I have been thinking about everything we have learned this semester on death and the variety of ways that people deal with death. It made me think about my friend who passed away a couple of years ago.One day I was looking through pictures of us on my Facebook account and it made me begin to look at his profile. Even though he was gone, his Facebook profile was still in use. After his death many of our friends would post ( and still do) on his wall. People would share memories, send him Youtube videos, write notes about how they were thinking about him and most often just wrote to talk to him. I had never thought about his page being a memorial to him or even what some might call it, a monument or gravestone to his life. Obviously my friend was not the first to die and leave behind a Facebook page. So with this growing dilemma of people leaving profiles behind after death, the creators of Facebook decided to begin memorializing profiles. Essentially when someone takes action and contacts Facebook about a death of a loved one, the deceased's profile is set to private. This means that only confirmed friends can see the profile. Facebook also tries to protect the deceased's privacy by removing sensitive information i.e contact info or status updates while still allowing family and friends the ability to leave posts on the profile wall in remembrance. Much like the new 'timeline' Facebook has introduced, memorialized profiles are a way to document life and share it with friends and family, a way to remember the loved ones forever. This idea of forever then made me question why we feel the need to immortalize the dead.
I find the human experience of death beguiling an and as Parker (1999) suggests, our awareness of death and our attempts to transcend it has been a pervasive theme in humanity's history. In our attempts to create new awareness of death, over time there have been concentrated efforts of humans to memorialized loved ones. Currently, social media sites like Facebook are attempting to alter society's awareness of death and create new notions of death through their implementation of memorial profiles. We, as a society, are transcending how we construct our experiences with the dead through new contexts of remembering (Pearson, 1999, 142). Facebook is now allowing a piece of the deceased to live on, in time and space, a typeof immortality that helps people grapple with the loss of someone close (Pearson, 1999, 145). This new type of homage to a loved one is allowing us to cope with the finitude of our lives and allow us to transcend our human experiences to come to terms with the deaths of others, while knowing that our own will come ( Pearson, 1999, 143). I myself have used Facebook to come to terms with a loved one's death and I have written on their wall. I write not just for myself and his memory but for his family that checks his posts regularly. It is a way for them to know that their son is still in our memories and we have not forgotten him. It is an interesting concept to think about Facebook as a monument to the deceased.
More and more people are memorializing individuals on Facebook and this new type of cyber memorial might be a social norm in the near future (perhaps it already is?). I personally do not have a problem with these types of profiles but I can see why this might not be everyone's cup of tea. After contemplating what a monument is, I believe that Facebook is creating a new type of monument. I think that these 'cyber' monuments have a chance at rivaling other burial monuments we have talked about in class. Facebook is creating a place where loved ones endure over time, and are immortalized. Essentially, the grave goods on Facebook, are the photos, videos, the status updates the deceased has written, as the person's wall is like a eulogy of sorts where people can write about the deceased. All of the grave goods on Facebook are well preserved and the memorialized profile creates a certain ritualistic interaction that helps many with the transformation phase of losing a loved one.
I wouldn't go as far as to compare a cyber monument to something like the Stonehenge, but for many individuals it is an alternative way to ritualize the dead. It is also a way for people to deal with the liminal phase of coping with the loss of a loved one and dealing with the idea of their own deaths. These types of monuments, in my opinion, would be a very interesting to study in an anthropological way to see how it is changing ideas of death in our society.
Does anyone have any thoughts about Facebook as a monument? Do any of you have friends/ family that have passed and might have faced this same dilemma?
References
Book:
Pearson, M. P., 1999. The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Chapter 7 "The Human Experience",Texas: Texas A&M University Press.
Website:
Facebook introduces 'memorial' pages to prevent alerts about dead members
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