I'm writing this for the friends and family of my dear friend Sam Roweis, who died on Tuesday, and for all others who have had a similar experience with anonymous Internet cruelty following the loss of a loved one.
My old high school friend Sam Roweis committed suicide Tuesday night, as reported on the Huffington Post and many other websites:
http://www.nationalpost.com/...
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
Our school was a tiny magnet school in Toronto that more closely resembled Hogwarts than your standard John Hughes institution – we entered at age 11, stayed for six intense years, the teachers were nutty but inspiring, and our fellow students were our family. We not only knew every one, we knew their birthday, their parents, their food allergies, and the best bus route to get to their house. We grew up together, and Sam, our witty and warm valedictorian, was the most brilliant and beloved among us.
During the years since graduation, I rarely saw Sam, but took vicarious pride in his remarkable accomplishments. He earned a Ph.D. from Cal-Tech, was an award-winning researcher in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, a star professor at NYU, and a father of young twins. I looked forward to the inevitable day that Sam’s name would appear in headlines for some world-changing discovery, and I would brag to friends and colleagues that I had the locker beside the famous Sam Roweis for six years. But instead I saw his name in headlines for the most heartbreaking reason possible: Sam had jumped to his death from a 16th floor balcony.
I promptly canceled my work meetings for the rest of the day to properly indulge my grief, and as soon as my teary eyes cleared enough to focus on a computer screen, that’s where I turned. Google grief therapy – using my trusty search bar, I launched into a virtual wake with my fellow mourners spread across the continent. I started with Facebook, where I posted my thoughts and plowed through every photo and memorial posted by Sam’s friends, marveling at all the lives he had touched. I moved on to various tech blogs, where dozens of Sam’s students and colleagues attested to his teaching prowess, some citing him as an inspiration for their decision to pursue a career in computer science. And, to my delight, I found Sam immortalized in online video-taped lectures (albeit expounding on Probabilistic Graphical Models), where I could hear his voice again and pretend for a moment that he was still with us.
But then my online grief-fest took an ugly turn. I started reading the comments posted by strangers on various media sites, such as the New York Post. Horror set in, as I read heartless and soulless entries such as "Nice jump, Einstein," and tears started afresh as I thought of Sam’s widow and family reading these posts. I know I am not the first to bemoan the abuses that have resulted from Internet anonymity, but there must be broader recognition across the online community that the Internet is not a consequence-free playland. In the modern age, the Internet is where friends and family go to grieve, and they read these postings to see what the world has to say about their loved one. These hateful postings are equivalent to screaming insults at the deceased during a funeral. Website operators would do well by the public if they were to exercise more effort to delete excessively hurtful posts associated with recent deaths.