[size=18px]Youthful take on modern tragedy[/size]
By Michael D. Ayers, Metroblog

If you don’t know what Myspace.com is, don’t worry. It’s not a place where kids hatch schemes to mimic Columbine. Myspace bills itself as a “place for friends.” Simple enough. One of the most popular features of Myspace is each user’s “board,” where your friends can leave public messages that everyone can read, creating an online discussion around, well, you.

At a recent conservative Christian convention, Myspace.com was dubbed by leaders as “Mysatan.com” — apparently not a place for friends, but more a “place for Lucifer” — claiming the site is evil and pornographic and ruining the moral fabric of our nation’s youth. On the other hand, the nerds — those who pay attention to such things as the Web and graphic design — abhor Myspace, if purely on an aesthetic level. Most Myspace pages look like blasts from the past (the past being 1996, when online design standards were still in their infancy). I happen to fall into this camp; navigating through Myspace is like going to a lame garage sale — everything looks bad and you can’t believe people ever had the gall to associate with these things.

I recently, however, came across something rather peculiar — a site called Mydeathspace.com. If it sounds morbid, you’re not far off the mark. It’s not a Myspace parody, or even an anti-Myspace site. Instead, Mydeathspace.com collects, via user submissions, information about young people who have recently passed on. The site posts their Myspace pictures and usually the accompanying local news story about their tragic early departure. Sometimes they are suicides. Sometimes they are auto wrecks. One 15-year-old was killed when his stepfather’s pistol went off while he was cleaning it. Like a train wreck, I knew I shouldn’t be looking, but I couldn’t click away.

If you click on the Myspace pictures, it links you to the person’s Myspace page. Some of them were set up posthumously as memorials. While nice, those are nowhere near as moving as when you click on a user’s picture and it brings you to the Myspace page they themselves created before their death.

What you see is a portrait of young people grieving over their real-life lost friends. It’s sad, honest and a heartbreaking portrayal of youth making sense of death. And there I am, voyeuristically looking through a window at the loss of life — a virtual funeral, a 24-hour, ongoing wake. Much like real-life wakes, some are at a lost for words and some are just ramblings. Some are recounts of last night’s activities and how “you would have loved the boy I met.”

Myspace is not a place where Satan spends time surfing, nor a place where teens are consistently cajoled by online predators. If anything, it’s becoming more than just a waste of time and a place where young people are making sense of real-life issues. And one of those ways is revisiting the past — in the forever ongoing present. Never would the designers of this “place for friends” have foreseen this use, but if it allows folks dealing with loss to connect with someone on “their space,” consider my heart changed. Even in the junkiest of junk sales, you never know what gems lurk.