[size=15pt]Dead, Buried & On-Line[/size]
By: Henry Stewart (CUNY Graduate School of Journalism)

http://nynooks.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/dead-buried-on-line/

A few years ago, in the Bay Area, a father murdered his two teenage daughters. When Michael Patterson, a local resident, heard about it on the news, he went on-line and found the girls’ MySpace pages.

“I was intrigued by the comments left by these dead girls’ friends,” Patterson said.

So he began looking up the pages, or profiles, of others who had died and in 2005 he launched MyDeathSpace.com, which provides links to the deceased’s profiles.

With over 150 million registered users on social-networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, it’s statistically inevitable that some of them will die. But when they do, their profiles on these sites often remain on-line, outliving their original user.

Friends commonly use these profiles as a space of public mourning, posting messages as though speaking directly to the dead users.

“i hope you can see how much you’re missed by all up there somewhere,” a user named “Kevin” posted to one dead member’s page.

It’s normal for mourners to try to speak to their deceased loved ones by leaving notes at their graves or at churches, for example, or by talking to them, whether aloud, at their graves, or silently, in the mourners’ heads.

“People do it because they’re not willing to let go yet,” said Dr. J. Shep Jeffreys, author of “Helping Grieving People – When Tears are Not Enough.”

But mourning publicly, as on websites, serves another purpose, tapping into a primitive need for people to share the news of a death, Jeffreys said.

“It’s something people do as a basic instinct,” he said. “We need everybody to know.”

Interactive obituaries and on-line memorials, on sites like Legacy.com and Making Everlasting Memories, have been around for years. But now that the phenomenon of Internet grieving has become, accidentally, a part of social networking sites, some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web, mourning-on-the-web’s profile has risen considerably.

Like the physical cemetery, on-line memorials, which together create a kind of “cyber cemetery,” attract tourists.

Cemeteries, especially those with celebrities like Paris’ Père-Lachaise (where lipstick kiss-marks cover Oscar Wilde’s grave), and memorials commemorating high-profile tragedies have long served as tourist attractions, spawning an industry known as “grief tourism.” In Michael Patterson, the web has found its tour guide to cyber grief. (Which, in line with the democratizing Internet, isn’t limited to celebrities.)

Since its launch, Patterson’s site has catalogued over 5,000 pages.

“I just wanted to create an archive of deceased MySpace members,” he said.

He hopes the site can serve an educational function. Most of the deaths he catalogs are a result of often alcohol-related car accidents, and he hopes that teens visiting the site will be frightened and avoid drinking and driving.

Despite Patterson’s noble intent, MyDeathSpace.com, which Patterson said receives 10,000-15,000 unique visits a day (compared to the tens of millions MySpace receives), received a lot of criticism, especially early on.

“People said, ‘you’re exploiting the dead,’” he said, because his website sells t-shirts and features advertising. “I’m not rich or anything from the site. I need advertising to keep the site up,” he added. “We’re not doing anything wrong or illegal.”

In fact, having a catalog of mourning sites can benefit the larger community.

Humans survive as a group, Dr. Jeffreys said, and a death is perceived as a threat to the survival of that group.

“There is a tribal need to pull together and show the strength of the group when someone has died to show how we will survive,” Jeffreys said. “Putting it on the Internet broadens it globally. You can have millions of people sharing in the loss.”

By mourning on-line, grievers also offer the opportunity for other mourners to see their memorials, and that can provide the mourner with the feeling of being connected to others, Jeffreys said.

Social networking with the dead isn’t unique to MySpace; Facebook, a competing social-networking site with about 66 million registered users, also hosts the profiles of deceased members.

“Facebook is a site for people to make real world connections,” a spokesperson for the company wrote in an e-mail. “Since death is a part of the real world, Facebook accommodates users who wish to memorialize loved ones on the site.”

That wasn’t always the case. Facebook once deleted the profiles of those that it confirmed to be dead, before a public outcry in the wake of the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech inspired it to change its policy.

Many students at Virginia Tech, as well as family members of those affected, saw the profiles of those who had died as on-line memorials.

“To erase the page was to throw the memorial away,” John Woods, who spearheaded the campaign for change, wrote in an e-mail.

Facebook now puts the profiles into what it calls a “memorialized state,” in which the company removes many of the profile’s features but retains the user’s pictures and the ability for friends to leave comments.

“The primary advantage is that it’s good for those of us who are far away,” Woods wrote. “I have to find an electronic way to visit my friends’ graves.”

Cemeteries, as we know them today, are a fairly modern creation. Before the 19th Century, Europeans typically buried the dead in churchyards, whether individually or en masse, or stored their skeletal remains in catacombs and ossuaries.

But around the 19th Century, due to health concerns and increasing lack of space for new burials, Europeans began burying their dead further away from population centers, in garden-like spaces — cemeteries as we know them today.

Cemeteries serve a practical function as a place to store the dead, but they also serve a more abstract purpose as well.

“Cemeteries serve as foci for ongoing links with the dead,” Douglas Davies, a professor of theology and religion at Durham University and the author of “A Brief History of Death,” wrote in an e-mail, “a place where action and not only thought is possible.”

In the face of on-line memorials, could the cemetery’s function as a place of mourning be rendered obsolete?

“Obsolescence – no,” Davies wrote. “Change – yes.”

Internet memorials won’t replace the cemetery; instead, they serve as a digital version of other types of memorials, like roadside shrines that mark the site of an accident, Dr. Jeffreys said.

“Something like why people put crosses or Stars of David on the highway,” he said. “It’s the same thing.”

To Davies, the on-line memorial serves as a digitized version of condolence books.

“It is an online development of memorial books that emerged in public contexts of disasters over the last decade or so,” he wrote, “themselves a public version of more personal books at crematoria especially in UK, themselves a paper version of stone headstones.”

For Davies, physical graves serve a function that on-line memorials cannot replicate.

Jeffreys, on the other hand, said that it’s not necessary to have a gravesite, though he prefers them.

“You don’t have to have a place, but I think you should have it,” he said. “It’s nice to have a location. It’s valuable to have a place.”