|
|
||||||
|
|
David McRaney | Journalist
|
|||||
|
Digital elegies burn eternal A USM student died recently. He was killed in an automobile accident, and it took everyone who knew him by surprise.Soon after, the Facebook page of Terry "T.J." Thomas started overflowing with messages of sympathy and remorse, electronic missives shot into the afterlife for all to see. When I first looked over it in preparation for our article, there were only a few wall postings. Now, there are dozens, most written directly to Terry as though the authors expect him to log on from the other side and smile back at the monitor from wherever he is now. For those of you not in the know, Facebook is a social networking website. It's extremely popular on most college campuses, USM among them. It is a sign of the times we live in. Our modern existence demands we have a cyberspace presence to go along with our meatspace one. Many people have several selves, one for each forum, message board, email and website. Anonymity helped build the web. With social networking websites, you turn the tables and put your real self on the Internet so you can connect with other real people. It all seems natural; after all, we are social beings. But, reading Terry's Facebook page feels strange. I never knew him, never spoke to him and have never met most of the people who are writing on his wall. Still, it's all there for anyone to see. Maybe that's a good thing. All those digital requiems floating in the ether for passersby to ponder, perhaps this is a latent function of social networking, one we never expected to be so good for us, so cathartic. There is a place on the Internet that collects the Myspace pages of people who have passed away. The website has an irreverent, darkly comedic theme to it. Those who have gone on are not honored, but made fun of. It gets lots of hits, and features lots of ads. You can buy T-Shirts there after perusing through the personal web pages of those lost to this world, their sites still flickering like candles in a virtual cathedral. When first logging on, you feel like the ultimate voyeur, rifling through the closets of the dead, looking under their beds and thumbing through their photo albums. Maybe it's just me, but I could only go through about 10 before the weight of it was too much. You read how they died: suicide, car wreck, aneurysm. You look at their photos: clear skin, their good side, that glamour shot they had made before they graduated, and you can sense their living intentions in the pictures they chose to upload, the likes and dislikes they slowly edited over the months and the flippant comments they left with their friends. Somehow, these peculiar, clunky documents keep them alive in a way foreign to us until now. Then, there are those people who did terrible things. The man who shot up a gay bar and then turned the gun on himself, his Myspace page is still right where he left it. The cheeky, giddy messages from his friends have been replaced by angry insults from friends and loved ones of the victims. Strangely, some of the victims have their own pages too, commandeered in the same fashion by those left behind. For many of us, our autobiographical epithets are already written and hovering on some distant hard drive, and if there is anything that should clue you in on how different our lives are going to be in the twenty-first century, it is this. The real-world whispers above your grave will be stolen by the wind, but the digital elegies will burn eternal. Originally published in The Student Printz on September 12, 2007
|