Digital death is a difficult topic. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable subject and I don’t totally know where I stand. A part of me wants to have all my data magically removed from the internet the moment I die, and another part of me wants to let my data from sites like Facebook live on for anyone that wants to look at my old web page. The more I think about it though, I’m much more in favor of the first option. I don’t want a digital record of me to exist forever after I’m gone, maybe if there was some sort of time period where social media sites and any other accounts of my personal life were allowed to stay up, it would be better. If the pages stayed up for a year, this could give anyone that wanted to look at the page for grieving or closure a chance. Most people will have moved on by then and give very little thought to me or at least to my social media page, while the people that are closer to me will not need a website for remembrance.
In this article and our classroom discussion, a person’s death is made public by social media or a newspaper article. In the case of our classroom discussion, the method of how the CSUMB professor died was made public in an article written by one of the schools where she worked. I was listening to many students discuss whether or not it was right for the school or anyone else to make it public that the professor had committed suicide. Some students said it shouldn’t be made public, some said it should at least be kept from her students and others said that the announcement could help someone else that was considering suicide by bringing awareness to the issue. I couldn’t make my mind up on what the right thing to do is, but I started to realize that conversations would frequently take a turn at one point to a place I didn’t like. At some part of the discussion, a student would say something like, “I was looking at her Facebook page and she seemed like a pretty happy person. I wonder why she did it.” I can understand being curious, but this always made me feel uneasy. It was almost like people stopped caring that someone had died and started trying to play detective and guess at why she would have done something like that. This happened a few times in this discussion and I think in this case, I would have preferred if the specifics were never announced. The people close to the deceased should be allowed to know, but I don’t think information like that should be made so publicly available, word of mouth should be adequate for something so sensitive.
2 Comments
Darren Chan
4/9/2017 01:59:17 pm
Death is something that is hard to pass on. Now that we have social media, anyone can be fooled by the profile pic of the person. Facebook is like a poker face for us, because we show our happy side and not what troubles us. I like what you said in the post and I agree that its not really anyone's business to know the specific details other than the people closest to the person.
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5/21/2017 01:21:42 am
I understand where you are coming from, but I think people need to stop being so sensitive. We ask for the truth and when we are given it we want it to be sugarcoated.
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