Digital Ethnography: The Democratization of Grief.

I’ve been fascinated by the news coming out of Virginia about the mass murder there. While viewing profiles of the victims on the New York Times online, I noticed that they are listing links to the Myspace and/or Facebook pages of the deceased.

It’s downright eerie – macabre even – to go to these highly personalized sites post-mortem. All the digital artifacts, carefully chosen to represent the essence of the person who "lived" there. The posts from other friends after they’d heard about the shootings but before they’d been notified that their friend was one of the unlucky ones.

The closest I can think of as a physical analogy would be if you went to the family’s house and lined up to see the deceased’s bedroom. Very, very strange…. And an interesting, unpredicted use of technology. Facebook and Myspace didn’t exist when Columbine happened. Even Flickr has pages and groups set up to aid the grieving.

I guess though, that in ways, leaving these sites up is therapeutic. Kind of like a digital Wailing Wall or a Vietnam Memorial. A gates of Kensington Palace of sorts, where tributes can be left by the grieving to those whose lives, like Princess Diana’s, ended far too short.

It’s also fascinating to see how video has played a role in this incident. The footage one student caught of the shootings with his cell phone video camera while outside Norris Hall. And then the video clips sent by the killer to NBC. New cinema, to be sure. I wondered if the gunman had watched Zodiac and decided to do a remake, 21st century style….