You have one new death notification
Social networking: it’s not just for the living anymore
BY Chandler Levack
So I’m procrastinating on Facebook late one night when my news feed updates, exclaiming that 25 of my friends have sent public messages to a close pal from high school. Curious, I scroll down to the bottom of her profile, which now brims with well-meaning condolences from mutual friends: “I’m so sorry for your loss,” “My prayers are with you and your family,” they’ve written. I’m an experienced Facebook detective, but her profile holds no clues: her last status update says she’s at the mall. So I text a mutual friend, who says that details have been posted on the “In Memorial” group—what, I hadn’t been invited yet? A few clicks later, and then it all becomes clear: my friend’s sister has died, and the funeral’s this Friday.
What’s the etiquette at hand here? Accessing such information this way, do I even know if the family wants me to attend? While I debate sending a virtual lily, I eventually elect to leave a phone message on her machine instead. Arriving at the packed service, I know I did the right thing, but still it nags at the back of my mind—I can’t believe I found this out from Facebook.
As people live more of their lives online, it’s only natural that their deaths go hand-in-hand. It’s bizarre to think that if we die today, the legacy we leave behind may no longer be the halffinished novel shoved inside a desk drawer, but thanks to social networking, is more likely to be a ghostly virtual collection of awkward party photos, favourite movie lists and instant messages that will never be answered, a kind of internet afterlife.
While cyber-mourning may feel creepy and weird to some, the emotions involved are genuine. The medium has changed, but the message is still the same: we feel some primal need to honour the dead. Just be sure to join the memorial group.
Friends and morbidly curious strangers can visit MyDeathSpace.com, a website that posts MySpace users’ obituaries, linked to their still-active accounts. While this may sound like a cruel joke (who wants to be commemorated by their blurry webcam photo and love for the Black Eyed Peas?), what’s fascinating is reader response, what people inscribe on an internet profile when they know that person will never return. After the death of seven members of a Bathurst, N.B., high school basketball team in a highway crash in January, YouTube quickly became a gathering spot for classmates in shock. One memorial video, a montage of yearbook photos and poetry, has been viewed more than 20,000 times.
Sensing this unfulfilled demand for cybermourning, Respectance.com launched in July 2007 as a dedicated postmortem social network. Its grimly hilarious marketing copy boasts that the site features the first use of “emo-social media” to provide a place for grieving friends and family to gather online, “unlike all-purpose social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook that are inappropriate for personalized tributes.” Users can post memories of the deceased, including photos, videos and testimonials, and interact with other members of the site.
In an article in Funeral Business Advisor magazine, Respectance director of business development Jonathon Nierengarten boasts that social networking allows morticians to “branch out to cover a wider demographic,” and adds that, “after the Virginia Tech Massacre last April, over 100,000 people signed up on the Virginia Tech Facebook site—all within 24 hours! The strength of [viral marketing] is nothing to sneeze at.” It certainly puts a new spin on the phrase “merchants of death.”
Posting on the memorial Facebook group, my friend’s mother writes, “Jessi had a million-watt smile, my house is so much darker these days, I miss her so much it hurts.” When I phone, she tells me that Facebook became the virtual condolence book because the demand was so strong—it was the only way to communicate the information of Jessica’s death. They couldn’t bear to make phone calls.
By text message or tombstone, grieving has always been a shared experience. A community of friends—a social network— gathers to mourn one of their own, and for a whole generation, the web is a natural meeting place. Suddenly, that virtual lily doesn’t seem so strange after all.
