It got me wondering, how many dead people's profiles are there on Facebook? Isn't it a bit creepy that physically deceased people can seem so alive on the internet? In about fifty years, we'll just have loads of these 'ghost' profiles piling up; having practically no worth, because nobody will really have an urge to want to preserve the status update badman Johnny made on New Year's Eve, or how many "Don't you just hate it when *insert mundane life occurrence here*" groups he joined.
And then there will be the hundreds of millions of youtube videos made by dead people, some of which may probably have more worth than a few words strung together on a Facebook page. Imagine it, we'll be watching intimate and from-the-heart messages by vloggers who'd be long gone, to be replaced by new, full-of-life youtubers who think they'll live forever. I don't know, maybe the internet itself will be dead in a bit, maybe there won't be an Earth to have an internet connection on in fifty years. Maybe they'll just re-introduce what hotmail did some time ago; which was to deactivate someone's account if they hadn't used it in 30 days. I don't feel the same about books or creative works made by people in earlier centuries; maybe because I wasn't part of that generation and I'm in the middle of this more 'alive', techno-savvy one, but I do sometimes feel like making my own "R.I.P. Yasin Fatine" Facebook group just to get everything sorted, and to freak everyone out :P
3 comments:
That very insightful, never really thought about it in that way before but its so true
Facebook have apparently started a thing a couple of months back where family could contact facebook to change accounts of the deceased so they no longer contain status updates etc.
I've been thinking about this too, death is never far off, we hear of marriages, deaths and births through status updates!
It's interesting to see a profile up, makes that person feel more alive. In a way, you could say it's more a physical and tangible representation of the memories that we all have of an individual, the ones where we all think of someone we've lost and remember the good, the bad and the ugly times with them.
It's sort of similar with pictures...we take them to keep ourselves sort of imprinted - capturing a grain from the falling sands of time.
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