Index

Death and Social Media

Have you ever had an acquaintance on social media - Facebook, Second Life - someone you didn’t know well enough to have knowledge of their “real life,” but still talked to on a regular basis just vanish, never to be heard from again? How about someone showing signs of problems-depression, paranoia, or “just not all there” - fade out or vanish?

In many ways, social media opens the door to new (to the human race) ways of meeting others, but it also opens me up to new ways of losing them. Because of the looser ties of those we connect with this way, we often don’t have the basic knowledge of the person we would need to stay connected once that person is no longer online to continue the conversation. On a more basic level, we can’t even apologize for a mistake until that person allows us to  talk to them online. Sometimes we know why they went away, sometimes we don’t.

So how do we handle someone vanishing online? There is rarely closure, because of the electronic barrier between us. Especially on the services where anonymity is part of it, we may not even have a name to even attempt to locate them, but then the other side of that is that we rarely get to the point where there is much reason to.

So how do you mourn a loss like that? There was a personal connection of some kind, but…?