Categories
Death + Technology Death + the Law Death + the Web Funeral Industry

Digital Death Day! (Is Every Day)

Virtual Life after Death
Peregrine Andrews, BBC News (May 22, 2010)

Last week, May 20th, was the first Digital Death Day, an unconference in California of funeral directors, digital identity professionals, attorneys, technologists, entrepreneurs and obituary enthusiasts to share concerns and probably a few crazy-interesting ideas about managing digital identity after death.

Despite DeathRef being followed by digitaldeathday on May 4th, I have been sucked into the void of Other Responsibilities and neglected to pay attention until, oh, May 20th, as the unconference was actually happening. Bad librarian! Suffice it to say, it looked pretty darn cool. It appears that notes, podcasts and such are still being compiled. We’ll link them once they’re up. In the meantime,

The BBC also gets in on the action (article linked above), discussing the issue of digital assets such as domain names, sponsored Twitter accounts and virtual property in online games, as well as memorizing at social networking sites, or otherwise continued online engagement with the person’s profile, as though the person weren’t dead at all. This practice has been criticized as prolonging the grieving process, though others argue that it merely facilitates it.

Good stuff. As this post title suggests, Every Day is Digital Death Day — we’ll keep vigilant for what else emerges from the unconference and, of course, elsewhere on this topic.

Categories
Cemeteries Death + the Web

Crowd-sourcing Genealogy at Find a Grave

Tracking Down Relatives, Visiting Graves Virtually
Lauren Silverman, NPR (March 15, 2010)

NPR has a nice short piece on Find A Grave, a one-man operation founded in 1995 fueled by an interest in famous persons’ graves that has become a full-on crowd-sourced enterprise for finding anybody’s headstone worldwide, famous or not. People can request photos of graves in faraway places and volunteers in the area will hunt it down, snap a shot and upload it to the site.

Lauren Silverman goes to Arlington National Cemetery with one such volunteer, Anne Cady, on behalf of Teddi Smith in Florida, who is looking for her cousin Jesse Veitch, a WWI veteran.

“There’s actually an emotional attachment that you get when you actually see the picture of the grave marker,” Smith says. “You can put that in your family tree, and they are no longer just a name and some dates.”

 

Categories
Death + the Web Grief + Mourning

Facebook Memorializing: What’s Church Got to Do with It?

R.I.P. on Facebook
Lisa Miller, Newsweek (February 17, 2010)

Grieving and memorializing through Facebook, along with Twitter and other sites, has faced criticism for being impersonal and superficial. Lisa Miller, religion editor at Newsweek, introduces a religious perspective on Facebook as a community space for grief:

We live in a disjointed time. Many of us reside far from our families and have grown indifferent to the habits of organized religion. More of us — 16 percent — declare ourselves “unaffiliated” with any religious denomination. …

The Christian ideal of “the community of saints,” in which the dead rest peacefully in the churchyard, as much a part of the congregation as those singing in the nave, is something any 19th-century churchgoer would have instinctively understood. In the absence of that literal proximity, Facebook “keeps the person in the communal space — the way a churchyard would,” says Noreen Herzfeld, professor of science and religion at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn.

All of which raises tantalizing questions: the average Facebook user has aged to 33 years old. In two generations, will the pages of the dead outnumber the living? Will our unchurched children be content to memorialize us with a quip on a “wall”? Something is gained, but what is lost in this evolution from corporeal grief (the rending of garments) to grief tagged with a virtual rose?

It’s fascinating to think of Facebook as someday having more dead than living account holders (I personally don’t think it has that kind of longevity, but hey — you never know). Though I suffer no anxiety about it, I’m also curious how online interactions compare to traditional, meatspace experiences, in individual instances and for societies over time. This isn’t a new form of grief, but a new vehicle for expressing the old grief.

I do, however, take issue with the idea of “unchurched children being content” with virtual memorials. In addition to it weirdly suggesting that Facebook is or shall become a den of heathens, it also seems to suggest that the “unchurched,” on Facebook or not, have less meaningful or are otherwise remiss about grief and memorializing.

