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Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#11

Post by DanielBMarkham »

jimbokun wrote: post #6
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #3

At first blush, this seems cheesy, but it's the wave of the future. Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net. Sounds strange, but that's the trend.

It's just hard to get the tone just right. Obviously, they need to handle dead people's pages somehow. But they don't want to look like they are profiting off of it, either. They certainly don't want to seem like they are "memorialising" the deceased just as a way to keep getting ad impressions for someone even after they are gone.

Agreed. I think it's going to take a long time to get the tone just right.

But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already doing similar things.

Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we can look to that service for some kind of decorum. But as more computational power gets controlled by individuals, this content will become more dynamic and more fluid. Then it's kind of hard to know whom to, er, blame.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#12

Post by mechanical_fish »

Edinburger wrote: post #4

I am torn on this. For some folks, this will be a wonderful persistent reminder of the deceased and a place to leave memorial messages. For other folks, it could become an awkward persistent reminder that just makes it hard to grieve and move on.

It is always hard to grieve and move on.

And, though I have met quite a few people who have lost friends and family members, I don't recall anyone whose response to losing a loved one was to destroy all the mementoes. One is far more likely to cherish them.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#13

Post by mechanical_fish »

scotth wrote: post #5

Why would they remove status updates? I could see myself wanting to go back and read through a deceased friend's online history, just to remember.

Like many editorial decisions, I'm not sure this one can be properly explained in words.

If you did explain it, the explanation might well sound like a post hoc rationalization. Which is okay. Writing, especially about the dead, is more art than science.

I'm willing to give the editors the benefit of the doubt. They've seen more Facebook pages of the deceased than I have.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#14

Post by khafra »

jimbokun wrote: post #6
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #3

At first blush, this seems cheesy, but it's the wave of the future. Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net. Sounds strange, but that's the trend.

It's just hard to get the tone just right. Obviously, they need to handle dead people's pages somehow. But they don't want to look like they are profiting off of it, either. They certainly don't want to seem like they are "memorialising" the deceased just as a way to keep getting ad impressions for someone even after they are gone.

Considering the trends I've seen toward memorializing the dead in decals on car windows, I don't think it'll be too hard to get the tone close enough to right to last them 'til the Singularity.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#15

Post by robotron »

zzleeper wrote: post #2

A very good friend of mine just died yesterday, so I kinda understand why it's a really good idea to do that =/

Someone in my community of friends passed away recently and continually shows up in the new "reconnect with" recommendations. This is timely and appropriate I think.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#16

Post by mechanical_fish »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #11
jimbokun wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just hard to get the tone just right. Obviously, they need to handle dead people's pages somehow. But they don't want to look like they are profiting off of it, either. They certainly don't want to seem like they are "memorialising" the deceased just as a way to keep getting ad impressions for someone even after they are gone.

Agreed. I think it's going to take a long time to get the tone just right. But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already doing similar things. Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we can look to that…

Technology has not waited. People need memorial rituals. I realized this the other week, when we held such a ritual on HN.

I can't physically get to a funeral for everyone I now know. And that's too bad, because funerals are good for people. You need a way to memorialize someone, preferably by gathering in a place, and preferably with a strong ritual component, like the lighting of candles or the gathering around a gravesite or the recitation of formal prayers or sayings.

(Because ritual, among other things, is what we do when we want to say something heartfelt but unoriginal. It's unfair to force someone who has lost a friend to write a standalone obituary on a blog. There are a lot more mourners in the world than writers, you want to be able to mourn for people that you don't know well enough to memorialize in prose, and writing public statements of memorial is often not self-effacing enough. Your real desire is to call attention to your deceased friend, so it seems unseemly to risk calling attention to oneself instead.)

Good for Facebook for figuring a lot of this out. But there will need to be more of this, because you're right: The web, and our network of acquaintances on that web, is going to outlive us all.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#17

Post by mechanical_fish »

Hm:

When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article.

So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for much longer.

---

[1] Only tasteful gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea is going to require a very careful touch.

[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish -- well north of a hundred dollars -- and I was going to rant about that, but then it occurred to me that (at least in theory) a newspaper needs to fact-check an obit before sending it to press. This is presumably why entities like Facebook accept the validity of a newspaper obit. So you have to pay a fact-checker, and they don't work for free.

Having said that, it's hard to believe that a web-based business can't underprice a dead-trees newspaper in the factchecking business. But there will be problems: Local newspapers have a legal status that your website won't have, at least not for a while. One wonders how many paper copies of something one has to print and circulate in a region before it counts as a "newspaper". Or whether alternative newsweeklies would accept a small additional source of revenue by agreeing to publish your company's syndicated obits.

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#18

Post by a-priori »

scotth wrote: post #5

Why would they remove status updates? I could see myself wanting to go back and read through a deceased friend's online history, just to remember.

I think they should allow the next-of-kin to choose what they want memorialized, what they want kept private (or perhaps family-only) and what they want destroyed.

I would imagine most families would want to keep the deceased's status messages, but not all of them (in cases of suicide, for example, as riklomas pointed out).

Re: Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

#19

Post by maukdaddy »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #17

Hm: When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article. So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for much longer. --- [1] Only tasteful gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea i…

My first thought is...what's the easiest way to make a fake obituary so that I can prank my friends and get their profiles marked as memorialized? This is going to happen, and it's going to happen a lot.
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