RSS 2.0
It’s one thing to discover that the person behind a webpage/blog has suddenly died, as happened with Uppity Negro’s Aaron Hawkins nearly three years ago.
It’s quite another to troll through MyDeathSpace, and specifically target MySpace pages that are frozen tributes to their now-deceased authors.
I mean, I can understand the feeling that goes into providing a final chapter for people like Gayle Grosman, who succumbed to a debilitating disease. Even more pertinent is placemarks for unexpected deaths:
Army Cpl. Matthew Creed was killed in Baghdad Oct. 22. His MySpace profile keeps watch without him, counting down the time - days, hours, minutes - until he would’ve returned home.
His father, Rick, visits the page from time to time, but he was unaware that it had been archived on MyDeathSpace.
“What MyDeathSpace is doing seems respectful, though at this time I’m not sure what I think about it,” he wrote in an e-mail. What’s most important, he believes, is that the link between his son and this world be preserved.
But it’s not like the victims’ MySpace pages feature a linkback to their corresponding MyDeathSpace archiving pages (or “walls”) — much like Creed’s father in the example above, I’d bet most visitors to the lingering MySpace pages have no idea about the existence of MyDeathSpace. So this collection of death notices serves more of a one-way purpose, and I’m guessing it’s a pretty morbid one: Web voyeurs pondering death. Which gives the whole thing a decidedly creepy feel.
“But it’s not like MyDeathSpace’s archiving pages (or “walls”) are directly linked to the victims’ MySpace pages.”
~this is untrue. The Myspaces of the deceased are directly linked in MDS’s archived pages.
Comment by mydeathspacer — 07/29/2007 @ 08:50:45 PM
Thanks for bringing that up. I wasn’t clear in my original writeup, I’ve since revised that part to:
But it’s not like the victims’ MySpace pages feature a linkback to their corresponding MyDeathSpace archiving pages (or “walls”) — much like Creed’s father in the example above, I’d bet most visitors to the lingering MySpace pages have no idea about the existence of MyDeathSpace.
That is, MDS links to the MySpace page it’s archiving, but that MySpace page typically doesn’t link back to MDS. I realize that’s usually impossible, given the author’s no longer around to do it, but it still makes it a one-way street kind of deal.
Comment by CT — 07/29/2007 @ 09:04:52 PM
Hmmm…..if you speak ur mind on this page you will be quickly ,putt down and banned. They think VERY highly of themselves and are basically ambulance chasers to MY SPACE.
Comment by sammy — 11/01/2008 @ 04:40:05 AM