Technological advances in communication and community do not discriminate between the religious and the nonreligious — or for that matter, those who go to church or those who identify as Christians but don’t regularly attend services. The “churched” are just as susceptible to “being content with” what contents them in every other aspect of their wired lives — including online discussions and memorials about the people they cared about.

Incidentally, that sounds like a congregation — and one that doesn’t require ascribing to a set of beliefs to participate and feel welcome. …Though you do need to agree to Terms of Service, this is generally less monumental than consigning, resigning or denying your soul.

Categories
Death + Art / Architecture Death + Popular Culture Death + the Web

The Dark Arts

Etsy.com, the DIY/craft juggernaut, is the go-to place to buy and sell all things handmade. If you are familiar with this phenomenon, you would know that if it’s vintage button earrings and owl-themed stationary you desire, then Etsy has it locked down.

The Etsy craze is so hot right now that it was recently featured in a NY Times story. Online since 2005, Etsy employs 74 people — and one dog named Dottie — according to the “About” section of their website. And, you really know you’ve made it when another site pops up mocking yours — see Regretsy.com.

Since I am interested in craft and DIY culture, and I like to troll Etsy from time to time, I decided to do a little searching on some death-related terms and see what comes up. I figured I’d see some skeleton-themed, Halloween-y stuff and sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed. But digging a bit deeper, one comes across a most interesting array of death/dead/dying oriented items that are available for purchase for that special someone in your life.

I compiled a list of search terms and their corresponding hits below. But alas, there are some false hits. For example, in searching the term “dying,” Etsy doesn’t make the distinction between a seller writing that you may be “dying” to get your hands on her vintage fabric scrap neck gator vs. actual items that somehow are related to the actual act of dying. The “Advanced Search” supposedly allows you to narrow your search by adding the minus (-) sign, but it doesn’t always work. So, to use the “dying” example again, if you search on that term, you will also be given items that are tie-died and die-cut. As you can imagine, this annoys this here librarian. The date of this search was Sunday, February 21, 2010.

  • We found 11,675 results for dead.
  • We found 3,470 results for death.
  • We found 16,098 results for dying.
  • We found 549 results for coffin.
  • We found 337 results for funeral.
  • We found 11 results for morgue.
  • We found 62 results for burial.
  • We found 161 results for suicide.

Peering further into these categories, here now are but a few of the handmade goodies on offer (click the photos to see the items in Etsy). I’ll let you explore some of the more “shock and awe” items on your own.

Toe-Tag Party Invitation


Natural, Green Burial Casket


Vintage Wells Fargo Casket Tag


Human Bone Necklace

Categories
Death + Humor Death + the Web Monuments + Memorials

The Overdue Death (and Snarky Remembrance) of Internet Explorer 6

A Funeral Is Being Held for IE6 on March 4. Browser to Be Buried Without the Body
MG Siegler, Tech Crunch (February 23, 2010)

In response to Google’s announcement that come March 1, it will no longer support Internet Explorer 6, the Aten Design Group is holding a funeral for the much be-loathed, cantankerous old man that is Microsoft’s eight-year ancient blunder of a browser.

Mock funerals forever! You can attend the service in person in Denver on March 4, send flowers or merely leave some memories — rants, backhanded compliments or even begrudging respect — at the memorial site. A few of our favorites (may require special knowledge to appreciate and fully ROFL):

Cromat: Enjoy that coffin and remember margin: 0 auto;height: 100%; is valid in heaven.

Danny Raede: He was the browser i used for many years. I will never forget installing xp, booting him up, and then downloading firefox.

Michał: Oh IE6… Such a hard person to please. Always thought he was more !important than everyone else. It’s like he could never fall inline and instead just float’d along by himself. And though he was often the bane of my existence, it pains me to see him now that he has Layout in the coffin. It makes me want to just * > #cry. Is that coffin 100% height?

b0ne5: I’ll always remember IE6 as a maverick. It rendered things its own way, even when all the other browsers were conforming to standards. Conforming was not in its lexicon & it refused to bow to pressure to conform to web standards. Shine on you crazy diamond!

