THE death of Brandon Vedas revealed how the strange intimacy of cyberspace communities can have disastrous consequences.

In a way the behaviour of those among the dozen watchers who encouraged Vedas to harm himself is nothing new. Drivers stop when people threaten to jump off Brooklyn Bridge and yell at them to go ahead and do it.

There also appears to have been a lack of comprehension about what was happening to Vedas. They were treating their virtual friend’s drug- taking as a sort of fantasy game of chicken, where you pull back off the railway track at the last minute. They didn’t realise that the cocktail of drugs he had mixed was lethal and that he wasn’t going to wake up from it.

One of those watching told Vedas: “Eat more. I wanna see if you survive or you just black out.” The viewer’s detachment — watching through a webcam — made it easier to encourage Vedas to kill himself. Had any of these people been sitting in the same room, it is almost certain that they wouldn’t have pushed him to suicide, and may even have tried to prevent him from overdosing. Lonely people are attracted to internet chatrooms because it is much easier to go online, where you are dealing only with words, than to meet someone and have to take into account physical things. There is no need to worry about looks, or smell, or table manners.

For parents, who have always worried about who their children are mixing with, the internet provides a whole new secret universe for them to be concerned about.

We know that teens worry about who they are and how they are going to negotiate this world. Most go through periods of feeling low and many feel depressed. There has been a steady rise in teenage suicides since 1945, and now it’s easy for a depressed teenager to find people on the net who will tell him it is a good idea to die.

Martyrdom has always been popular; if you feel that you can’t achieve something in your life, it can make you feel that your life has significance. Vedas is now all over the front pages: the first internet martyr.