May 16th, 2006
Myspace, blogging and death
Via The Guardian, another myspace story (very different from this one) about the murder of 17-year-old Canadian Anna Svidersky at her place of work by a schizophrenic. Since then, her friends have kept her memory alive by circulating bulletins about what happened and encouraging her myspace friends - many of whom never met her - to remember Anna on a tribute myspace page.
The article poses the following questions:
“Should we be intruding on someone else’s grief, even if we have been invited to? And in circulating the story of Anna’s death, are we treating her with the same triviality we would afford to a funny forwarded email?”
It also cites a report by thinktank Civitas that examined the way people reacted to the death of Princess Diana, dubbing it “mourning sickness”. The report says that some people make fake emotional connections to tragedies in order to feel better about themselves, something disputed by many of the young people quoted in the article who felt they knew Anna.
What if that happened here with blogging? How would bloggers react if something similar happened to a blogger they’ve regularly interacted with, linked to and commented reciprocally on each other’s blogs?
Would any feelings of loss be inconsequential because you hadn’t physically met the person? Who has the right to say that anyone’s feelings are phoney?
I suppose what I’m interested in, is if the internet, with all its facelessness and anonymity is a perfectly valid or insipidly inappropriate arena to examine grief.
May 16th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Hi Sinead,
I think what happened with Diana, or with this girl on myspace is a different case to your hypothetical one regarding the same happening to an Irish blogger.
The mourning sickness incidents involve a mass reaction by people who have never interacted whatsoever with the person in question and the points drawn by various people on this issue over recent years ring true to me, namely that it is a form of recreational and (maybe subconciously) selfish emotion.
If you have interacted with someone, exchanged ideas and banter whether that is over the d’int0rweb or in person, it is a very different situation.
May 16th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Sorry Cahony, I was comparing the blog situation with Anna’s story, not with Princess Diana. What I’m interested in, is the relationship between how well we can know people (through mails, messages and even exchanges like this) compared to the actual, physical contact of a so called ‘real world’ non-online friendship.
May 16th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
But in Anna’s case the reason the story has gone so stratospheric is because people who never had any interaction with her have been grieving for her in the same was as Diana.
People saw Diana, but any connection was one way, same with the majority of the myspace thing with this Anna girl, only a minority subset of the stuff surrounding Anna’s myspace situation was people she had interacted with over the internet.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
What I’m interested in, is the relationship between how well we can know people (through mails, messages and even exchanges like this) compared to the actual, physical contact of a so called ‘real world’ non-online friendship.
To answer that, I think we can know people pretty well via this medium, save for cases where people are being dishonest or false, that might be easier for a lot of people to carry off over this medium than in person. There are differences in the qualities you would gain from an acquaintance in person than an acquaintance over the internet but certainly in terms of pure magnitude I think you could validly feel the same sense of loss for an acquaintance you had only interacted with online.
Again though, I don’t think this was the case with Di, or Anna (in the majority) on myspace, both of whom’s stories involved people who had never interacted with them beyond a one way flow of information about the object person’s life to the people grieving. This is a real phenomonon I believe, whether you call it recreational grieving or mourning sickness…
May 16th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
What I’m interested in, is the relationship between how well we can know people (through mails, messages and even exchanges like this) compared to the actual, physical contact of a so called ‘real world’ non-online friendship.
Hmmmm. I think you can know other people well online, but it depends on the context. I think Livejournal adds an extra layer of intimacy because of its filtering system - you can closely control who reads each non-public entry. As a result there are more postings about personal issues and the comments conversations become much more chatty and informal.
Of course, most people with whom I interact on LJ are merely friendly aquaintances. But there are a couple of people whom I’ve met through LJ and whom I consider good friends, even though we’ve only met in person once or twice. And there are several more whom I definitely think of as friends even though we’ve never met in person at all. I have never once been surprised or shocked when meeting an online chum for the first time in real life - to a woman, they’ve all been exactly what I was expecting. A few of my LJ and Chicklit.com friends have come and stayed in my house (one brought her baby to visit us on her second visit), and the only funny thing has been explaining to my real life friends how exactly my visitor and I know each other. And while the majority of my online friends are English or North American, a few from have become genuinely good real life friends too.
An online friendly aquaintance of mine was killed by a hit and run driver a year ago. I’d met up with him once in London and just before he died last June we had been making plans to meet up again, this time with a bunch of other LJ mutual friends when I went to London in July. He wasn’t one of my closest online friends, and I was almost surprised by how upset I was when I heard about his accident and, some time later, his death, because we’d only actually met once. But he was someone I’d always liked and admired very much, and we got on well, and so I felt genuine grief at his death.
May 17th, 2006 at 10:10 am
http://www.mydeathspace.com/