I had a very emotional day this week when I found out an old friend of mine had passed away over a year ago. I was upset, and angry at mutual friends who already knew and hadn’t reach out to tell me. But more than that… I was sad that my friend was gone, and that feeling still lingers.
I noticed something as I frantically searched through search results to try and piece together what happened (I’m on the other side of the world so I didn’t want to call people in the middle of the night). My friend was still on the Internet. She was still updating her Facebook page.
Well, SHE wasn’t… but because friends had taken over her Farmville account, everytime they did something to her virtual garden her wall showed an update. “Marilyn planted flowers.” “Marilyn bought seeds.” Also, her profile hadn’t changed. You’d have to look very close and read between the lines of her Facebook page to “get” that she had died. And many were just like me – they didn’t know. Old friends were still posting “Hey, call me!” messages on her wall.
This is wrong.
I understand the reasons why they want to keep her “presence” alive on the Internet. I totally appreciate the gesture. I just think it’s profoundly wrong, and it does a disservice to her and the people who loved her. It’s wrong because it’s misleading… and she would never mislead anybody. She wasn’t that type of person. Now, obviously, I’m not a member of her family and wasn’t even in her immediate circle of friends when she passed away, so it’s not my call. But I still can react to it, and as you can read my reaction is not at all a positove one.
The thing is, besides her Facebook page… she didn’t leave much of a presence behind. She wasn’t tech savvy, and didn’t blog or write. If you wanted to know who she was, you could entered the walled garden of Facebook and get a lot of detail about her life… but only if you were a friend or family member. Other than that, she had a LinkedIn page. And an obituary. That’s it. And in two years, or three? Maybe not even that.
I searched the Internet for my Dad’s name after he died in November of 2010… and it was even worse. I could find the name of his company, and his obituary… and that was it. He never even set up a website for his business. It wasn’t that Google or Bing or Yahoo couldn’t find anything… it was that there was nothing to be found.
The main reason I wrote up my post on my dad, and spent the time writing up some words about my friend Marilyn this past weekend, is because I needed to express my thoughts and feelings about them… but I also knew that someone needed to be “on the record” about them. Someone needed to write it up. I guess it’s a side-effect from my days as a journalist, but I had to do it. Mark Evanier, a television and comics writer, has a similar compulsion… if he doesn’t write about the passing of some obsure actor or comic book writer or artist, no one else would.
I look at myself and my own “presence” on the web, and I don’t have the same problem. Search for “Joseph Dickerson” and you’ll be hard pressed to find a result that ISN’T related to me. I am a “power user” of the web, and have been for years… not to mention a prolific blogger/writer/content creator. I feel sorry for a writer I just read about, also named Joseph Dickerson, who just published his first book. He’s older, with a new website and twitter feed, and has an uphill climb to get “noticed” by the search engine algorithms compared to where I am with the same moniker.
But that’s now… what happens when I’m gone too? What will I leave behind? I’ve talked about “web presence” and other buzz-words here, but I now know that in the end, what we leave behind is… random. Fragments of a life.
On the web, we are ephemera. A comment on a message board, a set of photos on flickr… captured moments and random thoughts. It’s a great reflection of ourselves… but it isn’t us.
I can’t hug a web page, or a scanned photo. But I could hug Marilyn. And my dad.
And I can’t do that anymore.