Social Networks Celebrate Our Lives, But Can Also Be Our Internet Graveyards

Death is the one thing people at my age almost never think about. But even though I'm only 23, I have had several of my friends and family members die in the short amount of time I have spent here on Earth. Most of them died before the age of social networking, so I found out through the traditional phone call and TV news reports. But time has a funny way of changing things, and as the age of social networks bring about a new way to share information, it also changes the way we relate to those who pass away, for generations to come.

One day, I was checking my Myspace (back when it was still cool) and I decided to check up on my friend Daniel, who I hadn't seen in a while. As soon as his page loaded up, I saw something that threw me in disbelief. Everyone had written “RIP” in his comments section, and paying their condolences. At first I thought it was joke, since he was the same age as me and was as healthy as could be. I saw that it wasn't just his friends, some of my friends had written that too. Fearing the worst, I called up one of our mutual friends, just to find out it was true. It was. My friend had been killed in an accident, just like that. After I recovered from the shocking news, I too paid my respects.

For some time afterwards, all of us who knew Daniel changed our pages to show our mourning. I wrote a blog about the good times we had together, one friend wrote a blog as a letter to him, and another even made a Photobucket slideshow with all the pictures we had of him. To this day, whenever I think about him, I go check his page and remember the good times we had.

When I visited his page recently, something hit me. Since no one else knows the password, it will never get deleted. It will remain right there, for as long as Myspace exists, and maybe even longer than that. His likes, dislikes, comments, pictures, even his relationship status, all of that will be there forever. That’s when I realized his Myspace has become like his gravestone. Nowadays, the only reason why I still have a Myspace is so I can keep visiting his page, or rather his grave. If anything, it is even better than the normal grave, because it is a snapshot of what was going on in his life just before he died, along with all the pictures and blogs of his past. I guess instead of a grave, it’s almost more like a shrine of his existence.

As we continue to post our lives online for all of our friends (along with the world) to see it never really occurs to us that one day we will die, and this digital self that we create is one of the relics we will leave behind. Today, archaeologists dig through ancient ruins and discover people buried with their belongings, a tiny glimpse of what their life was like which had long ago passed. Someday though, maybe people wont be physically digging for graves, they might be digging through the internet to find out who was here at the turn of the 21st century. As with many things that we post about ourselves, they will probably find out a lot about these snap shots that may have been intended for a quick temporary viewing, but may even outlast our own lives.