Memorializing the past
“There’s something remarkably sad about a website that belongs to a person who is dead,” Tina says.
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Is there?
Personally, I find it quite intriguing. After all, the web is full of things created by people who are no longer with us. Even when it comes to abandoned projects, the effect is largely the same, whether the creator is still alive or not.
And many places on the web are rife with ambiguity.
Is it merely abandoned?
Did they die?
Or are they still laboring on it, behind the scenes, just waiting for the next piece to fall into place before leveraging the entire update into the public eye for our viewing pleasure?
"The point is that I was on Facebook yesterday and I saw that her page is still there, you know? She’s been dead five years, but she’s haunting the internet."
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I haven't visited Facebook on purpose in more than a decade, and in that time it's become a far more gated community. If you're not a member, you can barely glimpse through the bars before they pressure you to log in or sign up.
Used to be, they had a feature where you could memorialize someone's page, once they'd passed. That required someone to have access to the account in some way, but the feature was there. (I expect the feature is probably still there.)
"Have a bunch of people whose job it is to look through obituaries and delete people off the internet who are dead. Or not delete them."
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That is a bad idea, not the least of which for the whole "rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" business. If you don't want to see that sort of thing, by all means block the account. But I'm one of many eager archivers on the internet, so I abhor the idea of deleting something for any reason.
In the world where "the internet is forever", there's a remarkable amount of material that goes missing.
Last decade, I maintained a different blog on a different host. More likely than not, none of you here have ever stumbled across it. Some of those words can be found on the backup tumblr account. Some of them only exist on the Internet Archive. Some of them are gone forever (and yes, I have looked).
This blog is archived after every post to minimize that happening again, and the posts are actually written and saved offsite before I paste them into the BearBlog textbox. I'm being much more diligent than I was in the past.
Funny thing though, somebody took down all of her online accounts. Facebook, Twitter… all gone.
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My first girlfriend died almost two decades ago.
I got to her accounts first, changed her passwords and email addresses, locking everyone out. I wasn't going to do anything with them, I just worried about someone else going in and manipulating them, or deleting everything.
But some of her friends pleaded with her family and told them what I'd done, fed them lies about my intentions and put pressure on me to give them control of the accounts. I backed up some things, but I wasn't able to get much of it (this was in the days before it was easy to request full downloads of an account's activity). Then I sent them the credentials.
And they did all the things they'd accused me of, before purging the account. It's now nothing but a shell of what it once was.
"There’s something remarkably sad about a website that belongs to a person who is dead..."
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I wrote a story once, now long since lost to the ether, about a writer who prepared their words well ahead of time, set up a schedule of posts well into the future, akin to the anniversary room in Asimov's Foundation series, but less prophetic. On the tenth, twentieth... hundredth anniversary of their death, words they'd written were still being published, words unseen by any other eyes, just sitting in the queue, waiting for their turn.
The writer developed a postmortem cult-like following, donations continuing to drip into their accounts just to keep the website alive long enough to see how many words still remained...
It's a reminder of how words written so long ago can still mean so much for the people of today, and how today's words have so much opportunity to shape the future.
I still dream of it sometimes.
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