Priyanka Singh, committed suicide on Facebook. She removed her albums, then started saying her goodbyes and left a message “I don’t live here anymore.”
Fed up with the intrusive nature of Facebook and Orkut, many users are bidding adieu to their virtual avatars
Priyanka Singh, 25, just committed suicide on Facebook. She first removed her albums, then started saying her goodbyes. Her last message on Facebook was abrupt: “I don’t live here anymore.”
Now, before you let your imagination run wild, all she did was delete her account. For her, it was all just getting a bit “too much”.
“First of all, it’s useless. What purpose does it serve? And secondly, I was getting too many unnecessary invitations from people from my past, ex-boyfriends included. There is a reason you are not in touch with a lot of people, and when they come back into your life, it’s a big mess.”
She also didn’t want her boyfriend to object: “It’s better you wipe out the root of the problem before it gets out of hand.” These days, she is busy keeping tabs on her boyfriend’s Facebook account, and is sure he will be the next to commit ‘suicide’.
Singh is not the only one committing — what is being dubbed — ‘suicide’. Many of the millions of users, who log on to Facebook or Orkut every hour, have closed their accounts.
Or, at the least, have started contemplating it. There is even the Facebook Mass Suicide Club, which says “Fed up with Facebook? Don’t like having your info shared with the world? Sick of people you don’t like stopping by to ‘poke’ you? Have you ever thought about just deleting your account and freeing yourself? If Facebook is controlling and consuming your life — then this is a group for you...!”
So far, 144 people have joined. Facebook is now the 13th most-used website in the world, with two million members in the UK and 150,000 new people signing up every day, whereas as of August 2007, Orkut had a record 67,000,000 users. So why are people suddenly eager to end their virtual life on Facebook and Orkut?
Shubdha Khanna, 22, has a different take on the strange phenomenon. “It starts off being very addictive, but ends up being intrusive. I was hooked and was spending too much time on it. I would be logging on every hour, and would end up just snooping on other people’s accounts. I would check their albums, their messages, their friend lists. It was getting spooky.
“There was also the fact that too many people were getting in touch with me and vice versa. In the beginning, it was a way of getting in touch with people you hadn’t met in a long time. But finally, I was just getting in touch with people I didn’t even need to know. I had to end it as it was completely consuming me.”
And as always, security concerns top everybody’s lists. Some people closed their accounts as their pictures were being ‘stolen’. “I had been getting really vulgar messages for a while and I just couldn’t take it any longer. I am also scared that my pictures may be used for some obscene purposes. I have seen it happen to my friends. It’s not worth it at all,” said 24-year-old Swati Seth.
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