sorry, slip of the mouse... /GE Greg Elmer, PhD Bell Globemedia Research Chair Director, Infoscape Research Lab, www.infoscapelab.ca Rogers Communications Centre/School of Radio-TV Arts Ryerson University 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5B 2K3 416-979-5282 _______________________________________________ Co-Editor, Space and Culture: An International Journal of Social Spaces http://www.carleton.ca/space/ ----- Original Message ----- From: Greg Elmer <gelmer@ryerson.ca> Date: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 9:38 am Subject: [Air-l] mtg. Wednesday To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org
Do you have something for me to read over for Wednesday? Do you still want to meet? -Greg
Greg Elmer, PhD Bell Globemedia Research Chair Director, Infoscape Research Lab, www.infoscapelab.ca Rogers Communications Centre/School of Radio-TV Arts Ryerson University 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5B 2K3
416-979-5282 _______________________________________________ Co-Editor, Space and Culture: An International Journal of Social Spaces http://www.carleton.ca/space/
----- Original Message ----- From: Yukari Seko <yukaseko@yorku.ca> Date: Thursday, January 18, 2007 2:02 am Subject: Re: [Air-l] Japanese suicide reference To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org
Dear Dr. Chris,
I cannot help but replying you since it is the very topic I am currently working on for my master's thesis!!
Since the first online suicide was "scooped" by Mainichi news paper in December 2002, several group suicides have been reported by the media and graduallyknown as "Net Shinju (Net Group Suicide)" The biggest case was happened in October 2004 in which 7 people who only met on a suicide-related discussion board took their life together.
The followings are English article featuring on the incident; http://english.aljazeera.net/news/archive/archive?ArchiveId=7207 http://www.pimejapan.com/society/articolo_13102004a.htm
Since I used to work with the journalist Tetsuya Shibui reported in thesearticles, I personally knew some of those who committed online suicides through him. Shibui's ethnographical works on Net group suicide are (albeit journalistic) the best resources for this issue. Unfortunately, Englishtranslation of his books are yet unavailable, but I'm using the followings for my thesis by translating them;
Shibui, T. (2005). Net Group Suicide: Why "Maria" Chose to Die. Tokyo;Shinkigen-sha --------(2004). Net Group Suicide. Tokyo;NHK publications
However, I personally disagree with the perspective that online suicide appears to be "a frightening increase in the number of group suicides arranged over the Internet through chat rooms dedicated to discussing suicide." Apparentlyvigorous documentations in the media have informed suicidal people a less violent way of killing themselves (death of carbon monoxide with charcoalburners) and brought several copy-cat cases, but in some occasions, the same online interactions help suicidal people to change their mind. This type of grass-roots support is something absent from their offline life. Although the number of online suicides is quite small, suicide-related websites are increasingly removed from webspace. The growing regulation of suicidal> discourses in Japanese cyberspace is what I want to investigate in next few years...
Hope it helps,
Yukari Seko
-- M.A. candidate Joint Programme in Communication and Culture Studies Between York/Ryerson Universities Comcult GSA Webmaster (York) http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa/ yukaseko@yorku.ca _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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