I just had a look at my Feedjit tracker for the story blog. It appears that somebody came to the story Room 26 from Google by searching ‘why I shouldn’t commit suicide.’
It surprised me a bit since the word ‘suicide’ is used only once in the whole story, and isn’t in any way germane to the plot. I suppose that’s how search engines work, but there must have been a hell of a lot of returns for that one. Odd that he or she should have picked up my story.
What concerns me more, however, is that an unknown person might have been influenced in a decision of such magnitude by some inconsequential rambling of mine. I have no right to hold such influence, but what can I do?
4 comments:
Wow.. :( This worried me. I hope that person is okay.. search engines tend to find quite random websites.. hmmm.. it makes me wonder.
Don't think there's anything we can do about it, Joanna. We have to write what we have to write. What other people do with it is up to them. It's a bit different if we're writing personally to someone, of course.
Jeff, you are not responsible for how other people choose to act. I know that we as blogger's have a certain "duty" and I hate that word for readers, but we cannot, and I mean cannot control if someone decides to act from a certain post. Anyone can look for a website or blog talking about suicide and then decide what they want to do, which has nothing to do with the post. If you feel strongly enough about potential people acting on a death wish, you can always put a badge up of a suicide prevention site and hot line. And it sounds like from your above reply to Joanna's comment that you can only do so much and that we have to remember "to thine ownself be true."
That's the view I'm taking, Wendy. It just gave me a bit of a jolt when I saw it. Made me think about the whole question of responsibility in public writing.
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