I've been wanting to write on the issue of death in social network sites for sometime now, but I've always held off because it is such a daunting topic that it would require far more space than any blog could tolerate. Death, memory, nostalgia: each changes within these new media. How does forgetting function in an archival network? How that which has passed affect that which will occur now as opposed to times before the advent of these network cultures? This is stuff more suited to a lengthy, exhaustive study than to a weekly, often extemporaneous, entry. Yet, the entry "Mourning and Digital Culture" from We Make Money Not Art popped up on my del.icio.us after one or two clicks today.

This entry links to some of the critical pieces that address these issues like Elliott Malkin's Cemetery 2.0 and MyDeathSpace and several others. The first of these two examples explores what happens when death is brought into a networked environment in which it had previously not existed, by an ancestor of the decesased. On the one hand this raises questions of identity and subjectivity - the data entered is that of a real person, this data interacts as though it were this subject, and yet it has been done by someone else. On the other hand it only makes clearer the networked aspects of traditional expressions of mourning and posthumous network culture in genealogical practice, an inherenly nostalgic act. Just as my grandfather explored the memories and legacies of his biological predecessors, recording them through the collection of text, dates, and narrative, Malkin records his ancestor through means that have recently become known as the interactive means of youth. This brings a new perspective on services like Geni, which allow people to create personal genealogical histories: essesntially allowing people to enter their ancestors into a type of socially interactive network, albeit one focused on the on the dead.

The second, MyDeathSpace, in a somewhat opposite manner, operates by highlighting the death that arises within social network sites. The MySpace pages (and pages of any other social network site for that matter) of those that die also references genealogy, but more in the archival, archeological, or perhaps social sense. By preserving the recorded interactions of the deceased we engage in genealogy, but by preserving ephemeral interactions in socially archived networks we are at once foregrounding the future recording of death as well as the the guarantee of continued subjectivity, though perhaps in the form of forced collective memory or nostalgia. This archived network speaks death at the same time as it records life.

This is best continued another time.

The final section of (The) Audience (2.0) will be posted in two or three days.