So I am contemplating our generation's death and facebook's (as well as other virtual media's) strange role after someone has passed away. How strange it must be for people to have a loved one, a friend, or an acquaintance die. They aren't alive. Their facebook is still visible. Their facebook shows (thanks to instagram and digital imaging) thousands of images of them - they are not that image, but tiny pixels of color on a virtual web of information that make your brain feel like it is looking at that person. And even if it were that person, they are dead. You cannot talk to them, smell them, see them, feel them...but you can still look at their facebook like it was any other day. You can track some of the last moments of their life (i.e. where they "checked in," what they ate if put in their status, who they were with, etc). A boy I went to middle school with died a while ago and so many of his "friends" commented on his wall about how much he would be missed. I suppose I fail to embrace facebook as a viable means of true communication and I definitely don't feel it an appropriate place to say your goodbyes.
Facebook and the internet have changed our society - the way we think, what we do, how we show ourselves to the world, and absolutely how we spend our time. Let's go back to the golden age of the 1990s where internet was slow and only our dad's offices had computers I can't help thinking of Midnight in Paris and my European Primitivism seminar..."let's go back to a simpler age where we weren't so corrupt, yada yada."
I just want someone to delete my facebook when I die. My children or husband should save all of the pictures and then delete it. Sidenote: I was planning on deleting facebook when I got married, when I had kids, when I graduated from college (since it began as a college forum). Facebook has changed Facebook itself. It feels so strange to see the facebook of someone who has died. This is a completely new problem that I didn't even know I had.
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