Facebook now allows perpetual memorial sites to keep going. Yes the family can choose to have a perpetual memorial site by keeping the deceased’s site going. Or they can notify facebook of a death, and have a memorial site that comes down at their request. Recently there was an article in Newsweek on this subject. The average age of a Facebook user is age 33. It use to be that the memorial site came down in about a month, but now it appears that the site can go on, until the family requests it be taken down.
Now a facebook account can simply be closed and their be no memorial at all.
Recently more elderly folks are flocking to facebook. This all raise the possibility of a “Baby Boomer” community of the dead on Facebook or virtual tombstones depending how you look at it. This confronts traditional religious values in a weird sort of way. This from a February 17th Newsweek article.
Facebook changed its policy regarding the pages of members who have passed away. Responding in part to urging by people at Virginia Tech who wanted after the 2007 shooting there to continue to commune with their lost friends on Facebook, the company now allows a person’s page to remain active in perpetuity. (Family members may request that a loved one’s page be taken down.) “When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,” the new policy says.
One might imagine such virtual mourning is shallow, but it’s not. Here is a real gathering place, where friends can grieve together—and where the deceased continues, in some sense, to exist. “You’re creating something like a tombstone, but people can visit that tombstone anytime, anyplace, as long as they have Internet access,” says Brian McLaren, a leader in the emerging church movement and author of A New Kind of Christianity. “That seems to me to be a great gain.”
via www.newsweek.com
This raises all kinds of possibilities, like facebook having a virtual graveyard section. Maybe someday you can leave virtual flowers there.In effect there are already virtual memorials and obituaries,
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