Topher Fangio: I just rewrote a good portion of our site, and he (like an old man with thick glasses) didn’t quite see it just right. The images were distorted, and the colors looked a bit faded. Sad to go that way, looking at a bleak and awkward world…

Amos Vryhof: Die you sick twisted bastard!

Chris Shattuck: The one purpose in our existence that seems incontrovertible is that we should work steadily to improve the quality of the lives of our children and children’s children. IE6 had a difficult, highly criticized life and kept mostly to himself, but he was also successful in this one respect.

Transparency was incredibly difficult for him, perhaps because it would expose too much of his pain. But by forging his way in a world where there were no standards (at least that he was aware of), he did the hard work for his progeny, and IE6, 7 and 8 are a testament that from the flawed can emerge a greater perfection (though there’s still room for improvement). And for all his backwards ways, IE6 is still valued by holdouts across the world who rally for the qualities that he was unable to pass successfully onto the next generation. IE6, I salute you and respect your role in my world.

But damn, good riddance.

Internet Explorer 6: Hai guys! Just thought you should know I will be unable to attend… as this page is broken and does not render properly for me.

Categories
Death + the Web Grief + Mourning

Grief Revisited

Photo credit: DeviantArt.com

A recent article in the New Yorker entitled “Good Grief”, by Meghan O’Rourke, delves into the subject of grief and grieving and asks the question “Is there a better way to be bereaved?”

The article revisits Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ seminal work on the subject and seeks to examine the “stages of grief” in relation to new research on grief and mourning. The new research suggests that

Grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process–sometimes one that never fully ends.

Interesting as well is that,

Searching or yearning, crops up in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief. A 2007 study by Paul Maciejewski found that the feeling that predominated in the bereaved subjects was not depression or disbelief or anger but yearning. Nor does belief in heavenly reunion protect you from grief. As [another reasearcher, Bonnano says] “We want to know what has become of our loved ones.”

Popular culture is full of references to the ubiquitous five stages of grief as posited by Kubler-Ross. The latest issue of Adbusters, entitled “The Post PostModernism”, states that

Our upcoming issue explores the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and personal and planetary demise. Which stage are you in? Send your deepest insights and wildest notions to editor@adbusters.org.

Or this article from Reason regales us with

Therapists looking to study the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, in that order—need look no further than Washington Democrats struggling to come to grips with the fact that the health care overhaul they spent nearly a year crafting is now dead.

And then there is this icky YouTube video of a mother who taped her young daughter as she was told that her goldfish has died. The mother crafted a video of her daughter going through the “stages of grief” and set it all to a bad soundtrack comprised of a shitty song and the TV blaring in the background. Seriously? It reminds me of the mother who Tweeted her grief hours after her son’s drowning death, a questionable and hotly debated topic of late. However, in the case of the mother Tweeting, she was the one grieving in her own way; the “goldfish mother” is choosing to film her daughter as she is grieving over her beloved pet. Good grief!

Categories
Death + Technology Death + the Web Funeral Industry

TiVo Grief with Funeral Webcasting

Funeral Webcasting – Can’t Attend a Memorial Service?
FuneralResources.com

via The Consumerist, “Now You Can Attend Funerals Live Over the Internet”

Laura Northrup at the Consumerist recently blogged about funeral webcasting with this video from Chris Hill at FuneralResources.com. Weirdly, the vid seems aimed at those in need of services for loved ones while the accompanying webpage is targeted at funeral directors (i.e., getting a funeral home set up with “Pre-Screened and Qualified™ Preferred Providers” — yes, that is actually their trademark).

Anyway, reasons for being unable to attend a funeral include being poor, old, sick or riffraff:

Specific details are scarce — I imagine it depends on the local Pre-Screened and Qualified™ Preferred Providers. Nonetheless, it seems to target those who don’t really understand how the internet works (you can watch it anywhere! even the library!). I also frown that he emphasizes that services are archived up to 90 days as though that’s a bonus and not a ripoff — you can be sure for an extra fee you can extend your access to final farewells if not purchase a DVD.

