To deal with death on networking sites

While writing my last post about networking sites and new reseach tools I thought about how amazing it is how you can connect to everything and how much stuff has developed in the last couple of years.

That reminded me of my thoughts about profiles on networking sites and how they are used. What happens when a member of a networking site dies? The profile will stay forever. Everytime when I log into the German punk networking site Abgefuckt liebt dich, it tells me that my friend Micha has not logged in since March the 14th.

That is because he died shortly after the last time he logged into this website. The scary thing is that I found out by going on his profile, reading messages that people left in his guestbook. As it was in the middle of the term, I was stuck in London. The only way I could deal with it was to read those messages. There were hundreds of them and still today, nine months after Micha's accident, people still leave messages saying that he is dearly missed by everyone.

This networking site really helped me to deal with the death of my friend Micha. I don't know if that is a good thing or just a scary aspect of how the internet has changed our lives.