Your life, your friendships, causes, groups and fan pages—even your death—all on a social network’s terms. Death is difficult enough. In America, there is an expectation that everyone has to have everything figured out when they die: finances, funeral arrangements, cancellation of magazines, etc.; faith, bills, insurance, the soul’s final resting place, and who will care for loved ones. To this, I submit to you, we now must add the obligations that web 2.0 bring us.

In the summer of 2009, in Chippewa Falls, Wis., three young men lost their lives. One died in a fire, one drowned, and one died quite unexpectedly, according to a local paper, with no further explanation given. Aside from the obvious fact that these three knew one another and may have even been friends—they went to the same high school, after all—another commonality exists: at their respective times of death, June 13, June 20 and June 21, all had working Facebook and MySpace pages. Even now, more than four months after the last untimely summer death, these three men still have active social networking accounts. Some have more than one.

If Facebook catches wind of a death, or if a death is submitted to them, they will gladly “memorialize” that user’s account. In their own words:

“When a user passes away, we memorialize their account to protect their privacy. Memorializing an account removes certain sensitive information (e.g., status updates and contact information) and sets privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. The Wall remains so that friends and family can leave posts in remembrance. Memorializing an account also prevents all login access to it.”

They also honor requests made by close family members of deceased users to deactivate accounts permanently.

Finding this information, however, took some effort: Facebook the corporation has none of the conventional contact information that one can usually uncover on the Internet. On their site they list a physical address, and further searching offsite will yield a telephone number—but there is no readily available email address. Even reporting a death on Facebook can be a difficult matter. As someone who prides himself on his ability to navigate the Internet, this reporter had to turn to online forums and search engines just to see how it is done.

On its extensive “Help” site, the company provides answers to many frequently asked questions—along with a search blank for getting one’s own questions answered. A search for the term “death”—jarring no doubt to the parent or close family member now served with the task of reporting the recently deceased status of their loved one to Facebook—would eventually turn up a series of articles on the subject. There is even a hyperlink, leading to an online form, for reporting such member losses. But what Internet-savvy, now-distraught legal guardian is going to have time for this? And how responsible should Facebook be for seeking out more information on the mortality statuses of site users on its own? Doesn’t it already collect so much other personal information?

My “death crusade” also brought me to an interesting site called “MyDeathSpace.com.” While perhaps a bit too heavy on the coverage of deaths of higher-profile celebrities and other famous people, the Web page essentially functions as a clearinghouse, “containing news articles, online obituaries, and other publicly available information,” that allows users to “pay [their] respects and tributes to the recently deceased MySpace.com members via [their] comment system,” along with a warning to “Please be respectful.” MyDeathSpace.com did not respond to interview requests for this article.

Because the information MyDeathSpace uses for its online obituaries is publicly available, should other social networking sites actively evaluate the status of their own members to spare others the grief or the hassle of reporting a death on their own—or does this start to get at a seldom-talked-about issue regarding death, illness and privacy in a public sphere?

In the United States, modern medicine, in all its splendor, has almost entirely removed death from the home front. Instead, fear of unknowing has emerged in our collective consciousness; death has become something we’re afraid of, more now than ever. It is a specific end for all at the terminus of a very long race called life. So, by its willingness to create for us a “digital cemetery” in what is otherwise a vicarious (online) social network of living people, is Facebook now influencing our concept of death? Absolutely.

But that’s not the whole story…

There is a big difference between the old-fashioned cemetery on the hill and the digital ones on Facebook; Ye-Olde Cemetery’s proprietors aren’t getting rich from advertising dollars generated by having social marketing messages on your memorial [grave]site! It’s sad, but true—absolutely true. All of the pages for the aforementioned individuals still had social advertisements on them. Even the still-existing MySpace pages linked to by MyDeathSpace had advertisements mediated by Google prominently featured. Unless close family members request that a page be taken off of Facebook, social networking sites and advertisers will continue to capitalize on death the same way they have capitalized on others’ lives. Is Facebook’s founder, one of America’s richest men, and the leader of over 300 million people, doing enough to help the nation of his creation, especially when one considers that he’s now making money off of our deaths?

A better question would be, are institutions like our newspapers any better? Like Facebook, the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press both have a tendency to capitalize on death. A mourner, or any reader, for that matter, can find in the obituary section advertisements for funeral services, monument companies, grief counselors, even purveyors of death-themed knickknacks. Bigger ticket deaths bypass the obit section altogether, and jump to the front page, where they have the power to sell more newspaper.

In-house, media outlets also make money on “memorial classifieds,” which can run as often as a reader would care to pay for one—and space will permit. The analogue of this, however, can be found on sites like MySpace and Facebook, and, strangely, it’s free.

If a page is “memorialized,” friends and family can view it as often as they’d like. If the “wall” is still enabled, people can keep posting their tributes forever and ever, ad nauseam— and, looked at it this way, the “social advertisements” on the site go toward paying down the cost of keeping these constantly updating, dynamic obituaries on the servers. Viewed through this lens, even the Facebook motto of, “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” seems to make sense.

The moral of the story is: if you abhor the idea of having digital remnants of yourself floating out there in cyberspace, then perhaps it’s time to consider a little premature cremation — gut the thing while you’re still alive, or, at the very least, make provisions for it in your Last Will and Testament. (Rest assured, even if you do die an untimely death, no one will be able to read those compromising messages left in your Facebook inbox—unless you’ve left yourself logged in to your computer.) This approach can be applied to all things online in your sphere of influence, not just MySpace or Facebook profiles: think about email, dating sites, pornographic material. Start living the persona you espouse offline in your dayto-day vicarious interactions (it’s your legacy).

If, on the other hand, you don’t mind the concept of being given a lasting, free, although ad-supported, tribute, do at least take some pride in the things you write there—that “it’s” mistakenly spelled as “its,” for example—because, god knows: this may be the last time you ever get to fix things. Still not satisfied? You can take the issue up with Mark Zuckerberg
when you see him in the afterlife.

Tags: Death, facebook, myspace, social media