Blue whale: Why the online suicide challenge seems all too familiar
News of a 14-year-old from the suburbs of Mumbai committing suicide has raised a number of important questions. The victim – a Class 9 student in an international school – was spotted by a neighbour walking on the parapet on July 29 while shooting what looked like a selfie video. The boy then jumped off and killed himself.
Five days on, there is still no clarity on why a seemingly healthy teen decided to end his life in such a bizarre way. Even though the police are yet to confirm anything, statements given to the police by the victim's friends suggest that the suicide could be linked to the deadly "Blue Whale Challenge" – a social media game, believed to have originated in Russia, which incites teenagers into committing suicide through a series of tasks and quests.
This suggestion, however, has left the country confused and unable to understand how a game could have pushed a kid to the point where he ended up taking up his life. Although the first such case reported in India, the incident falls in line with more than 200 other such cases across the globe where teens and sometimes even pre-teens over a 50-day period physically and mentally harmed themselves at the behest of a complete stranger.
Unable to make sense of the situation at hand, some have pointed fingers at products of modern day pop culture, such as Netflix's popular show, 13 Reasons Why for glorifying suicide the culture. However, the answers we are seeking could well be available in another Netflix production – Black Mirror. A highly unsettling TV show by design, Black Mirror episodes explore "futuristic situations to worlds just like our own".
The Blue Whale problem, if looked at closely does not reflect a growing suicide trend among teenagers, but rather hints at the rise in power of the darker forces trawling the vast expanse of the internet. There has always been a fear that the internet itself can spy on us and control us. With, the case of Blue Whale, we might just have been given a proof. While psychologists may explain the Blue Whale deaths as a consequence of alienation from the real world, the explanation could well be much scarier.
This fear has been explored in the widely appreciated episodes of the sci-fi TV show – Black Mirror.
In one of the episodes, Shut up and Dance, a teenager Kenny falls into an online trap which eventually ends up ruining his life. This teenager is blackmailed by a mysterious hacker who owns compromising material on him which he threatens to make public if Kenny doesn't follow orders given by the hacker.
The game starts with Kenny following simple orders, carrying out innocuous tasks, but towards the end, he is left with an option to fight for his life or have his whole life ruined by the hackers click of the mouse.
This plot has uncanny similarities to the Blue Whale game that it could be argued if this is the case of life imitating art. But even if it's not, what is clear though is that the episode explains how we can easily be controlled and punished by the very systems of communication we depend on.
At a time when cyber attacks and spying have become a huge nuisance even as Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg covers his computer camera with tape so that he can’t be spied on, it could be a good idea for us to be more careful while exploring the internet.
In an age where the virtual is increasingly intermingling with real life, certain amount of caution should be exercised when interacting with strangers on the web.
If we have to look at pop culture and TV shows for answers in such troubling times, then instead of pointing fingers at shows like 13 Reasons Why, we should turn our focus and learn from shows like the Black Mirror, which for long have been warning us of the perils of a digital life, which we are so enamoured of.