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It begins with a sickly child, as so many stories do.
This week saw two news stories which tested the “viral” potential of bodily suffering. The first was that of Victoria Wilcher, the three-year-old survivor of a pit bull attack who was asked to leave a branch of KFC because of her “scary” facial scarring. The narrative lends itself to social media: hate on the giant fast food chain, side with the child victim, then share your outrage on Twitter and Facebook. Then a second story surfaced: after investigation the entire account was shown to be a hoax.
Whatever the parents’ intentions, they must have known their daughter would attract online attention. Her story coincides with another, yet more sinister one: that of Garnett Spears, a five-year-old boy who died last January of sodium poisoning. His mother blogged the experience of coping with illness as a single mother, posting online up until the boy’s death. Last week she appeared in court indicted on charges of poisoning him, an act of second degree murder possibly caused by Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
People do strange things for online attention. They teach their cats to play the keyboard. They Instagram their receipts for bottle service. But the two cases above stem from a distinct subcategory of online stunt: that which directly affects the body. They slot into a young tradition, one including cancer hoaxes, fictionalised recovery memoirs and internet-facilitated hysterical pregnancies. They are encouraged by the advent of the sympathetic web, the era of crowdfunding, clicktivism, Upworthy headlines and retweeted social justice.
And because the internet thrives on shock value, reblogging and reacting before taking the time to verify, Munchausen by proxy is practically encouraged. This kind of morbid self-fashioning is so prevalent as to have been given a name: Munchausen by Internet—attention-seeking online by feigning illness—with repeated calls for it to be added to the DSM.
Blogs depicting illness at its most life-threatening gain traction. We click on the extreme, to flirt with death and abject horror through an electronic medium.
Spears’s sparsely populated blog is heartbreaking to read. It closely emulates the tropes of mommy blogging, assuming a cheerful, formulaic tone we know to be artificial. Similarly her Twitter feed is full of effusive, exclamation-marked statements about how much she loves her son: Spears defines herself as “GarnettsMommy,” by extension defining herself by his disease. She now stands accused of inventing a father for Garnett who died in a car crash, another dead child before Garnett, and “borrowing” a friend’s son to pose as Garnett’s brother. If reports are to be believed, she was seen taking photos of Garnett on his deathbed to share on Facebook days before he died, and much of the debate around her guilt has centered on her labeling as a “social media mommy” obsessed with exploiting her son.
The case prompts consideration of how often sympathy is called for online, and how physical pain has become a kind of internet currency. How frequently are we asked to pray for people, or places, or things on social media? How many times each day do narratives surface in your Facebook feed of people or animals triumphing over physical hardship?
Two years ago I followed the Tumblr of an anorexia sufferer, whose hospital photo on life support was reblogged over and over. The months that followed chronicled her recovery, her struggles with learning to eat again and feeling secure in her own body, until after a year or so she seemed happy again and switched to posting motivational quotes and Instagrams of her morning coffee. Without the drama and suffering it was boring, and I unfollowed her.
Today I don’t feel guilty for unfollowing so much as for reading her posts in the first place. Ostensibly a ‘recovery’ blog, one of a community which still lives on Tumblr after the crackdown on pro-ana content, the truth is that only blogs depicting illness at its most life-threatening gain traction. We click on the extreme, to flirt with death and abject horror through an electronic medium. We follow them to witness suffering: everything afterwards is beside the point.
Our fascination with pain and suffering make them natural clickbait, a new kind of online “wound culture.”
The internet is forever trying to make itself physically tangible, encompassing everything from the fitness instructor who assures you they feel the pain too, to the hospital selfie, to Arduino sex toys and teledildonics. In the same way that a makeup blogger on YouTube swatches products on their wrist to make them somehow more “real,” physical suffering must be written on the flesh. YouTube memes like the cinnamon challenge and the NekNomination are compelling for very real possibility that they might (and do) go horribly wrong. Bodies built by the internet, like the Human Barbie or steroid abuse victim Zyzz, are walking memes too extreme to survive in real life, forever on the verge of collapse as though sustained only by retweets.
Suffering makes the denizens of the internet more real, more human. Members of health forums include their diagnosis and dosage in their signatures: illness becomes a personal hashtag. Given the cost of healthcare in America, and the stigma which can accompany diagnosis, it’s little wonder that illness functions as a new kind of social tribalism. Post-illness narratives like The Big C, The Fault in Our Stars or even Breaking Bad link disease inextricably to heroism.
The theme also panders to our hypochondria. Much has been written about the hypnotic, life-swallowing appeal of Web MD, a black hole of cyberchondria which is forever leading readers to believe they have three kinds of cancer and the gout. I fell down into that trap myself for the best part of a year when I took antidepressants, spending more time reading about the side-effects of my SSRIs than focusing on getting better.
Illness narratives offer the daylight version of torture porn, a momentarily “real” twinge of pain felt from the unreal act of clicking. Our fascination with pain and suffering make them natural clickbait, a new kind of online “wound culture.” We see the hyperbole of the internet written on the body, in the form of self-harming Bieber fans and popstars who shave their heads in penance, turning the internet into a marketplace of suffering. Focusing in particular on young female victims, this age-old appetite surfaces everywhere from tubercular French prostitutes to doomed children, misery memoirs and cancer-themed blockbusters. They confirm Edgar Allan Poe’s dictum that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
The internet can’t know what goes on under your skin, just as social media rarely tells a person’s full life story. Whether or not they intended to, by putting them online the parents of Victoria Wilcher and Garnett Spears turned their children’s bodies into public property. Spears’s mommy blog is particularly sinister, as it writes the child into the pre-made narrative of terminal illness, becoming more “authentic” the closer the subject becomes to death.
In the internet’s fascination with illness, the closer the suffering comes to ending, the more the subject is celebrated. Recovery marks a satisfactory end to the narrative of illness, but death is the ultimate disruption, offering a memorialised fame which confounds its online medium with spirituality.
We habitually use social media to refashion ourselves, but the terminally ill catfish moves this ability into dangerous territory. It makes the internet internal, converting a need for hyperbole and rapid change into physical and personal detriment. Disease is the original “viral” topic, because suffering will always be news.
