STAFF EDIT: Dead links

There are many ways to memorialize the death of a friend or loved one, some traditional, some unorthodox. But in the age of social networking sites ‘- in which Twitter trending topics proclaiming ‘RIP Michael Jackson’ remain top hits for weeks on end ‘- how does one draw the line between respectfully acknowledging one’s life and death and tactlessly marketing it on the Internet. Facebook recently began advertising a service on its site that can be used to create profiles specifically for the dead, as an outlet for friends and family to remember them by. Though this is a modern and technologically integrated new endeavor for memorializing the dead, it seems to open up channels for the wrong kind of remembrance.

Using social networking sites for unconventional things is nothing new to the millennial generation ‘- they’re used for group projects, event organization and even marketing. But these are all things that are social, and dependent on social evolution to succeed. People who are dead do not contribute to this evolution ‘- making it seems like Facebook attempting to get its users to memorialize deceased loved ones is an unrealistic attempt at keeping the idea commercial ‘contact’ open with people who cannot be contacted. These memorial pages will include advertisements and the usual features of any Facebook profile, some added privacy restrictions notwithstanding. But the dead are not to be advertised to, not to be used as tools for viral marketing or the perpetuation of a funny YouTube video. The dead are not to be Googled.

If the minds behind this Facebook feature conceptualized a type of ‘Internet gravestone,’ they were quite off target. One cannot rest in peace when one’s Facebook memorial wall is constantly being updated. On the other hand, if the Facebook memorials are about celebrating life, then one’s life, effectively, has been reduced from whatever achievements it yielded in reality to just some HTML parameters set forth by Facebook. These types of memorials are limiting in that they place the dead in the same context as groups entitled ‘Stop French Horn Players from Using their Horn Cases as Backpacks’ and photo albums of drunken college students carving pumpkins. Facebook is not about life ‘- it’s rather a caricature of life, it’s life as the users define their profiles to be. That being said, how can Facebook be about death?

Social networking sites have a time and place. Just because some social activities transcend nicely onto the Internet stage doesn’t mean all of them do ‘- and memorializing death is one that just doesn’t make sense. Not everything has to be modernized, not everything has to be digitized. The dead had been duly remembered and respected for thousands of years before the invention of Facebook, and can be in the future, without it.