The Digital Graveyard

The Digital Graveyard

A New Take on Death

According to BuzzFeed (okay don’t discount it yet its actually pretty interesting), there is now a new social media site for dead people. That wasn’t a typo, it really is for dead people and it serves as a digital graveyard of those who are no longer with us. People, who are living obviously, can add family or friends who have passed away as a way to remember and honor that person. Its essentially a free way of having a memorial for them that will live on forever.

The site, Neshama, has a pretty interesting start actually. An Israeli entrepreneur set up this site as a way to preserve gravestones in Israel, and it has grown to include hundreds of thousands of people. That’s actually a really cool idea because headstones really only last a few generations until the stone starts to fade and eventually become one with the earth. But its also kind of funny that this is the point the 21st century has brought us to. Its also fascinating because you have a great variety of different people all commemorated in the same place from celebrities to nobodies. Also, its helpful because it could in theory provide a lot of history for us in the future. People love shit like Ancestry, this could be a useful tool for people wanting to know more about their ancestors in the very far future (just a thought okay).

Now there are other social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, where there is a “tribute” feature that is turned on when a person passes. However, there is a lot of complication if the person who passed did not allow access to other family or friends to log into their account. That process includes having to send documentation that proves the person has passed and be approved by the site in order to access the loved ones account, which sounds like the last thing I would want to do if I’m grieving the loss of a loved one. Also there’s the whole encryption of data part that turns people away also, but we won’t get into that part. This new website allows people to have an easy way to remember that person in a respectful way with a community of others who are going through the same thing with their loved ones. It helps others to not feel alone to remind us that there are people mourning the loss of others versus us only interacting with the one account of the dead person’s profile. 

What’s Wrong With Just a Normal Graveyard??

I actually visited Philadelphia recently and saw a lot of history at play such as Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Elfreth’s Alley (the oldest residential street in America), as well as some really old churches that date back to the time of our country’s founding that still have graveyards in them. However one thing that I noticed was that all of the headstones were blank and had been smoothed out by the earth. So that’s something to keep in mind, after a couple hundred years nobody is going to know or care about who we are after we die. 

Here’s a picture I took of how sad those headstones in Philly look.

The idea that we can have a way to remember our loved ones that lasts is an interesting idea. It’s a community for loved ones to come together and share that with people they don’t know. There’s no boundaries also, no “elite” class or “poor” class, everyone is just dead, nobody really cares. And there’s a considerable number of people on there too, as of 2013 when the article was written, there was 120,000 people added to this website. 

Grieving Online

In my opinion I think the digital graveyard is a healthy way to cope with grief in the modern era. There is no “one way” to handle the grief of losing a loved one, and channeling that feeling into a place of remembrance. And now that we have social media available to us, grief gets intermixed into that. Grief is a weird process to go through and I think that people don’t really know what to do, so they feel as if talking about it online will help them to confide in others and provide some closure. Often, there are feelings of wishing the person was still here, so there is the opportunity to go to their social media profiles and pretend as if they never left. Or, it provides people the chance to talk to others about the things they will miss about that person. Social media plays such a big role in our lives for all of our big life moments: marriage, children, careers, and even death. 

The way we interact with the world is much different than we did 10 years ago thanks to technology, and not even death is spared from it. Get used to seeing people on social media filled with death because its not going anywhere, in fact, there will be more Facebook accounts for people who have passed away than those who are living within the next 50 years or so.