[size=18px]How MySpace deals with death[/size]
By Patrick Cooper, USA Today On Deadline Blog Web/Tech
As much as young people use MySpace.com to chronicle their lives, the popular social networking site appears to be taking on new meanings after death, a variety of news organizations report this week. The New York Times and the St. Petersburg Times both run their stories this morning.
The New York paper finds family and friends using MySpace to mourn and remember lost lives, focusing on a father maintaining his daughter's page and receiving messages of support months after her death. In St. Petersburg, Fla., the local paper tells of what appears to be a MySpace suicide note. "By 7:26 a.m. Tuesday, within hours of Meyer being pronounced dead, his friends were already writing testimonials on his MySpace page," the story says. "Within a day, the site became a place of public mourning."
From earlier this week, the Staten Island Advance has a profile of MyDeathSpace.com: "In a similar vein, MyDeathSpace is a site that collects the profiles of deceased MySpace users and links them to news stories, obituaries or blogs that detail their lives as well as how they died." Visit MyDeathSpace.
Also, a story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel examines the reasons these profiles live on. "It's only natural that as the Internet becomes a bigger part of people's everyday lives and, in the case of some young people, the hub of their social network, it will also become the place they go to grieve, said Amanda Lenhart, a researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project," the story says. "In some cases the anonymity of the Internet allows people to pay their last respects with a privacy not afforded at a traditional funeral, Lenhart said."
Update at 8:50 a.m. ET: For more on MySpace issues, read USA TODAY's March report on online social networking controversies: "What you say online could haunt you" and "Is the issue free speech or risky behavior?"