More Ghanaians Committing Online Suicide

First, I peeped downwards to the right half corner of my computer to see if the green little dots were active. Then, I scanned through to see how many friends among my contacts were online. Two of my regulars were missing. They were offline, so the green lights against their names would not show at all. I typed their names into the search engine to see what they have been up to. The search produced no results. Had I typed in the wrong contacts? I checked again to confirm the spelling of their names. They had committed Facebook suicide by deleting their accounts from the social networking site. They had done the same on Skype and MSN. Seven more friends had also killed their virtual life on their favourite social networks.

Rita’s suicide was the most painful. I could contact the others via telephone, email or send a little tweet. Not for Rita. She had removed personal profiles and all private information from her virtual world, leaving her virtually dead–at least to some of us whose only access to her was on Facebook. In Sheldon’s case, my former work colleague, there were no traces of a possible resumption of his virtual life at all. He had sent messages to warn all his online friends that he would be taking the noose any moment. So he did, shutting himself from life on the computer. He had gone an unusual step further to change his email addresses, so that his MSN was also inaccessible.

When the Facebook fever caught on, it was like the flu. It was easy to sign on to see photos of friends and their families–photos which would never be available for public consumption had Mark Zuckerberg chosen to read other people’s books, instead of bringing millions of people together in one big book of faces. You flip through the profiles and albums of a former college sweetheart to see the lucky man in her life, or where curiosity took the better part of you, check to see the relationship between your ex and the fellow in the compromising pose. It also provided a gauge to monitor the relationship status of those we fancied. “It’s complicated”, an old friend has indicated. I had attended their wedding in England just the month before. So I called to check before he made it official on the site: ‘It’s all over’, the update said.

Such was the information and curiosity traffic on Facebook. Skype, MSN and Yahoo messenger gave life to it all, by affording us access to their bedrooms and kitchens on video. Now, the virtual world is becoming too tasking. I would rather my Skype was down when I am writing or eating. There isn’t any feeling of excitement when I have to answer a video call. And frankly, I have refused to answer many of these friendly chats, which, in fact, are becoming a boring chore. I am hesitant to add a friend or check status updates to see what somebody ate for lunch or who is marrying who.

Even for the young and restless 21 year old, social networking is fast becoming a tolerable nuisance. My little cousin in the states, a 20 year old, maintains a limited presence on Facebook these days. She says it is a waste of her time–time she needs to study her nursing courses. The last time I checked, she had removed all her photos from the site, replacing her profile photo with a flower–the kind of inexpensive pack of leaves you dump on a tombstone. Her status update also hasn’t changed for nearly three months. And not everybody could access her profile past her name (an online alias she has adopted to disguise her identity), because she had invoked the privacy tools to limit who can see her profile. The new video function on the site has not won her over, because as she says, “The whole video thing is ‘freaky”. For her, the entire virtual experience is not very worthwhile.

Many have reported several virtual life suicides among addicts who facebooked and skyped on the go. So the verb form of the noun ‘I will facebook you’ or the usual ‘are you on facebook?’–expressions which almost replaced the traditional ‘good bye’ or the trendier ‘see ya’ and ‘have a good one’, do not come handy as our greeting finishers anymore. It is no more fun to have a great number of friends online, because most of them are inactive or bored with the whole social networking experience. A few of our friends have animated their virtual lives after voluntarily taking the noose, but their second coming has not been very exciting. They ration their chatting times. Most often, they did not come back with their photos.

On Twitter, however, there seem to be some life. Every now and then, a strange fellow somewhere in the Americas signs on as my new follower. I have also followed quite a number recently, mostly celebrities and journalists. I don’t see many Ghanaians on Twitter. So when I saw Kwame Kwei-Armah, a British playwright on twitter, announcing his presence in nearby Baltimore, I felt a great sense of kinship and followed him right away. I don’t get to see many of those names on the site. I have followed Komla Dumor, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, and a few others. Still Rita, the Legon contact I desperately need to nurse, is missing. On twitter, the business is a little serious than browsing photos and tracking birthdays. News and celebrity updates are regular. Are our friends who have taken the noose on Facebook going to be born again on twitter? Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin is a journalist. He lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he is involved in partner relations and outreach management.

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