HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
THE VIRTUAL CEMETERY
account in a special memorialized state. Certain more sensitive
information is removed, and privacy is restricted to friends only.
The profile and Wall are left up so
that friends and loved ones can
make posts in remembrance. If
we’re contacted by a close family
member with a request to remove
the profile entirely, we will honor
that request.”
Memorials can only be found by
people who were already friends
with the dead person (by default,
Facebook accounts show up in
Google) and the “tag a friend” and
“people you may know” features
are disabled. But the memorialization option is unknown to even
the most social media-savvy and
hard to find on the site. It’s unclear how much the feature is being used. Wolens said there are no
figures on how many formally memorialized pages exist.
“Facebook doesn’t do a good
job of thinking about death,” says
Brubaker, the scholar who studies death on social media. “It
doesn’t have that concept. There’s
no checkbox that says ‘I am dead,’
and when would you click it anyway? What does it mean for all
these profiles to be lingering on of
people who are dead?”
Evan Caroll, who co-founded a
website called The Digital Beyond,
is trying to fill that gap. Along with
co-founder John Romano, a coworker in the marketing business
in Raleigh, N.C., the site has dozens
of articles on how to plan for digital assets after death, from email to
bank accounts and, of course, Facebook. The site lists more than 30
for-profit online services for digital
legacy management.
“People really want to control
“WE BELIEVE WE HAVE PUT
IN EFFECTIVE POLICIES THAT
ADDRESS THE ACCOUNTS
THAT ARE LEFT BEHIND BY
THE DECEASED.”
what they leave behind — and
what’s left behind of their loved
ones,” says Carroll. “But I think we
are starting to see this shift in our
feelings about death, where it will
be less tangible but will be about
situations where we can remember people whenever, wherever we
want to and make them part of our
everyday lives.”
Aurora, who says he “wouldn’t
write on Lalit’s wall” to say any-