On Facebook, a billion users around the world document their relationships and share their children’s first steps, growing and aging in plain view. But what happens when they die?
Preserved forever in stark blue and white pixels, comments, photos, observations, and interests don’t disappear when bodies do. Whichever afterlife you believe in, Facebook could be the path to immortality.
An increasing number of mourners struggle with grief stemming from the leftover profiles of lost loved ones. Facebook developers have even created features that attempt to handle this new phenomenon. Physical death and digital death are two very different things.
As I perused vacation photos, drunken Instagram snapshots, and disoriented status updates last summer, my half-asleep eyes landed on a photo. A boy I’d gone to school with and had vaguely known since middle school was pictured on a hospital bed attached to innumerable tubes. Sober, familiar faces surrounded him.
Nap Cantwell died when he was 18 years old, after an accident in which his bike collided with a van. Andrew Imanaka, one of my best friends and one of Nap’s, took the photo.
“I figured it was the last picture anyone would take of him alive, to be honest,” Imanaka said. “How else are they (acquaintances, far away friends) going to find out [about Nap] in this day and age?”
Posts cover Nap’s Facebook wall, with new ones added often. Childhood photos, pictures of tattoos and tags memorializing him, and simple R.I.P.s and thinking-of-yous fill the digitized profile left by a very real human being.
According to UC Irvine Ph.D. candidate Jed Brubaker, who spent the last three and a half years studying the phenomenon of death in social media, 30 million Facebook profiles belong to the deceased, making up a significant proportion of the Facebook population.
“Social media, broadly, does a really bad job of accounting for the fact that people might die,” Brubaker said. “But when I originally began research, people were confused about what I was even talking about. I had to stop and explain myself.”
People don’t think about how they will be survived online when creating their Facebook profiles, but people have attempted to preserve their presence and that of others since the early days of the Internet.
Online memorials began around 15 years ago with personal webpages and cyber obituaries coming from as early as 1996. Early memorials like this were impossible to find unless friends or relatives were looking for them — unlike deceased Facebook members, who can show up on your “people you may know” sidebar.
“A funeral used to be a moment where specific individuals at a specific time and space meet to grieve an individual,” Brubaker said. “Facebook breaks this wide open.”
Liz Litts, a Shoreline, Wash., native, died suddenly in 2010 at the age of 18. She had more than 500 Facebook friends, and within 24 hours of her death at least 100 posts from various people who knew her expressed their sympathy, according to her friend Mackenzie Fenton Conlan.
Empathy, disagreements, and relationships from real life can manifest themselves on Facebook in ways more serious and real than one would expect.
“We had a falling out due to pointless high school drama, and now I regret it more than anything,” said Melanie Yordanova, who was best friends with Litts at one point. “I saw her 24 hours exactly before it happened, and she hugged me and said she loved me. The thing I regret most is not saying I love her back and also deleting her from Facebook and not accepting her friend request when she added me back.”
But dealing with loss over social networks is not for everyone; sometimes comments on a website seem distant, and constant reminders of a lost loved one are overwhelming.
“It took me a while to write on her page, because I didn’t think that people should resort to Facebook to grieve,” Conlan said. “However, it ended up being somewhat therapeutic.”
People who aren’t comfortable with Facebook aren’t really in a position to do anything about it, Brubaker said. In the same way that showing disapproval of the way a funeral is conducted is seen as disrespectful to the deceased, there’s no real way to disagree with the legitimacy of a Facebook memorial. This phenomenon is well-established. The moral and ethical questions it raises aren’t going anywhere.
“What is the proper way to grieve that guy from 20 years ago?” Brubaker asked. “It puts individuals in a tenuous place; they want to be respectful.”
Facebook death is often most uncomfortable for people distantly related to or vaguely associated with the deceased, because there is no social norm for responding to the situation. Before Facebook, these individuals probably would not still be connected to the deceased. Today, not only are they connected, but they have the opportunity to respond to the tragedy no matter where they are.
Facebook has provided the option to “memorialize” a page since 2009, in an attempt to end this problem. Family members must contact Facebook with proof of death for the process to be completed. From there, the page of the deceased will transform into a place to post memories about the person who will no longer show up in “suggested friends” or public searches.
“I have only talked to two individuals that have actually gone through this process, and it takes a long time,” Brubaker said. “It seems, in practice, there’s a lot of ambiguity about who has the right to memorialize an account.”
Various problems come from this ambiguity. Parents can delete friends they didn’t approve of after the death of a child, and new Facebook users cannot be friends with the deceased after the account has been memorialized. Future relatives cannot access it, and friends cannot modify it. There are no real guidelines about how ethical it is to gain access to someone else’s profile or who is allowed to do this.
Even people who don’t communicate with their parents usually have their accounts inherited by them regardless, Brubaker said. There are also questions about inheritance by domestic partners in states that have not legalized same-sex marriage.
“I’m a little suspicious. Should we be relying on these old, traditional values, or are there a broader set of people that should be included in input in an account?” Brubaker said. “These profiles have very rich afterlives; to lock these accounts down can really limit the opportunity for people to connect and remember each other and, in some scenarios, can be downright traumatic.”
Litts’ page has just such a rich afterlife.
“Since she has passed, her page is filled with people sharing memories that they had with Liz,” Conlan said. “I go back from time to time and post on there memories, songs, quotes, whatever. It’s kind of like a little remembrance page.”
Conlan and Yordanova mentioned the way Facebook helped to organize meetings and remembrances in honor of Litts. It also allowed for long-distance relatives and friends away at school to connect and share what they would have said at her funeral, had they been able to make it.
“Losing someone close to you can be one of the most difficult things, especially since you don’t have control, but the support of everyone was a huge help,” Yordanova said. “I got to see everyone express their sorrows in different ways, and in the end I felt less alone.”
Facebook already handles our day-to-day lives. Logically, it should also handle our deaths. Unfortunately, the legal framework governing these memorials is behind the times.
The Stored Communications Act, a federal law enacted in 1986, and the voluntary terms of service agreement used by sites like Facebook prohibit companies from sharing the personal information of users. This includes providing passwords to mourning relatives, and the law prevents estate managers from attempting to access Facebook accounts because of the possibility of being charged with cyber crimes.
Various state legislatures have taken up the cause, including Oregon and Nebraska. Yet it may not reach Congress for some time, as a bill aimed at modernizing the Act failed in the House Judiciary Committee last year.
The mourning process is one of the most intimate and personal of human experiences. Now this process has shifted dramatically into the public sphere, raising a slew of new legal questions.
The more pressing questions, however, have to do with the morality these interactive epitaphs. The line between what should and shouldn’t be online is becoming harder to see.
Friday 15 March 2013
http://dailyuw.com/archive/2013/03/14/arts-leisure/digital-tombstones-life-death-and-facebook#.UUM66UfVWCA
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