MySpace, Suicide, and Defensive Ethics
Dec 3rd, 2007 • Posted in: CommentaryIn the last week, the tragic tale of Megan Meier has blazed across the national media like a comet — spectacular, ominous, and crying out for interpretation. Why did Megan, a 13-year-old in a Midwestern U.S. suburb, hang herself after being dumped by her 16-year-old boyfriend, Josh Evans? What are we to make of the fact that the two had never met, but only communicated through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking website?
What can we learn from the fact that “Josh” didn’t really exist, but was the fictional creation of an adult who, after setting up an extended flirtation, suddenly began insulting Megan? What do we do with the knowledge that the perpetrator was no distant stranger, but the 47-year-old mother of a daughter who was once Megan’s best friend, living four houses down the street?
How important is it that this neighbor knew Megan to be in a volatile state, taking antidepressant medication and worried about her weight and social acceptability? Does it matter that this neighbor’s final message from “Josh” to Megan — “The world would be a better place without you” — arrived minutes before Megan was found dead by her own mother? Finally, where do we go with the knowledge that the author of this fatal hoax has not been charged with any crime — because, as a local sheriff’s department spokesman said, what that neighbor did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal”?
One place to go is into a recognition that “rude” and “immature” hardly characterize the perniciousness of this offense. This story is about many things: bullying, mental cruelty, teenage yearnings, and an absence of conscience so chilling and remorseless that it can only be described as moral idiocy. But what makes this story so significant is the way it illustrates the conundrums that spring forth along the frontier where our values and our technologies meet. I’m convinced that the most gripping, tormenting dilemmas of our future will arise along this interface between ethics and cyberspace.
Notice I didn’t say, “law and cyberspace,” and for good reason. Ethics almost always precedes law: A thing is usually understood to be wrong in a moral sense long before it’s classified as wrong by legislatures or the courts. Not surprisingly, the public outrage over Megan’s case, reverberating through news stories and blogs, sounded like a chorus of voices chanting, “There oughta be a law!” As this outcry grows, the ebb and flow of ethical discussion will gradually harden into the concrete of the legal code, enforcing the previously unenforceable. That’s how laws so often get launched.
But where is the boundary beyond which ethics turns into law? What do we do before something unethical becomes illegal? And once a law is in place, how do we help our children understand it?
For starters, we can test specific actions against our five principal core values. This neighbor, it would appear, violated every one:
- Honesty. She depended on deception, without which “Josh Evans” would have been dismissed by Megan as a fiction.
- Responsibility. Abdicating the expected responsibility of adults for the safety and security of children around them, she deliberately shrugged off all concern for Megan’s well-being.
- Respect. Conscious, deliberate disrespect, it now appears, was the strategy for pushing Megan beyond her limits.
- Fairness. While creating purposeful torment for Megan, she would have mightily resisted anyone who did the same to her own daughter.
- Compassion. Void of fellow-feeling, she instead laughed with another neighbor about her plan to “mess with Megan.”
Recognizing unethical action in this way is an important first step. But it’s not the same as defending ourselves against the unethical intentions of others, whether accidental or intentional. Unethical motivations appear to operate much like hypnotism, which works best when the one being hypnotized gives his or her consent to the process. For impressionable kids, the very act of signing up for a MySpace page amounts to tacit consent. It’s a setup, a willing disablement of one’s own mental self-defense. It entails a voluntary engagement with a world that deliberately blurs the line between the real and the unreal. And it lures its users into an agreement, skillfully clothed in the language of freedom and choice, to operate outside the protections usually afforded by a community of caring adults, in a context of predictable laws, moderated by a culture of moral constraints.
Against such threats, who is teaching our children to be alert, savvy, and self-protective? We spend hours on such instruction before we issue kids a driver’s license. Why? Because without it, we open our children to an asphalt environment that is enticing, unfamiliar, and dangerous — putting them at risk and allowing them to endanger others.
The Web, as Megan’s story proves, is a similarly dangerous environment. Yet, as in the early years of the twentieth century before a driver’s license was required, we turn kids loose to navigate as they will, with no coaching as to the dangers. Laws will help, especially when they afford swift, sure punishment for the kind of intentional malice that destroyed Megan. But the real need is for clear programs and policies that teach defensive ethics. Megan, even at age 13, could have learned to defend herself. We just never thought to tell her how.
©2007 Institute for Global Ethics
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