Broadcasting Your Death Through Livestreaming: Understanding Cybersuicide Through Concepts of Performance
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Broadcasting Your Death Through Livestreaming: Understanding Cybersuicide Through Concepts of Performance Annamaria Fratini1 • Susan R. Hemer1
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Cybersuicide, or suicide mediated by the internet in various ways, is a growing phenomenon worldwide and one which makes an often private act highly public. This paper provides an exploration of one version of cybersuicide: suicide that is livestreamed on the internet. Through an analysis of three case studies, this paper asks what light anthropological concepts of performance can shed on cybersuicide? It argues that as a public and social act, cybersuicide needs to be analyzed in terms of how an audience is attracted and retained, as well as the key roles the audience plays in the social practice. This means that cybersuicide has a different structure from suicide offline, impacting how it should be analyzed and understood. Keywords Anthropology Cybersuicide Internet Performance Suicide
Introduction 18-year-old male Elliot,1 a regular user of an online forum, posts that he is going to kill himself and livestream it on YouTube. Audience members join and see a tarp taped across a window. Coming into frame, the young man, whose face is concealed by a beanie with a scarf around his nose and mouth, 1
Pseudonyms have been used and key identifying details such as race, location and specific items have been omitted.
& Susan R. Hemer [email protected] 1
Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
123
Cult Med Psychiatry
holds up to the camera a piece of paper with the date and ‘Bye’ written on it. Throughout the stream he does not speak. On the livestream, the audience can hear voices from his computer. A female is heard crying and begging him to stop, a male repeatedly calls him a ‘sadbot’ (a depressed person), and another male complains that he cannot see the stream. The boy then reaches for a 12-gauge KSG shotgun. Silently he hoists up the firearm and presses it against his forehead. Seconds pass and he is still. Then he pulls the trigger. Soon after this, another person enters the scene, screaming: Elliot’s mother. She is yet to realize that hundreds of people watched her son die, and while some tried to deter him, others encouraged his choice. This livestreamed suicide occurred in March 2018. Despite the footage being promptly removed from YouTube, it was captured by a viewer, and has been reuploaded to various shock websites where people can watch and write comments. Elliot’s suicide is one of dozens of livestreamed suicides that were reported between May 2016 and May 2018 in the US (Artwick 2019:64). However, this is not a new occurrence, as the first documented case occurred in 2007 when a man in the UK died by hanging as he streamed it online via webcam (Seko 2016). The choice to livestream suicide is a growing phenomenon that occurs in contrast to ideologies that posit suicide as a private and individual act (La Fonta
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