ABSTRACT

Orkut consists of a public place of discontinuities, where intimacy is unveiled through the subjects‟ narratives. To narrate knowing that one is being watched enacts a game of “displaying” and “hiding” which, somehow, rules and constitutes the social relations of such virtual place. When narrating their experiences, the subjects enact discourses that, beyond their own voices, bring the voices of the others. There is an entanglement of memories, from where one selects and organizes, on time and space, the hiper-textuality of one‟s own writing. It is possible to “walk” along such “Blue City” and to identify the rituals of contemporaneity which have started to settle into our society: new ways of narrating death, new ways of experimenting mourning, and new ways of rendering public that which, for a long time, had been confined to the private domain. In the present research, I attempt to understand how teenagers, users of Orkut, are dealing with life and death, with the ambivalent loneliness that springs from a set of virtual relations which might shorten some distances and make rifts between others. I analyze discourses of Brazilian youngsters who committed suicide and left, along the public spaces of Orkut, the virtual traces of a foretold, uttered death.

Keywords: Suicide, Internet, Orkut, Discourse Analysis