Salon has a piece today on “The New American Way of Death” about MyDeathSpace, a site that points to the MySpace profiles of recently deceased members, highlights the untimely deaths of young people and offers a discussion space for visitors to post notes — often rude — about the departed. It’s a good, well-researched article that raises questions about the site without taking a crotchety “ban the bums” line. (One of the pleasures of my new status is that I get to read the Salon daily lineup as a surprising cornucopia of reading material rather than the end-product of an inevitably messy editorial process in which I’ve been immersed.)
The thing is, there’s very little that’s “new” about MyDeathSpace. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Salon (we took that summer to publish a special “Death Issue”) titled “Ashes to Ashes, Bits to Bits.” The piece covered a number of topics, including the Well community’s response to Tom Mandel’s death and Timothy Leary’s vision of digital eternity. It also recounted an early instance of the MyDeathSpace phenomenon of flaming the dearly departed: the City of Berkeley’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial site hosted discussion boards, and they became a flashpoint for old political arguments. (The page, remarkably, is still there.)
As I wrote back in 1996: “If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts.” As in the Web of “home pages” and discussion boards a decade ago, so on today’s sometimes anti-social “social Web.”
[tags]death, myspace, online memorials, salon[/tags]
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