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memorials
This page considers the 'cyber memorial' (aka cyber cemetery
or virtual cemetery) phenomenon.
It covers -
introduction
The preceding page noted the emergence of 'cybermemorials'
as virtual spaces for commemoration of the dead (human
and otherwise) and companionship among the bereaved.
Those spaces, whether dedicated to a discrete individual
or to a collection of individuals in the form of a cybercemetery,
offer insights about the ways that people conceptualise
and adopt new media. They also reflect traditional forms
of mourning and mere memorialisation, building on past
phenomena such as memorial books, newspaper death notices
and scrapbooks in which
relatives pasted items as diverse as photographs, locks
of the deceased's hair and cards from mourners.
Online memorials include prose tributes to the departed
and guestbooks in which the grieving (or vengeful) can
add comments for others to see.
They also include text, audio and video messages from
the departed - cyber versions of tombstones in the
US and Japan that feature a pre-mortem recording. In 2008
Japanese gravestone manufacturer Ishinokoe launched a
range of markers equipped with QR codes, which can be
read by mobile phones for access to images and audio of
the departed.
precursors
In considering online memorials it is useful to recognise
offline memorialisation and other mourning activity in
the West prior to development of the net.
Memorialisation has included -
- post-mortem
photography, with daguerreotype for example often providing
the basis of cards distributed by families during the
Victorian era
- 'mourning
books', unpublished works in which family members and
associates expressed their loss and recorded reminiscences
of the departed
- obituaries
in newspapers and other journals, with memorial notices
often being published on the anniversary of the subject's
death
- reliquaries
such as a lock of hair in a locket or bracelet (or artistic
items that featured 'hairwork', ie plaited hair taken
from the person being mourned)
- adornments
such as mourning rings
- privately
published memorial volumes, a particular vogue among
upper class families in the UK and US after The War
To End All Wars
- gravesite
markers, often with statuary that was representational
or symbolic
- plaques,
stained-glass windows, pews, garden benches, organs
and representational statues in churches, schools, gardens,
streets and public places
- commemorative
medallions
- scholarships,
endowed academic posts, orations and other benefactions
intended to keep the memory of the deceased (or merely
those making the endowment) forever fresh.
The
shape of endowment has been influenced by perceptions
of an afterlife (secularisation for example reduced the
market for perpetual masses for the souls of wealthy decedents)
and fashions in the expression of grief or respect. The
Victorian genre of photos of dead children or of items
made from the departed's hair thus now strikes many people
as morbid, and the demise of the cavalry has been followed
by the disappearance of commissions for public sculpture
depicting potentates on ponies (or in togas).
online memorials
Manifestations of grief, mawkish or otherwise, have colonised
the net - perhaps inevitably so in cultures where nothing
is real unless it is shared.
Online memorials started appearing soon after emergence
of the web, with features such as biographies of the departed,
tributes and statements about people are missed, condolence
books and even messages from loved ones telling the dead
what has happened since their departure for the beyond.
(The latter is somewhat puzzling for sceptics who assume
that in the spirit world one would not need to read a
web page to track recent events.)
Virtual memorialisation has attracted the same breathless
prose evident in much reporting of the net and statements
such as guestbooks
communicate with the living and the dead, providing
assurances that the dead are not forgotten and that
their mourners are supported
Some
memorials are restricted to an individual. Others aggregate
information about several people. MyCemetery.com ("connecting
with those who have left us") for example proclaims
that
Over
the years, MyCemetery.com has grown to become the world's
best-known online burial grounds. Thousands of visitors
from all over the world come here every day to read
and share the epitaphs, create personal memorials, and
leave messages for their loved ones.
The Virtual Memorial Garden says
In
the Virtual Memorial Garden anyone can be remembered.
At the moment you see simple text much as you would
in your local newspaper, but in the future there will
be more complex memorials, with sound and images combining
to tell you about someone you never knew and how they
touched those around them. Perhaps you will see cyberpyramids
and datasphinxes appearing. Certainly there will be
electronic crypts as pages devoted to whole families
are assembled.
We
are still waiting for the datasphinxes.
Competitor Virtual Memorials says
We
believe every person should be remembered - Virtual
Memorials provides a place where every person can be
honored free of charge. Free memorials consists of unlimited
text and a guestbook. We also offer full featured (one
time $50.00 fee) and custom memorials. A full featured
Virtual Memorial includes unlimited text, photos, slide
show, custom pages and much more. You may try the full
featured Memorial service free of charge for two weeks.
Its
virtual pet cemetery explains
The
deep and special bond we share with our pets makes the
pain of death just as deep. We have found many
people experience healing during their grief by remembering
the special times in a virtual memorial. Read the Rainbow
Bridge poem to help deal with the loss of a pet. Pet
Memorials are free for text only with a $35 cost for
a full featured memorial. ...