Cynicism aside, this is not a bad idea, at least for those physically unable to make it to a funeral. When it’s used as a tool of convenience, however — or as an excuse to not need to put aside differences and invite the family baddies and black sheep — the idea turns crass and cold. Funerals are about gathering and remembering together — not about watching other people gather and remember on the internet, whenever you happen to find the time to tune in and grieve.

Categories
Burial cremation Death + Humor Death + the Web Funeral Industry

Video Killed the Cremation Star… or So Suggests Casket Company

Aurora Casket Company Trying to Stop Cremations with Video
R. Brian Burkhardt, YourFuneralGuy (January 25, 2010)

YourFuneralGuy just found a gem: it seems the Aurora Casket Company, one of the big three casket manufacturers in the United States, made a video of a mock funeral for direct cremation, the very villain encroaching on and slowly killing their market.

It’s dry, earnest and, well, pretty awful:

The Death of Direct Cremation from Aurora on Vimeo.

I do applaud the intention — I just hope they’re laughing, too. Whatever some marketing blog or fifteen year old told them, the internet will not save the casket industry… this time.

Categories
Death + the Web Death Ethics Grief + Mourning

Fog Is Rolling in Thick, My Son Is Drowning

Mom Shellie Ross’ Tweet about Son’s Death Sparks Debate Over Use of Twitter During Tragedy
Emily Friedman, ABC News (December 16, 2009)

Announcing a Child’s Death on Twitter
Lisa Belkin, New York Times Motherlode blog (December 17, 2009)

A popular “mommy blogger” who tweeted about her toddler’s sudden death Monday has been facing considerable backlash for using Twitter while her unattended son was apparently drowning — and again during a time generally reserved for meatspace grief-stricken horror.

Cleaning out the family chicken coop with her eleven-year-old son, Shellie Ross of Florida tweeted at 5:22pm, “Fog is rolling in thick scared the birds back in the coop.” Minutes later, her son called 911 — his two-year-old brother was discovered unconscious at the bottom of the pool. Ross tweeted again about a half hour later, appealing to her community of followers to “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” The boy could not be saved; five hours later, a tribute tweet of sorts followed from Ross (“Remembering my million dollar baby”) along with a few photos of her young son.

The internet has been eating her alive over this, from accusations of being a negligent mother to not knowing how to mourn properly. Twitter has become king in spreading news of celebrity deaths (including death rumors and pranks), but evidently is still deemed an inappropriate medium by which to relay personal, close death and grief — to say nothing of in-the-moment updates.

Ross, however, didn’t “tweet-by-tweet the accident,” as she told ABCNews.com. Additionally, she seems to have relied heavily on her online community as her main network of support, a not uncommon trend with social networking (despite having disgusted many of her followers with this incident, with several wondering whether this was some kind of sick joke).

It was a foul, arguably unnatural move — but the last thing the mother of a dead son needs is to be told she’s doing it wrong. With over 5000 followers, Ross, or Military_Mom on Twitter, had updated on the status of the fog, the sort of mundane, who-cares, barely literate statement fashionable amongst compulsive tweeters. Then all of a sudden something was actually happening. The initial tweet was panic — oh help us God — a mad scramble for emotional support and a holy miracle. The second tweet serves as a quick memorial but also a meek follow-up — she left her friends hanging in the drama of her life, and she was responsible for their held atttention. Should she have been bawling out her eyes instead? Who’s to say she wasn’t?

Then again, she was responsible for the safety of her child — not for the clarification and closure needs of her internet community, many of whom she has probably never met in person. But that doesn’t make the comfort she derived from them — either from their concerned responses or simply in the telling — imaginary or less important than non-virtual interaction (though one certainly hopes she also tends to the needs of her older son, who may have been responsible for failing to close the latch on the gate surrounding the pool).

The worst part of this story (aside from the death itself, of course) is that the brutal criticism of her actions — her chosen means of expressing fear and grief, which were modeled on her normal behavior — are now preventing her from having any sort of grief process at all. She’s too busy fighting off attackers and giving fiery interviews with major news outlets where she calls anyone who criticizes her “a small-minded asshole who deserves to rot in hell.”

