One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minnesota, took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents' bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell's school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was a "hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. *** do we wish we could take it back."
Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell's newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead.
From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell's page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the "trolls," as they have come to be called, who dwell there -- the designated "random" board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post on /b/ consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as "anonymous." The message board reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall or an obscene telephone party line.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell's death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson's MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson's grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson's face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods and hard-core **** scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson's demise appeared on YouTube,...

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