us.