A 17-year-old from India recently committed suicide after an argument with her parents in which they banned her from overusing her Facebook account, the Press Trust of India reports.
Aishwarya Dahiwal was found hanged in her bedroom in the western Indian city of Parbhani Wednesday night following the argument, during which her parents reportedly expressed their concern over the excessive amount of time she spent online and on her cellphone, which they also wanted to restrict.
"Like all parents, their intentions were only to ensure that the girl did not go astray," investigating officer, G. H. Lemgude, told the Press Trust of India. "They advised her to concentrate on her technical studies and stay away from long mobile chats and social networking sites."
Dahiwal's suicide note, written shortly after their confrontation, included the statement, "Is Facebook so bad? I cannot stay in a home with such restrictions as I can't live without Facebook."
According to Newsweek Pakistan, Internet acess has begun to spread rapidly across the country, with many high school students becoming distracted by social networking sites like Facebook, which they've started using for communication instead of cell phones. By the end of 2013, it is expected that 200 million of India's 1.2 billion population will have acess to the Internet.
In addition to its effects on the younger generation, India's press will also be affected by the rise of Internet popularity, according to the New York Times. While the country is "frequently considered the last vestige of printed news," many magazines and papers are suffering in the wake of the national economic downturn. And with a growing national literacy rate and more people online than ever before, papers and magazines may have to make the leap and go digital in order to stay afloat.
"Just looking at the warehouses, the returns, the time it takes to get the money back-this just cannot continue," businessman Samir Patil told the Times of his former pursuits in the comic books industry. "The physical distribution system is a dead duck."
Ditching the "dead duck," Patil turned to and found success in Scroll.in, an online publication of Indian news, for Indian readers.
