This will apparently be published in something called "The False Magazine" or "Defconform Magazine" (http://www.deconformmagazine.org/index.php). The person who sent the article to me gave two different publication names.
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[size=20pt]The After Life Waits.[/size]
www.mydeathspace.com
Even the afterlife must suffer the alchemy tumble into the digital age. Mydeathspace (mds) holds court as an purgatorial black market where sincere and cheap grief argue within an abstracted landscape of digital silence. A gothic gallery of bland and tragic deaths, both hell and heaven always seem to be present with plenty of superstition bridging the two (supposedly a curse exists upon those who dare blog!!!). One can easily imagine a cruel Old Testament god punishing sinners by trapping their souls in their myspace profiles
Apparently, the internet offers genuine, no strings attached immortality, at least technically. One can live forever, at least through your loved ones, friends, associates cleverly codified in condensed ritual. If, you have a myspace page and you die, then you’re fair game. The archival site like a spider web links obituaries, news stories, and blogs of the deceased. Like strange retribution and puritanical shaming, murderers and a glut of other violent criminals are also posted, digitalizing in stone what these bloody fools have wrecked.
The site constantly bombards visitors with car crashes, heroin overdoses, unknown fatal conditions and worst of all, dry dull obituary writing. Most deaths are under age thirty, highlighting a sprawled, technological divide. The place offers a space that exists upon a digital, abstracted brink. Digital tombstones stretch as one scrolls down the “articles” as if a hologram of the deceased hovers over their freshly dug and filled grave.
The site’s ambiguous nature pursues a contradictory path. Simultaneously, it preserves, exploits, cheapens and also champions common people’s voices who often meet obscurity's fate when death sweeps the playing table. The site captures a deceased one’s life more accurately then a regular old obituary, which are often vaguely insulting through language generalities. The actual myspace profiles of the deceased or the murderous shows how those individuals saw themselves.
Arguably deceitful by default because a myspace page can at least make you feel someone is still alive, the site’s interactivity insidiously creates illusive contact. You can leave comments like people leave stuffed animals or letters on cold graves
Mydeathspace satisfies the lurid drive to check your mortality similar to newspaper obituaries or listening to AM death announcements on static fueled radio. Like a digital radio or morgue, Mydeath space celebrates while exploits. Hard to actually call the site exploitive, because family member or friends will send in the news of a dead one.
Mydeathspace poses more questions then anything about death. Ss the grieving process helped or made worse by such abstraction? The site is truly morbid for an outsider. Will everybody just mourn online or plugged into virtual reality while most are cremated? Who knows what it is like for one in grief to stare into the vortex profile? Grief goes adrift on a seemingly endless digital ocean.
Mydeathspace functions as a digital mausoleum where even signs are posted to be respectful. Americans characteristically deny death, preferring a numbness to emotion. The site serves as a twisted antidote to this mentality as it offers a place for individuals to unpack suppressed emotional baggage and feel (even if this means sickly and sad), while simultaneously honoring the dead at a morbid mystery coach stop. Elusively, death still speaks mystery in the digital age.
By Matthew Doyal Proctor
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