Some days ago, a friend of mine made reference to a phenomenon he reckons being quite innovative. He has a friend, let’s call her Mary, who died quite recently. Before dying, Mary had a Facebook profile. Facebook policy is to keep all profiles as long as the owner doesn’t delete it, obviously Mary cannot delete her profile anymore. What happened is that her Facebook profile is becoming a spontaneous memorial, where her friends and family leave messages and interact to remember Mary. We are witnessing the birth of the network memorial…
4 Responses to “Internet Memorials”
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Alejandro Ribo-Labastida, DPhil student, Oxford Internet Institute
Alex, this is a hot topic. It would be great if we had some empirical research on that. In Orkut this is an old phenomenon already.
There are many profiles of people who were killed in Brazil — as you know, Orkut is mostly Brazilian; like the Amazon forest, I would say, if we truly owned Orkut!
Those profiles stay active and people express in them all their grief, saudade (sorry, no English — or Spanish! — word for that) and support to the families of the deceased.
In a sense, they are like virtual mausoleums, though much more alive and poetic.
Best,
Marcelo
Yorick has discussed Death and the internet – http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/yorick/2007/01/24/death-and-the-internet/ – which asks similiar questions – but also looks at how AI could be used to simulate life after death, by email.
A high school classmate of mine recently passed away as well and his profile is still on Facebook…and as you said, his friends and colleagues are using it to leave msgs of condolence.
A popular blog also picked it up and is now advocating for more asthma awareness in Barbados…
See the link…
http://bajan.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/asthma-barbados/