The whole concept of ‘copycat suicide’ might sound strange at first. Why would anyone kill themselves just because someone else did it first? And, how could such a subjective and private decision be so contagious? Yet, that is exactly what was happening. People would hear of someone committing suicide locally, or hear about it in the news, and then go on to try it themselves. ‘Copycat suicide’ is the laymen’s term, but it was the sociologist David Philips who coined the technical phrase: the ‘Werther effect’.
“Are you a cat person or a dog person?” is a normal question nowadays. I am neither. I don’t think I can stand the sound of any animals other than humans. (To be quite frank, I’m not overly fond of humans either. But being part of the Homo sapiens family, you know… you kind of have to). ‘Cats versus Dogs’ is a question that dates back to the time of Pharaohs and Romans. And it still persists, maybe with even more vigour.
Amidst the global coronavirus pandemic, the United Nation’s happiness report published its 2020 edition two months back. And like in the previous two years, Finland is still smiling.
Being a movie fanatic myself, I can say for certain that most of the aliens that ended up in our most beloved sci-fi movies were humanoids. I’m also pretty sure that if I go around asking people to paint me pictures of aliens, I’d more or less be left with amateur self-portraits at best. We’ve always had this urge to see a little bit of ourselves in these hypothetical extra-terrestrial beings – was this tendency leveraged by filmmakers to come up with reasonably believable ETs or was it the lack of imagination on the part of directors that paved the path to this collective impression of an ugly-looking-upright-mammal landing in a space-sauce in the US, however, is a question that warrants further investigation. Well, as much as I would like to encounter other-worldly species in my lifetime, I know that it is an unlikely event. But there is something that does come close – Artificial Intelligence.