Death and MySpace

This article in the Houston Chronicle looks at a particular aspect of the online reaction to the Virginia Tech killings:

On Facebook.com, many of the Tech students are using a black ribbon over the school logo as their icon. A quick search on Technorati yields thousands of blog posts on the subject. Beth 0319 writes: “I didn’t know anyone there but I just feel this tremendous sadness that has no where to go. It’s just all so senseless.”

Is the grieving process different for Generation Y, a group that has come of age at a time of world turmoil and a time when social networking has reached critical mass?

…

Monday’s tragedy, [the author of a book about teenagers and technology] said, is the first massive incident to occur after the revolution in social-networking technology. Now the dead’s MySpace pages become tribute pages, where friends and family continue to have a conversation as if they were still alive.

I’ve mentioned earlier, probably more than once, that we’ve gotten much more aware of Army culture since moving to Savannah, because there’s a base nearby that houses the 3rd Infantry Division, now in the process of embarking on what is for many soldiers a third deployment to Iraq. When someone from the 3rd ID is killed — there have been five such deaths so far in 2007 — it’s covered in the local paper, and we’ve noticed that such stories often mention the tributes that have appeared on the soldier’s MySpace page.

I suppose that a year ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me that soldiers would have MySpace pages, but many of them do.

And this practice that the Chronicle describes above is routine — people post messages to soldiers who have died (in what, if I may say so in passing, would seem to count as a “massive incident”), as if they’ll be checking MySpace in the afterlife.

This seems odd, at first, but I don’t think the urge to do this is so different from leaving flowers on a grave, or from “speaking to” the deceased in remarks at a funeral.

The Chronicle story also mentions a site called MyDeathSpace.com, which I’d never heard of. Among other things, the site publishes news of MySpace users who have died, and provides a link to each person’s MySpace page, so you can click straight through to read the tributes, or leave one yourself.

I am somewhat curious about whether MySpace itself has any kind of policy about what happens to a given page when a MySpace user dies.