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Myspace Deaths!

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The exclamation point is not mine.

Last week, I stumbled across this blog through a link in my delicious feeds. Then I saw it on Waxy.org, and then all around the web.

So what was it (it no longer has entries)? It basically was an entry per-death about people, usually teenagers and college age kids, who died and had MySpace profiles or LiveJournals. It put a cause of death, date, age, links to stories in the popular press and then a link to their MySpace profile.

The pictures and such had a type of gallows humor, especially concerning drunk-driving deaths (those that perpetrated them were labeled Murderers), and even poking fun at an overweight woman’s death by saying that her death was caused by McDonalds.

What struck me outside of this however was looking at the MySpace profiles of the recently deceased. What on one hand was a tactless website suddenly became something almost beautiful. The MySpace profiles basically had become memorials, virtual gravesites for the mourning. Friends seemed to use the comments in their profiles as a way to communicate feelings of lost to the recently passed, in much the same way we talk to the dead at a gravesite.

In looking at all these profiles, I was struck by a feeling of sadness on one hand, but wonder on the other. We go through our lives now creating identity after identity in various services, both explicitly (like MySpace) and implicitly (credit reports). As we live and breath, our virtual identities are likewise living and breathing, being informed by action, changed, tweaked, interacted with and made more reflective of our inner-selves through our own actions, both with and without our knowledge.

My MySpace profile, FaceBook profile, Murmurs.com profile, etc are all reflections of who I am. Each is maintained diligently to reflect the intricacies of my life. My new job, getting married, moving, etc are all there. It is not historical, as the changes aren’t cumulative. Things just change. My living and breathing self is reflected through the mutability of data, as well as through the progression of time as referenced by that “age” field.

The same applies to these dead MySpace profiles. For the duration of these peoples all-to-short lives, their profiles were maintained and groomed to be a virtual reflection of both an idealized and realized self. People posted pictures, surveys, likes and dislikes to make their piece of text on the Internet reflect something internal and whole.

And then they died.

But the data did not.

Their MySpace profiles are still there. They are not updated, but they are informed by the causal reflection of the realities of death. Their comments are no longer a reflection of idle banter, but of mourning and loss. Their age field continues to tick on. A girl who died two years ago was said to be 19, although she was 17 at the time of her death. Her virtual reflection of self is without consciousness of her death, and the clock keeps ticking even while she is not.

I often say that the Internet is without time and space, but I think that is a constructed fallacy in some ways. The Internet, in situ is without time and place, but the ways in which we use it are reflective of the moment of intersection. The data we create is only alive so much as we are alive to help construct it, manicure it and make it mutable to our liking. When I create a profile, I’m creating a reflection of myself, but it is wholly different than myself in regards to its intersection with the specific lack of morphological memory the Internet has.

I can die, but my profiles will live. They will age, but only so much as a computer says they can. In 100 years, my MySpace profile would reflect an age of 126 even after I’m long gone (assuming that MySpace lasts that long). But what will really happen in 50 years for instance? Will the MySpace generation be remembered not so much through art, film, music and culture, but more through vast collections of dead profiles, frozen memories, projections of digital identity through bright colors, surveys, memes and videos?

Are we, as a generation going to be nothing more than pages in the ether, frozen at the moment of death or disinterest?

I wonder: is the MySpace generation’s legacy going to be dead data, and what does that say about their cultural impact?