• by Douglas Quenqua , April 2, 2008

Perhaps it was inevitable. As we increasingly live out our social lives online, we begin to seek a digital equivalent to death. The concept of profile "suicide" - not simply abandoning one's profile, but actively deleting all traces of it with extreme prejudice - has become something of a phenomenon.

To wit: Media and tech blogger Simon Owens, fed up with a constant barrage of e-mails from MySpace, publicly declared January 30 to be International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Owens clearly hit a nerve, as frustrated social networkers everywhere turned his "holiday" into a viral grassroots movement - a virtual Jonestown sans Kool-Aid. Soon everyone from The Washington Post to the BBC was covering the story.

"I think there was a lot of animosity from people who were fed up with MySpace," says Owens. "It really wasn't keeping up with the times." Owens, like many others, was pushed over the edge, virtually speaking, after receiving one too many e-mails informing him of some new friend request, or an upcoming birthday, way too much spam from pretty girls who want him to watch them on their cams, or any of the other non-events that can trigger a notification. "They do anything to drive you to the site and increase their page views," he says. "It's maddening." Hence his plan to deprive MySpace of his presence.

And the suicide fantasies aren't confined to one site. Facebook was forced to play Dr. Kevorkian to scores of its own members after a Feb. 11 New York Times article detailed the troubles some members have had getting their information permanently removed from the site. Facebook promptly publicized step-by-step instructions on wiping one's data clean, though follow-up articles suggest the process is still not without its bugs.
And the urge for mass deletion doesn't stop there. As of this writing, a Facebook group called "How to Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account" now claims more than 12,000 members. (Although one understandably questions the sincerity of these folks, as they clearly lack the gumption to do the deed.)

Why this sudden urge to end it all? Online chatter suggests a growing weariness with the transparent lifestyle. MySpace (which is fast becoming little more than repository for photos of exes) and Facebook thrive on a degree of exhibitionism among members, and the idea that privacy is antiquated in the era of Web 2.0. But as we learned from the backlash against Facebook's Beacon program, there is a limit to how much control people are willing to sacrifice over their personal data. Social network suicide is at least partly a mass reclamation of one's privacy.

But it's easier said than done. What's true in life is quickly proving to be true online: Suicide may be painless, but that doesn't make it easy.