“A teenager created his own death site on the

internet – and hanged himself.

Simon Kelly, 18, first searched the web for

information on how to commit suicide, then set

up a page saying how and why he would do it.

It contained heartbreaking messages for his

parents – who came home from holiday

yesterday to be told of Simon’s death by his

older brother Nick.” Supposedly. Hard to say if this is yet another story that’s going to turn out to have been a hoax; after all, this is from The Sun. Going to www.essjaykay.com gives a page-not-found error.

Does this kind of uncertainty about whether someone is having at you speak to a moral issue in relation to the Internet? David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain

Manifesto and web-publisher of JOHO: The Journal of the

Hyperlinked Organization, writes on belief.net that “The World Wide Web reflects the best and

worst of humanity. But its structurally more

moral than any place we know.”

In fact, human interest and motivation is built right

into the architecture of the web. The web is only a

web because the pages are linked, and links are

created to anticipate the interests of readers. This

flies in the face of our real world geography,

where proximity has little to do with our beliefs

and interests and everything to do with the

accidents of location. The web’s geography is

neither alien, nor alienating. In fact, the web

consists of people, groups, and organizations that

for one reason or another would like us to see the

world through their eyes.