We believe that by expressing your feelings and thoughts
in a memorial and sharing the love of your pet with
others, you begin to feel better during the grieving
process and have a way to communicate with others who
are sharing the same experience. We hope you will find
comfort in creating a virtual memorial for your beloved
pet.
Online
memorialisation is not restricted to pets. In 2005 Der
Spiegel announced that
the
famous chestnut tree which provided succor to Anne Frank
during her years of hiding from the Nazis has succumbed
to infection. It will soon be cut down - but will live
on in the Internet.
The
tree will "lead a virtual existence at the annefranktree
site", with a webcam trained on a replacement tree.
The dead don't, of course, need to leave things to the
living. Letters from Beyond for example claims that it
is
a
special place that allows you to leave your last statement
to the world... something everyone can remember you
by once you are gone. Your letter can be as simple as
one or two sentences expressing how you feel about someone,
or as complex as a collage of poems, pictures and ideas
you want to share. You can include snippets from your
journal, photos from your family album, passages from
the Bible, or even love letters. This is your chance
to say something to the world before you enter the beyond
...
There are few truly original ideas online and it was inevitable
that a social network service (SNS)
for the dead and their live associates - the ones with
the credit cards - would attract funding from venture
capital and big media. In 2008 Tributes.com was launched
as a competitor for Legacy.com.
That service deploys information from the US Social Security
Administration's Death Index database and from funeral
homes, boasting data for 84 million people in the US from
the 1890s. Obituaries of up to 300 words will be free
(as of September 2008), with more elaborate entries costing
up to US$80 per year or an upfront US$300 for an "unlimited
placement period". At the time of launch the service
expected to earn revenue from user fees, "revenue
sharing with funeral homes", online advertising and
the sale of "flowers and grief-related books, CDs
and videos".
It is being promoted as "the first place people go
to learn about a death, obtain funeral details and post
remembrances", with members being alerted by email
when a person (identified by surname, school, military
unit or ZIP code) dies. The New York Times rather
chillingly enthused that
Eventually,
users will be able to download their address book to
the site to keep abreast of the passing of friends and
relatives.
Two
years later the government of the Hong Kong SAR launched
a memorial
site under the auspices of its Food & Environmental
Hygiene Department, reflecting that agency's responsibility
for public cemeteries and crematoriums. Users have a choice
of preset layouts and background music and can upload
photos and videos as part of the profiles for the dead.
The site allows memorialists to restrict access, eg to
invited friends and relatives. The 'owner' of the profile
can choose whether to receive reminders of the deceased’s
birthday and date of death, and to invite others to browse
the page and post messages ... a sort of social network
service for relicts.
mourning
Proponents of cybermemorials have assimilated the enthusiasm
for 'community' evident in writing cited elsewhere on
this site.
Pamela
Roberts for example enthuses about "new communities
of the bereaved in cyberspace", claiming that
Analysis
suggests that rather than serving as a poor substitute
for traditional bereavement activities, Web memorialization
is a valued addition, allowing the bereaved to enhance
their relationship with the dead and to increase and
deepen their connections with others who have suffered
a loss.
It
is unclear whether going online to mourn creates a new
community or strengthens an existing offline community.
An enthusiast for missyou.org.uk dismissed criticisms
of self-indulgence and ostentation, claiming that such
sites are
indicative of a trend in a different way of mourning
and bereavement. Princess Diana's death was the beginning
of an awareness of the emotional outpouring that people
need to express. We want to give people an opportunity
that hasn't been there to say what they feel in a safe
environment where it doesn't matter what others think.
It
is clear that some online memorialisation is abused, with
laments from family, observers and cybercemetery operators
about such things as -
- defacement
of web pages by vandals or by people seizing an opportunity
to settle a score with the departed (or with the survivors)
- vengeful
messages in guestbooks by colleagues, clients and resentful
relatives
- use
of guestbooks to sell coffins, flowers, insurance, religious
faiths and even Viagra.
Legacy.com,
operator of online obituary services for major US newspapers,
is reported to spend around 30% of its budget filtering
some 200,000 personal attacks and other nastiness in 2006.
One observer commented that
When
they're face to face at a funeral, people don't have
the guts to do something like that and write something
offensive. On the Internet, people might not even know
the guy, but they might feel free to write something.
Respectance.com
has been marketed as a Facebook of online memorials: a
social network that
showcases the departed's "friends".
business
Death, like birth, is a business hedged by the commercial
imperatives of service providers and the ostentation (or
insecurities) of the bereaved. Some online memorial activity
has been non-commercial. Other activity has been primarily
for profit, with businesses regarding death as just part
of homesteading the online frontier and accordingly seeking
to make a buck through manufacture of virtual cemeteries
and bespoke memorials.
