The initial draft of
“404 Not Found”: Infocide in Open Content Communities
is available. I welcome comments here, or via email.
Abstract
: The term infocide, and related neologisms such as cybersuicide, are identified and distinguished as a type of cyberlanguage. The complexities of infocide are then explored in open content communities with respect to reasons, enactment, and community reactions. I find that infocides are often prompted by the exhaustion of maintaining an online life, by discontent towards an online community, and over privacy concerns that one’s real and online identifies have intersected. Community responses are also varied: infocides might be ignored, lamented, sleuthed, and mitigated by preserving content that was taken down.
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When people choose infocide they are doing two things: they are leaving and
they are taking their stuff (information) with them when they go. (Hence, in
English we have an idiom for those that leave in a huff as “
taking
their ball and going home
.”) Even without the retraction of one’s self
from a community, leaving is an intriguing behavior itself. We have many ways
of speaking of this behavior with varied connotations including: resign, quit,
drop-out, and take a break/holiday. Similarly, Wikipedia has templates that
decorate the user pages of those that have gone missing, which I sort based on
the how often a template is used.
Here we see significant redundancies (why 3 versions of a vacation template
and
a holiday template) but a few interesting features. First, these
are self-declared absences — except for “Not Here.” Second, the absence
might be more or less permanent. Three, the reason for absence is only
specified in the case of a real world (e.g., holiday/vacation) though the EX-WP
template implies dissatisfaction since one is purposefully no longer
identifying as a Wikipedian.
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Even when one puts aside
mediated or facilitated death
, terms related to infocide might speak of (a) attention seeking, (b) getting oneself banned (intentionally or not), and (c) and the purposeful retraction of one’s presence and contributions from the Internet.
Attention seeking behavior is central to the Urban Dictionary’s first definition of
Internet suicide
: “When someone in a forum, newsgroup, etc. says they are leaving (sometimes ‘and never coming back’), but actually wants to see how people react to their leaving. Usually as the result of drama” [
Shawnyshawn20071is
]. However, this dramatic aspect is less ambiguously identified as a
flounce
at Encyclopedia Dramatica:
A
flounce
post is when one must proclaim that they are leaving a community forever. These attention whores are nearly as amusing as those who use “deleting your LiveJournal” for attention. Rather than quietly leaving an LJ community, they feel they must leave a long ass, boring, nonsensical post explaining why they are so much more highly evolved than anyone else in the community. [
Dramatica2011fce
]
Behavior which is likely to get oneself banned is identified in the second definition of
Internet suicide
at Urban Dictionary. While infocide is usually spoken of as a voluntary and self-enacted practice, this definition speaks of annoying others such that they are the ones that enact the retraction: “The act of intentionally getting yourself banned from a website or forum.” The provided example does not follow this connotation exactly as it implies that the term is used in a sense that mirrors the “real world” declamation that a particular behavior is risky and may result in an unintended consequence: “Man, you can’t go around posting the f-word everywhere, that’s internet suicide!” [
Dude20092is
]
Finally, retracting one’s online presence is captured in the definitions of
infocide
and
digital suicide
at Urban Dictionary:
infosuicide/infocide
: Disengaging from the Internet via the deletion of all your publicly available information. K
quadhome20111ii
]
digital suicide
: Deleting all or most of your information from the internet namely social networking sites such as your facebook, twitter, xanga accounts…. “[For example, Frederick] committed digital suicide when he applied for a new job”. [
shitastic20101ds
]
This sense, of retracting one’s online presence, then has varied Web-site specific variations including
Twittercide
[
rtil20092t
],
Wikicide
[
Dramatica2010wde
], and
Facebook kevorkian
(“A person who assists a Facebook user in committing Facebook suicide (deleting their account), especially with regard to deleting all information and data” [
beagle20111fk
].
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I have recently begun a small research project about
infocide
: the purposeful retraction of one’s presence and contributions from the Internet. However, naturally, one must distinguish this practice from the purposeful ending of one’s life. Both retraction and suicide have varied, and sometimes overlapping, neologisms.
Internet suicide
is ambiguous in that one can find it applied to suicide that is facilitated or mediated online [
Wikipedia2011is
] and getting oneself banned from a site [
Shawnyshawn20071is
]. However,
cyber suicide
is distinct and has a longer history of being used to describe online suicide [
AlaoYollesArmenta1999cis
,
Analytics2005chi
] — reflecting that “cyber” was a popular affix then, following
e-
but preceding
i-
and
2.0
. Similarly distinct,
infosuicide/infocide
is consistently used for retraction [
quadhome20111ii
,
Dowland2011ide
], as is
digital suicide
[
shitastic20101ds
] and the more specific
twittercide
[
rtil20092t
].
Beyond neologisms, the phenomenon of online suicide garnered some popular attention with the enactment of suicide pacts in Japan in 2000 and 2003 [
Ueno2000saj
]. However, if Wikipedia can be thought of as a popular indicator of online phenomenon it’s surprising that the first version of its English article was created in 2005 [
Wikipedia2005is
]. In any case, a search of English-language journal articles reveals the issue became salient to mental health scholars in the late 90s:
Suicide On The Internet: a Focus for Nursing Intervention?
[
BaumeRolfeClinton1998soi
],
Cybersuicide: the Internet and Suicide
[
AlaoYollesArmenta1999cis
],
Internet Sites May Encourage Suicide
[
Dobson1999ism
], and
The Internet and Its Potential Influence on Suicide
[
Thompson1999iip
].
In this work I will be focusing exclusively upon what I will label as
infocide
: the purposeful retraction of one’s presence and contributions from the Internet.
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