Social Networks, Suicide and Statistics 66
mikejuk writes "The data that is available in social networks is often used to detect the opinion of the crowd — but can it reveal the state of mind of the individual. New research suggests that some simple but non-obvious characteristics of social network use are related to suicide. Data mining is usually about determining things of economic advantage, but in this case, suicide we have a personal loss and an economic one. A new paper by a group of Japanese researchers Naoki Masuda, Issei Kurahashi and Hiroko Onari claims to have found ways of detecting suicidal tendencies — or at least the tendency to think about suicide, so-called 'suicide ideation.' The study used the Japanese social network mixi, which has over 27 million members and allows users to join any of over 4.5 million topic groups — some focusing on the subject of suicide. This provided a study and control group to compare. The most interesting finding is that while users in the suicide group had lots of friends, they didn't have as many transitive relationships i.e. where A friends B friends C friends A. This suggests that it isn't lack of friends but a lack of tight social groupings that is a factor. The same technique could be used to investigate similar problems such as depression and alcohol abuse."
Re:well (Score:2, Interesting)
As cynical as it sounds, I guess they have to mention economic loss in order to get funding for their research. I mean, teenage suicide is just taken for granted. Nobody is changing the school system because of that. Bullying is presented in pop media as a fact of life, a rite of passage that makes you stronger if you make it through. Bullying prepares you for corporate life and for the binary gender system. That is its function as an institution.
Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, bullying isn't an "institution", it's a fact of evolution. All social animals "bully" each other as they're growing up; there are hierarchies, dominance and submissiveness within any pack animal's social group.
Now, we're obviously a bit more rational about it then, say, a litter of wolf pups, and we can find psychological reasons behind why Person A bullies Person B, but there will always be competition in any social group. The mother wolf will step in if the Alpha male in her litter is being too rough with his litter-mates, give him a nip of her own, and he'll knock it the fuck off.
I don't think the problems we have with bullying these days have anything to do with the kids, and everything to do with us. Zero-tolerance policies in schools, for instance, serve to punish both the aggressor and the victim equally, which is ridiculous. This was true even when I was in high school 15 years ago, pre-Columbine before the bullying hysteria started really ramping up, and it's even worse today. Parents aren't disciplining their kids effectively (which is why so many bullies come from broken homes or empty ones due to chronic absentee parents chasing that big brass ring to leave their kids raised by 4Chan), and they're not noticing the signs of this behavior when the kids are young enough that the behavior can really be corrected. Our definitions of what is 'bullying' are changing all the time, too. We've become more and more sensitive on a societal level to it, and I really do think that it's become a sort of moral panic at this point. "Did Jimmy call you a doody-head?! He's a dirty BULLY AND MUST BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!! Throw his 7-year-old ass in JAIL!!!!!!!!"
I realize that's a little insensitive, and that there is much more severe forms of bullying than that, but I've heard younger parents characterize relatively innocent shit like that as bullying in conversation. Bullying is starting to come to mean any negative interaction between two kids anymore. I had my share of adversaries in school, as did most people, and while we had our dust ups, I wouldn't call the other kids bullies. We just didn't get along. That's how life is, sometimes, and guess what? It did make me stronger. It taught me how to deal with antagonistic people like that, which is a pretty useful skill, especially these days where everything has become so polarized. I learned not to let the shit get to me when I was a kid, but if we shelter kids from that shit in the misguided idea that we're going to turn school into a utopia where nobody fights with each other, they're just going to end up unable to deal with any adversity in their lives as adults. Not only are we over-sanitizing our world to the point where kids are getting sicker than they used to due to lack of exposure to germs, but we're starting to do the same thing to them socially, as well.
What happens when they start having to deal with those people when they've never learned how to deal with them before? They feel helpless, they get despondent and depressed, and they think suicide is the only solution...because they never learned how to deal with the bullshit. Their self-esteem and confidence is shot to hell because they've never had the opportunity to rise to a challenge and deal with it on their own, so when they actually are forced to deal with a situation on their own, they're powerless.