http://www.thingsmagazine.net/?p=3108
(...)
"... from death and digital legacy, ‘Facebook says 200,000 of its members die every year.’ Gizmodo has a post on What happens online when we die, revealing Facebook’s ‘healthy help section for the bereaved, which lays out what how one can deal with a dead profile…. Accounts can be turned into digital insta-memorials. This is a service Facebook actually offers: “Please report this information… so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only.”
"The idea that we share physical space with the memories of the 100 billion or so people that have lived before us doesn’t really impinge very much on daily life; those lost souls don’t exactly crowd you (How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?). But at some point in the (probably very distant) future, the number of dead people online will suddenly outnumber the living ones. Virtual corpses will start to become a real problem, just as physical corpses fill up real-world graveyards and have to be carted off and stacked up somewhere else...."
(((That's a provocative image... Sure, there will be a lot of dead people on MySpace someday, but what if MySpace vanishes first?)))
