As of Wednesday, Twitter users are being invited to sign up to Samaritans Radar, a web app that keeps tabs on your friends’ tweets, and brings your attention to signs of mental anguish. In order to do this it keeps its digital eye out for keywords such as “depressed” or phrases like “no one to talk to”, and sends you a private email when they feature in your friends’ output. The Samaritans has reason to believe this might help, as there’s said to be a high correlation between suicidal messages and actual suicides.
When people are suffering and don’t know where to turn, the internet offers the possibility of some sort of interaction. You can throw words out into the electronic vortex without fear of burdening specific individuals and, if you’re lucky, you might even receive an encouraging, thoughtful or helpful response. Or then again you might not. But at least now, if you’re already fortunate enough to have the sorts of friends who sign up for well-meaning web apps, you have double the chance of being heard.
The problem with the app, as its creators willingly admit, is that it isn’t yet up to the task of decoding nuanced human communication. Irony is outside its remit, as are jokes and quotes. Nor can it tell the difference between a friend and a “friend”. If you follow your favourite brands of shoe and ice-cream, plus numerous actors, supermarkets, celebrity pets and music festivals, you might find yourself receiving an awful lot of concerned emails – although the app boasts a “whitelist” of companies liable to use trigger words in a non-worrying way. In time, apparently, this will improve – as long as users diligently fill in feedback forms in response to irrelevant warnings. In short, if you sign up, you risk a bureaucratic nightmare.
It hardly needs saying that if you try to keep up with everything that’s being said on Twitter, you are likely to hit information overload, at speed. And such saturation is perhaps the main thing that would cause a person to miss or ignore a troubled tweet in the first place. If, on top of that, we’re constantly receiving misguided alerts about companies and friends with a dark sense of humour, we might very well find ourselves ever more desensitised and inclined to ignore worrying signs.
Still, while it could be tempting to criticise the Samaritans for coming up with an Orwellian-sounding scheme for keeping tabs on people’s feelings, perhaps Samaritans Radar could be seen as a spooky-but-useful reframing of our troubled negotiations between privacy, self-presentation, authenticity and intimacy. We may want to people to know we exist, but without making an unreasonable demand on them. If we can cause the world to be interested in us by appearing harmlessly fascinating and “nice”, that’s great. But what to do when the response we need from the outside is more than a noncommittal like or retweet? Who can we say it to, and how?
It’s frightening to think that we live in such an alienated, technologised society that we might need a clunky artificial intelligence to scan Twitter and remind us that there might be real, suffering humans behind the avalanche of words constantly tumbling into the technosphere, but maybe we do. It can be easy to trounce the internet, yet again, for destabilising human interaction, promoting illusory, meaningless connections and generally turning coexistence to junk, as if in the old days everyone just sat around the fire understanding each other properly. But it’s always been difficult to communicate suffering. Sometimes words are not enough.
If the Samaritans’ app gives people’s fragile cries for help a second chance to reach a useful destination, it is pretty heartless to rubbish it, even if their medium of choice could contribute to the problem.
