Hacker News Reader

You are not your iPhone. You are not your tweets. You are not your checkins. Quitting a service is not suicide in any meaningful respect.

Relatedly, the construction of identity around relationship to technology is one of the dangers of spending your time with the tech crowd. If you hang around the Valley all day and TechCrunch is your only source of news, you might get the impression that this stuff matters. At the end of the day, its still bits.

View on HN

I don't think we're taking it that seriously. We just had to pick a word to describe it, and suicide was close enough, while being dramatic enough to put in a headline.

Are phone conversations less real for being remote and digital?

In a phone conversation you are having an actual conversation. You can hear a human, the tone of the voice, hear if the other person responds immideately or hesitates. You get lots of contextual information you can't get from text alone.

And as the name implies a telephone conversation is an actual conversation. A conversation involves interaction.

With twitter you are not so much in a conversation as you yelling and hoping that gits on the internet will give you attention.

So yes, I'd say there is a difference and it lies in how the medium works, not in its implementation (i.e. digital or analog).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com