Life, death and mourning on the social web: What should Newsvine do?

Seeing the headline I suspected this would be a silly post.

But actually as social life is moving into cyberspace dealing with death is in jeopardy. Everyone should experience loved ones dying - the opposite would be sick. Life has moved from flesh to screens. Westerners are desentisized while right outside our castle walls people live in filth. 300.000 Iraqi infants have died unnecessarily and Newsvine casually argue who else is to blame.

Guess I got carried away there but good idea, do something.

I owe this idea more thought before I respond in full.

Thanks, SDM.

Scooter...I think this is a valid concern but I don't have an answer. I think it's important to honor relationships, cyber or not...and we're not all so good at it. I'm still trying to understand what a cyber relationship is and what it means. So many people, known and not known, are touched by others in this realm. Hard to know what a friend is really. Clearer to feel community and connection. I'd certainly want to know when someone had moved on, whether through death or disinterest. I'd want to be able to say good bye. One idea is that each of us would make known to someone in our 'real life' that we would want, let's say, newsvine, to get one last post letting people know. Wow, kind of like writing our own obituary.

Let's put our organizational skills to use — if we can develop a system for orchestrating a worldwide online drinking contest, surely we can tackle this issue constructively.

Frankly, having been a fairly sober bystander of that event -- I'm surprised that we didn't have to deal with the death of a 'Viner the next morning. I'm sure several "felt" like death.

:)

Just as an FYI: An entire espisode of the TV show My Name is Earl was about this very topic.

One of the people on his list had no social life -- and Earl couldn't find anyone to attend his funeral. When they got to his house, the found thousands of messages upon logging in and realized that he had spent all his time socializing online. I believe they ended up having a virtual funeral, which ended up bringing everyone together in real life.

If I were to die there are many on line codes, sites, user names and passwords that someone will need to negotiate my estate. It behooves me to give a document to someone I trust to be aware of these things once I have died. All the info could be contained within a will or the will could give directions to obtaining such info. In this regard, I need to get off my butt and produce such a document and hand it to Vicki. As things stand now, she would have a hardship caused by my negligence in keeping all this info to myself.

Along with that document, it might behoove me, and others, to write our own obits and have them available so others can publish them at the appropriate time.

I have only just arrived on the Vine. Literally. Thanks to Digg, who unceremoniously 'killed' my being on their site. So in some ways, I share the submitters sentiment. Let me think of something worthy of contribution. Good way to start a new life!

There's been a few deaths over the years in another community I belong to, and we've yet to come up with a solution to how to keep track of people.

The most recent one was fairly tragic, as it was during our white elephant gift exchange, and the gift giver knew his WE guy was pretty depressed and upset with his life, so he put together a great package of stuff, only to come online asking if anyone had heard from him after the package sat on his doorstep for a week. Tragically, he had killed himself, and this guy never found out.

There's something very strange about the death of a friend you've never really met.

Scooter, I too, have thought about this. I disappeared for a while because of extenuating personal matters and a few people here on NV had my real email. They were concerned after not hearing from me for a while. It really made me feel good that these people actually cared and certainly pulled me through an extremely tough time. I don't know what the solution is really, but maybe at least one or two of the person's closest friends should have contact info for each other. Does that make any sense?

I cycle a lot and track rides with my GPS and then post them to a great tracking and mapping site Motionbased.com. You can share and download routes of others.

A while back a popular cyclist who was killed in a traffic accident. His many friends posted touching eulogies, elsewhere. Motionbased left his rides up on their site, so sad.

How about an online celebration/wake, where people discuss favorite articles of the deceased

i keep an easy-to-find text document on the desktop of my home computer with usernames and passwords and a list of all my online memberships, as well as my emails. aside from some of the people who i know only through the internet, a lot of the contact information for my friends is stored online, and i wanted a way for my wifey and/or kids/parents to be able to cancel accounts, notify out-of-town friends, etc. also, this ensures that my writing, some of which is stored only online, is kept and archived by my family.

if i die, i've asked whoever reads the "letter" it to update most of my profiles with just some basic info that i'm pouncing thru the afterlife. no drama, just a simple note.

It's happened to me...one of my Usenet friends lived in France, and when I was scheduled to vacation there, I sent an email to see if we could f2f, although I hadn't seen him online for six months or so. His wife wrote back, saying that he had died suddenly. There wasn't much I could do except offer condolences.