blogging and death

http://www.myspace.com/aznsilkyboxers69

www.mydeathspace.com

I'd thought a bit about journals or blogs or social networking profiles like MySpace as something that would live on after you die, but in sort of an abstract way, but now, thru mydeathspace, I've found entries from people who have died.

In a way, a blog becomes more important after you die. While you're alive, you can modify people's judgment of who you are by replying to comments or by meeting them in person. But once you die, all of that blog (or journal or myspace page) is you. You can't supplement it or contradict it.

The people who really loved you probably don't care that much about your blog. Perthaps it would just be casual acquaintances who would go to your myspace page after your death, or strangers. The whole point of blogging and myspace seems to be social networking, and so they become pointless in death, or become repurposed.

There are blogs by people who committed suicide, probably blogs by those who commit murder. If (god forbid) someone committed many murders (a la Columbine), I can only assume the police would take down that person's blog. Would that be the "right" thing to do, and if not, is that out of respect for the people that died? If that's the case, then why leave up the blog of a suicide, or someone who died in some other way?

Its very easy to say, "of course a murderer's blog should be taken down out of respect for the victims. Don't be sick!" But does the murderer gain anything by having the blog up there? Do we, the public, lose anything by not having it up there? I remember when blogs first started out, thinking that this would be the ultimate tool for learning about a large number of people, how they felt, how they thought. Soon afterwards, I discovered how banal so many people (including myself) were. If blogs are a way of learning about human nature and behavior, doesn't it make sense to keep the liminal people's blogs intact and public? Would you prefer they just be viewed by the police?

If you're going to be offended by the presense of a blog, I would think it would be these blogs that stay up after people die, rather than the ones that stay up after a person commits murder.

Being overly ironic in one's blog or myspace page seems like a bad move if only for this reason. It can all be a joke while you're alive, but if you die, it can become the only facet of you that lives on in the public sphere. Then again, you're dead, so what do you care, right?

Even weirder, I read a blog entry by a guy whose daughter had been killed that day (there's no way to prove the veracity of this, but it seems believable). I read a blog by someone who had been hospitalized and died days later. Its one thing to blog when you've gotta blow off steam, or blog to be noticed, or blog to stay in touch with people. But to blog right after your only daughter has been murdered? What is driving that person to do that? I can only guess that he feels some sort of very real connection to his readership. But his readership is...almost illusory. It could be everyone and it could be no one. It could be curiousity seekers or people who actually care. There's something significant about the internet playing a role in these emotions, these moments in people's lives. I guess the internet has been a part of sex and love for years now, so why not death? Its one thing to use the internet for casual conversation or business. But these core emotions and events...

It sounds as though I'm totally opposed to it, which I'm not. In fact, I kinda enjoy this sensation of things evolving so quickly, faster than our ability to theorize about them, to even begin to figure them out. The way we define friend or loved one seems to be changing, maybe even the way we define love or death.