On this blog I've often written about death and nostalgia in the context of online social networks. It's a theme one sees expressed throughout the web as it becomes a medium for our projected and distributed subjectivities. From Elliott Malkin's thoughtful piece, Cemetery 2.0, to MySpace pages acting as informal memorial sites as well as embodiments of/surrogates for the deceased (many collected at MyDeathSpace), it's clear that online social networks' archival purpose serves a nostalgic impulse for both the past and the present. Profiles are created and edited to reflect an idealized, nostalgized present vision of the individual - and if this person passes away, their presence (or, presents) remain.

So I was intrigued when I saw TechCrunch's post about Respectance, which is a well designed online memorial site billed as a social network for the deceased. In some aspects it resembles a very slick version of FindAGrave - which allows visitors to leave virtual flowers at the gravestone and personalized notes - but it also seems to imply a presentness usually reserved for the living or the living online spaces of the deceased (a MySpace page for an expired teen, for example). Each dead person has associated media such as videos and photos and even allowing them to have "friends."

While I can't say that such developments as Respectance or FindAGrave's social aspects are all that surprising, they do feel a bit forced. The developers have clearly caught on to the same sense of nostalgia that surrounds social networks and is seen most strongly around profiles of the deceased, but these pages come across as more of a false and shallow nostalgia compared to the ad-hoc memorial one sees on Facebook or MySpace. On these latter sites, the dead walk among the living as though they have not departed at all, where as Respectance seeks to segregate the dead.

Several years ago, when Facebook had just recently launched, I created a profile for Johnny Cash, a short time before he died (if I remember correctly). While at the time I had no high-minded purpose, it was simply an expression of my admiration and a test of the limits of the then-new service, the profile became an informal memorial for the singer after his death. He had hundreds of friends at schools across the country and many users would leave messages on his birthday every year. I tried to respect visitors' use of the profile as a space for remembrance by accepting all friends, pictures, and comments.

Slightly less than a year ago, the Facebook administrators deleted the Johnny Cash profile I made (there are still several up, but I proudly claimed to be the first). I sent and e-mail to an administrator stating my curatorial purpose with the profile, and in the response I received was this sentence:

"...one of Facebook's main goals is to facilitate meaningful relationships between living people. We do not want to have a number of profiles of deceased celebrities intermingling with living users."

A fair point in some respects, but ultimately it shows that Facebook fails to see profiles as anything beyond an expression of individual identity. In practice, a profile is far from singular, incorporating the flows of many subjectivities. The profiles of the deceased embody this multiple subjective view even more so by removing the originating singularity and remaining as a memorial space for users.

The Johnny Cash profile was a successful memorial exactly because he was intermingling with living users. This is something that the people at Facebook and Repectance both fail to see.