It has been accompanied by what many people might consider
to be macabre commodification, with online vendors for
example promoting jewellery made from gold extracted from
a deceased person's teeth or LifeGems (diamonds made from
the carbon in the deceased's brain). For an anthropologist
such products, along with all mourning rituals, have a
macabre fascination; we suspect that the market for recycled
carbon or amalgam is not much bigger than that for taxidermy,
Trobriand Islands style, of the dear departed.
Most virtual cemeteries, like their offline counterparts,
appear to operate on a commercial basis, albeit not very
successfully. Charges are typically around US$20 to US$35
per year for creation of a "virtual plot" that
features a biographical text, an image and reminiscences
regarding the person. Some services charge extra for a
guestbook or merely for restricting access to that book.
Some encourage visitors to pay for "virtual flowers"
and features such as online candles and music.
Jessica Mitford, who has escaped memorialisation in a
digital version of Whispering Glades, would be unimpressed
to see that US funeral industry 'uplift' has migrated
online. The
Cemetery Gate - "a peaceful, serene place where people
come to remember their loved ones" - for example
hopes that
when
you leave this place, you will be refreshed, have a
new vigor and be resolute in your desire to live your
life with full measure.
A
2007 UK voluntary code at thememorialcode.org offers five
principles for memorial sites, eg that the tribute creator
"should have the right to privacy and be allowed
to grieve and remember without hindrance", initial
and recurring costs should be clearly displayed, and full
contact details for the service provider should be provided.
statistics
How many memorials are online?
As with much online social activity, the answer is uncertain:
there have been no comprehensive studies and much media
reportage is distinctly problematical.
US academic Hermann Gruenwald claimed in 2005 that "Overall,
there are about 2,000 people buried on-line". Pamela
Roberts noted, however, that there were 5,897 memorials
on the Parting Wishes site alone.
Legacy.com claimed to be receiving 18,000 messages per
day in 2006 about the newly deceased.
studies
There have been no major studies of cybermemorials. Salient
academic work includes Hermann Gruenwald & Le Gruenwald's
'Cyber Cemeteries and Virtual Memorials' in Making
Sense of Death (Amityville: Baywood 2003) edited
by Gerry Cox, Hans Geser's 1998 'Yours Virtually Forever:
Death memorials and Remembrance Sites in the WWW' paper
and Pamela Roberts' 'The Living & the Dead: Community
in the Virtual Cemetery' in 49 Omega: The Journal
of Death and Dying 2004.
For a historical perspective see Esther Schor's Bearing
the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment
to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1994),
Laurence Lerner's Angels and Absences: Child Deaths
in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt
Uni Press 1997), James Curl's The Victorian Celebration
of Death (Stroud: Sutton 2005), Gary Laderman's The
Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883
(New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1999), Pat Jalland's Death
in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press
1996), Mary Kete's Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning
and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
(Durham: Duke Uni Press 2000) and Western Attitudes
toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1975) by Philippe
Ariès
For contemporary mores see Pat Jalland's Changing
Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney:
UNSW Press 2006) and Kate Berridge's Vigor Mortis:
A Cultural Commentary on 21st Century Death (London:
Profile 2002).
Works on epitaphs and obituaries include Nigel Starck's
Life After Death: The Art of the Obituary (Carlton:
Melbourne Uni Press 2006), 'From epitaph to obituary:
Death and celebrity in eighteenth-century British culture'
by Elizabeth Barry in 11 International Journal of
Cultural Studies (2008) 259-275 and Janice Hume's
Obituaries in American Culture (Jackson: Uni
Press of Mississippi 2000) which features Mencken's mordant
dismissal of William Jennings Bryan -
There
was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his
last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village.
He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched
by the refinements of the toilet. ... Bryan lived too
long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken
seriously hereafter by fully literate men. [He was]
a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame
or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his
grotesque career was simply ambition - the ambition
of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his
superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their
eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the
trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters,
that he himself might shine.
Works on offline cemeteries include Last Landscapes:
Death and the Architecture of the Cemetery in the West
(London: Reaktion Books 2002) by Ken Worpole and Marilyn
Yalom's The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years
of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burials (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin 2008).
The undertaking industry - unctuous, opaque and expensive
- was mordantly skewered by Jessica Mitford in The
American Way of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster
1963) and The American Way of Death Revisited
(New York: Random House 1998). It is defended in Gary
Laderman's Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death
and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Oxford Uni Press 2005) and Thomas Lynch's The
Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New
York: Penguin 1999).
For memorialisation of particular figures see Mourning
Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (London:
Routledge 1999) edited by Deborah Steinberg & Adrian
Kear.
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