IP Democracy: The Blogosphere is a Cruel Place

The NYT has this piece today linking the suicide of a 40-year old ad executive with cruel comments posted about him on advertising blogs. Paul Tilley, the creative director of DDB Chicago, jumped from the upper floor of the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago after AgencySpy and AdCam published online insults to Mr. Tilley.

Now, Mike Arrington is taking advantage of the timing to swing a swipe at his nemesis Silicon Valley gossip blog ValleyWag.

So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide? My fear is that it isn't a matter of if it will happen, but when. Valleywag and Nick Denton, though, will likely look forward to the event, and the great traffic growth that will surely follow.

It's very sad about Tilley and Arrington does have a point about Valleywag stepping over the line sometimes. But the truth is that suicide is usually caused not by the media or the blogosphere but by clinical depression. Which is a disease not caused by blogs.

Yes, it can be "depressing" to be publicly humiliated. I actually can't find the comments referred to in the article (were they taken down in the wake of Tilley's suicide?) but I did find this tribute to Tilley on Agency Spy, which is, um, a little hypocritical. The comments, however, are innocuous compared to other things I've seen people write. According to the NYT article, someone said Tilley "needs to go back to management 101" because of an email he sent exhorting his subordinates to work harder.

Maybe these comments were the straw that broke the camel's back and Tilley's mood darkened even further. On a stand-alone basis, though, they probably weren't the cause of Tilley's suicide. He had to be in bad shape to begin with, even if no one knew.

Make no mistake: the blogosphere can be a cruel place. The usual journalistic standards don't apply and sensational, defaming posts drive traffic. And it's all too easy to besmirch enemies and extract revenge by going over the top.

But most people survive even worse stuff than this and sometimes even thrive in the face of adversity. One of my favorite inspirational books, or at least the first half anyway (the second half is weird) is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." Frankl was a doctor imprisoned not in one but several Nazi concentration camps for five years. He lost everything, including his new wife and his entire family and he experienced things that no one in the world should experience.

Yet, he emerged not only to go on and become a successful therapist but he also stayed, strangely, optimistic about the world.

Yeah, the blogosphere can be a cruel place, but life itself can be very cruel. AgencySpy and AdCam may need to rethink their viciousness -- according to the article ad blogs tend to be particularly nasty for some reason -- and ValleyWag does sometimes turn my stomach. But are they responsible for people killing themselves? Absolutely not.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on March 3, 2008 7:17 AM to IP Democracy