Sure. Yikes. But c’mon, vultures — stand down. This woman may have fumbled at pivotal moments of her life. But who is expected to excel at handling her child’s death? Who is prepared to battle strangers who vilify the integrity of this worst possible pain.

Categories
Death + the Law Death + the Web

This is What It Sounds Like When Avatars Die…

Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches
Chris V. Nicholson, The New York Times (November 02, 2009)

I am not an online gamer so I don’t have any experience with the bazillions of virtual worlds inhabited every day by living people. That said, it’s impossible to spend any time online these days without hearing about World of Warcraft, Second Life, or the Sims, so I know all about these places. I never really gave much thought to what happens to a person’s accumulated virtual world wealth until I read this article.

Death Avatar

The key question is this: who (or whom) inherits or keeps your ‘stuff’ after you die but your online persona hasn’t? A number of e-mail services and social networking sites have changed their policies to deal with user deaths. I wrote about a recent Facebook change here. And, as the article linked above describes, Yahoo ended up in court over the release of a dead solider’s email to his next of kin.

The article mentions a company which handles many of these online-property issues, The Digital Beyond, and if I were going to law school right now I would absolutely focus on individual internet property rights. More and more of everything is online and unless the national power grids all go down then that situation won’t change anytime soon.

Lady DeathThe article also discusses this apparently HUGE online incident (based on what the almighty Google showed me) from a 2005 World of Warcraft funeral. Mourning avatars gathered in-game to pay their respects and were slaughtered by a rival group. It’s all like some kind of crazy drive by shooting at a funeral for a rival gang member or something.

But since this incident involves an online funeral turned avatar massacre, someone produced a YouTube video. I won’t pretend to understand what is happening in this video but it looks like a lot of gaming nerds got really really upset:

This kind of makes me want to know what is going on in these online worlds. But not enough to actually become a gamer. Death already eats up enough of my online time.

Categories
Death + Technology Death + the Web Monuments + Memorials

No More Status Updates from Dead FB Friends

Facebook ‘memorialises’ profiles
BBC News (October 27, 2009)

It was bound to happen sooner or later. You know, someone dies and then Facebook goes ahead and suggests that you add him or her as a friend. Yikes. It’s one of the many technology dilemmas when it comes to death and dying in the interweb age.

Upon receipt of proof of death, Facebook will now turn a deceased member’s profile into a memorial site, allowing existing Facebook contacts to view the profile but otherwise locking it down, including removing potentially sensitive information.

facebook-death

I haven’t read through the full Facebook policy, but at some point a new policy will have to be developed: how long does the memorial page remain active? And/or can some next of kin have the page removed even though other members of the family disagree? These cases will all come up.

Such is human death in late modernity.

Categories
Cemeteries Death + Technology Death + the Web

The Cyber Cemetery: Where Government Websites Go to Die

264DeathbyCat5-mCyber Cemetery. The University of North Texas, along with the GPO, are the crypt keepers of this depository for the digitally deceased.

As a librarian and archivist, I find this to be an important and worthwhile project. The ephemeral nature of the Internet makes it a constantly moving target, fleet of foot, seemingly larger than the planet itself and inherently impossible to capture — at least in total. But, if someone is going to attempt to archive portions of the Internet, then taking on the US government is certainly a worthy subject. It supports the case for government transparency, which as we know, may be intentionally elusive. Of course accountability isn’t the only reason we should be capturing the data. The preservation of these and other websites is a “best practice” as far as I’m concerned — but then again, I’m a librarian.

There are other places on the web that attempt to capture snapshots of dead websites, like the Wayback Machine — now known as the Internet Archive. But the Cyber Cemetery is the only one of its kind specifically dedicated to government sites. Our digital past is relatively young in the grand scheme of things. Hopefully these digital graveyards, like brick and mortar libraries, will live on as important historical archives and storehouses for our collective memory.

Image: Fantasy Art Design