[LINK] "How to die on Facebook"

[rfmcdonald]

Fellow veterans of soc.history.what-if, that old tight-knit Usenet community, will remember that for all the joys that the group let us share there were also any number of griefs. Perhaps chief among these was the death of Alison Brooks, uchronicist extraordinaire, inventor of the alien space bats. I've run into deaths on other online communities before--I miss rydel23, I really do--and in the Globe and Mail Susan Krashinsky writes about how Facebook is tackling the issue.

Many people today have a second self online, complete with photos, hobbies, deep thoughts and personal news from the monumental to the mundane. But few think about what happens to their digital doppelganger after they die. At the moment, scores of Facebook souls are left out there, stranded in the ether.

Now, partly in response to inquiries by Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Facebook wants people to help the company manage their virtual afterlives.

"Obviously with 300 million users, we don't know who has passed away," says Brandee Barker, a Facebook representative. "We really rely on the network of people to share that with us."

[. . .]

Facebook's memorial practices grew out of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. The bulk of the site's members then were college-aged, so the deaths of 27 students and five professors hit its user base hard.

"The shooting happened three weeks before many of us were to graduate and move across the country," says John Woods, whose friend Maxine Turner was killed. He is now a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin.

"I can't go visit Max's grave, or any of the others, for that matter. It's a 22-hour drive. Facebook is a way for me to leave little notes for her, notes that our mutual friends can see and respond to."

At the time, Facebook's policy was to memorialize pages for only 30 days, and then to delete them altogether. The students "kicked up quite a fuss," Mr. Woods says. Facebook listened and extended the memorials indefinitely.