T
here is a Facebook app for something Facebook itself does very well: alerting you to your friends’ birthdays (and milking everyone who downloads it for precious demographic nectar). Friends and family keep inviting me to let this app into my life, and I keep saying no, thank you. After all, there it is, upper right of your Facebook home page every morning: the birthday or birthdays of people you know. Once a year, it’s you. I’m not saying it’s unpleasant to be wished happy birthday by a chorus of friends, but this is information we didn’t use to have about everyone we knew, information we hadn’t agreed to be shared in this way. The newly public nature of life events brings with it the occasional issue of modern manners. Do we issue a cheery birthday greeting to every Facebook friend whose day pops up? If not, what are the criteria? To offer a virtual hug when a relationship status changes, or not? Births and weddings are more straightforward – our job is to coo over the photographs. But nowhere has the internet changed the way we mark life events more than when life ends. Twenty years ago, few people received public eulogies. There were short memorial notices in the newspaper, but usually only the famous got anything more. Things changed with the mainstreaming of the internet. In 1997, New York researcher Carla J Sofka published a paper with the daunting title Social Support, “Internetworks,” Caskets For Sale, and More: Thanatology and The Information Superhighway. “Gone are the days when avenues for exploring issues of death, dying, grief, and bereavement were difficult to find,” wrote Sofka, listing what was already an array of places to grieve and to talk about death, from the Usenet group alt. support.grief to the World Wide Cemetery. The latter was founded in 1995 by Michael Kibbee, a 31-year-old Canadian engineer, in the wake of his own terminal cancer diagnosis. It is currently, according to the message on
Mind’s Eye
Not The Last Post Lives lived online, says Russell Brown, bring what happens next front and centre its home page, “celebrating 17 years as the web’s premiere memorial site!” But things really changed with MySpace, the breakthrough social space, where the dialogue was controlled by the users, who were of a demographic that had never really been able or encouraged to talk about the death of their peers. When they started doing so, in their own way, it was not universally welcomed, especially if the death was by suicide (and it commonly was: suicide is second only to road accidents as a cause of death among young New Zealanders). In 2008, Christchurch newspaper The Press picked up on a media panic in Britain over supposed suicide clusters driven by “cult” Bebo pages. Wild speculation and statistical ignorance met in farce when The Press declared that several deaths “have been linked to a Bebo website called Suicide Girls”. Anyone
familiar with Suicide Girls will know that it has nothing to do with self-harm, unless you count pierced nipples. Which is not to say that some things weren’t genuinely challenging. My Death Space, a site launched in 2006 that linked social media profiles of the deceased with news reports of their deaths, was an uneasy mix of sincere memorial and voyeuristic distraction. It feels like no great loss that the site has run out of steam. That happened in part because online grieving has been normalised. We customarily post our feelings on the deceased’s Facebook wall, especially if distance prevents us from attending the funeral. That can still be strange. When my much-loved sister died, her teenage daughters immediately received dozens of Facebook friend requests. The friending was done with the best of intentions, but as my nieces noted, it was an uncomfortable way to find out how popular you were. We can leave much behind online when we go. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all now have established mechanisms for relatives of the deceased to gain access to their accounts. Facebook can “memorialise” a profile on request. The internet has even begun to offer a virtual seat at funerals. A friend of mine has a growing business in video coverage of funeral services, which can be watched on the internet. Although the video links are rarely shared beyond friends and family, he says the services can sometimes be viewed by hundreds of people. Even 10 years ago, funeral webcasts would have seemed exotic. Now, it’s just something people do – something practical. The most striking changes to our lives and our cultures as a result of the internet are often ones we barely perceive as change. We now confront mortality and discuss and deal with death in new ways, even if some of those new ways are simply updated equivalents of the old. This is how we live now. And sometimes how we die. Russell Brown is a media commentator and blogger living in Auckland
THE RED BULLETIN New Zealand, ISSN 2079-4274: The Red Bulletin is published by Red Bull Media House GmbH General Manager Wolfgang Winter Publisher Franz Renkin Editor-in-Chief Robert Sperl Deputy Editor-in-Chief Alexander Macheck UK & Ireland Editor Paul Wilson Contributing Editor Stefan Wagner Chief Sub-editor Nancy James Deputy Chief Sub-editor Joe Curran Production Editor Marion Wildmann Chief Photo Editor Fritz Schuster Deputy Photo Editors Ellen Haas, Catherine Shaw, Rudolf Übelhör Creative Director Erik Turek Art Director Kasimir Reimann Design Martina de Carvalho-Hutter, Silvia Druml, Kevin Goll, Peter Jaunig, Carita Najewitz Staff Writers Ulrich Corazza, Werner Jessner, Ruth Morgan, Florian Obkircher, Arkadiusz Piatek, Andreas Rottenschlager, Robert Tighe Corporate Publishing Boro Petric (head), Christoph Rietner (chief-editor); Dominik Uhl (art director); Markus Kucera (photo director); Lisa Blazek (editor); Christian Graf-Simpson, Daniel Kudernatsch (app) Head of Production Michael Bergmeister Production Wolfgang Stecher (mgr), Walter Sádaba Repro Managers Clemens Ragotzky (head), Karsten Lehmann, Josef Mühlbacher Finance Siegmar Hofstetter, Simone Mihalits Marketing & Country Management Barbara Kaiser (head), Stefan Ebner, Stefan Hötschl, Elisabeth Salcher, Lukas Scharmbacher, Peter Schiffer, Julia Schweikhardt, Sara Varming. The Red Bulletin is published in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. Website www.redbulletin.com. Head office: Red Bull Media House GmbH, Oberst-Lepperdinger-Strasse 11-15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700. UK office: 155-171 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JP, +44 (0) 20 3117 2100. Austrian office: Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 (1) 90221 28800. Printed by PMP Print, 30 Birmingham Drive, Riccarton, 8024 Christchurch. For all advertising enquiries, contact Sales Manager Brad Morgan or email brad.morgan@nz.redbull.com Write to us: email letters@redbulletin.com
THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE RED BULLETIN IS OUT ON MAY 7 98
THE RED BULLETIN
ILLUSTRATION: ALBERT EXERGIAN
M O R E B O DY & M I N D