Death 2.0 – networking our grief

Social media tools and networks have rapidly become central to many of our lives but may be only something unexpected can bring their role in death into focus.

Although I have known someone who blogged her terminal illness, this week I gained a new perspective on social media and the end of a life. Late the other evening I received a direct message through Facebook from a stranger who said she was the niece of “Kildare” and broke the news that he had died suddenly that morning. Within minutes I was in a tornado of Tweets, Facebook exchanges, Yahoogroup posts and straight emails as other friends received the message and sought confirmation and more info, as well as an outlet for shock and sadness.

It was my first experience of an online wake and it certainly gave those involved a new way to share in a time like this. Kildare’s Facebook wall became a place of tribute and memorial. Messages of condolence and even photos from recent night out with Kildare were soon sprouting. It was clearly a helpful, cathartic exercise – and much faster than that kicked off by traditional notification methods.

But death 2.0 raised other issues. The Facebook approach meant that some of Kildare’s closest – but perhaps older or less social media savvy – friends learnt the news second or third hand, in one case almost by accident.

Then there is the unexpected. While Kildare’s Facebook presence lived on in a dynamic way, his Twitter biog – like an unerased answering machine message – remained frozen in time reading, poignantly: “I was born and have not yet died…”

So how do we ensure old media users are not excluded in the era of the online wake? And how long do we leave the online ghosts untouched – or erase or not to erase?

Suddenly these are issues society – or that part in 2.0 world – needs new norms for.

 

Comments

[Dominic]

It was odd - a few days after this, we had a previously scheduled get together, one where under normal circumstances he would have been present.
A portion of those present knew him, but a sizable number didn't. And of those who did, some hadn't heard anything (for assorted reasons).
A degree of remembrance happened - but contrary to my expectations this wasn't the focus, which remained where it normally went on such occasions. People who didn't spend much time online were informed, but it was all business as usual, almost as if some people had got a head-start on the shock, and were proceeding on the usual quiet recollections that goes along with this.

[Adrian Jones]

We were already leaving a virtual echo when we go, with phone numbers stored in mobiles, answering machines with out-going messages and email list subscriptions to be erased and stopped.

Now the advent of social networking has added more places where friends and family might stumble across us, and the dilemma of what our executors should do with them.

Facebook is going through a turmoil at the moment, over the issue of whether, when a user deletes their account, Faceboook should automatically remove all their comments, pictures etc. on other users' pages.

Leaving aside the issue of continuity and coherent converstions, suddenly to lose all the messages a recently departed friend has left us would be an additional bereavement.

[Adam]

I had something of a taste of this myself. I blogged and tweeted quite a bit about my mother's cancer, right up until her death last year.

Since then I've been slowly closing down her accounts on various services - she was a definite silver surfer - and informing mailing lists she was on about her death. It's an odd additional circle to the bereavement process.

[Bronagh Miskelly]

My latest variation on this came at the weekend. A friend announced her mother's death through her facebook status. She wasn't 100% comfortable with this but reasoned that because her friends knew her mother had been very ill, that it was the easiest way to contract a lot of people quickly especially as she was away from home and didn't have lots of contact info with her.

[Adam]

One interesting side-effect is that my post announcing Mum's death - http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2008/07/ann_tinworth_1939_-_2008.html - is now very high in Google for her name, meaning it's become a way of her old friends getting in contact with me. That's the good part of doing it in a more public way than Facebook. But it did take a lot of thought before I did it.