Well apologies for my recent absence here! Kidney infections are proving to be a recurring nightmare for me at the moment :-( It's amazing how work can be shoved onto the back burner when you feel ill! Anyway enough about me and back to my research! I struck upon an idea the other morning over coffee of a possible issue for my dissertation. I was searching through blogs and came across one (can't remember which sorry!) that talked of the work of someone who had passed away and wanted to keep people's interests in the ideas raised. It made me wonder about the internet in the future. If people have active blogs, bebo/facebook profiles or websites and then pass away what happens to them? Since most of these are password protected it would be impossible for friends or family of that person to delete their profile. Should these profiles be deleted by the company providing the service or is that against people's human rights? These profiles could be used by friends and family as a way to leave messages and help mourn. So how long to these webpages stay online? The internet must already be full of people's online profiles that have now passed away and are not being used anymore. This build up of layers could conceivably become a port of call for future archaeological research in the future. Will it be possible to excavate the internet?
Also the title of this blog for any hardcore Indiana fans is a little quote from Raiders. DVD out this week!
April 24 round up
1 week ago
6 comments:
I think the blogs/profile pages/Facebooks should not be removed from the Internet. I don't necessarily think we will "excavate" the internet in the future, but even if the information isn't useful for archaeologists, it strikes me that it would certainly be useful for anthropologists.
A friend of mine passed away almost 4 months ago now, and her Facebook profile is still very much active. As well as actually being useful for her family (who posted on there to let all her friends know), I think it has actually become a fairly significant part of the grieving process for some of her friends. Some still post messages to her, and there is still a steady stream of photo uploads. If the page were removed, it would remove our last social contact with her, in a way. I think it serves as a memory bank for us, preserving all the good things (hopefully) forever. I like to think of it as a more premanent memorial, and one which represents her exactly as she wanted to be seen and remembered by those who visited her page.
I'm sure blogs could act in the same way. They are as much a source of information about people as they are about whatever topic or theme they cover/are based on.
i don't know, i'm not sure. i don't think deleating a facebook profile or blog or whatever is against someone's human rights - there isn't a human right to be remembered, no matter how much we may want to be. that's what gravestones are for, and were for in the past. also, would it be better for the internet if the extra pages were gotten rid of? if the internet would actually be more efficient if unused pages weren't there, then surely it's better for everyone? the internet could then be put to better use? just a thought.
I have to say, I think you don't fully appreciate how important my friend's Facebook page has been for us. She was Jewish, and in this religion often a gravestone is not put in place until 11 months after the funeral. When I went to the cemetery recently I was shocked to see just a painted wooden board (with her name spelt incorrectly) stuck in the ground. I was almost relying on the gravestone to be there for me to have something. Since then, and presumably for the next 7 months, her Facebook page has been the major port of call.
Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather deal with my loss than un-clog the internet!
To respond to your question about 'excavating' the internet, to some degree you can do that now via the Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine) - it apparently has archived around 85 billion web pages since 1996, and is I think rather appropriately mirrored at the New Alexandria Library. It's a rather strange experience going back to very early versions of familiar web sites! It also archives blogs, apparently - their forum has a recent exchange which suggests blogs are treated no differently than any other kind of website. Interestingly, the reason behind the forum exchange is that the originator wants to leave a legacy behind in the form of their blog ...
J :-)
P-dawg I totally understand what you mean about using an old unused blog in that way which can be helpful to mourn a loss but when does it go too long? If you remember those Bebo "suicide pacts" among the teenage girls in Wales last year you'll know that most of their pages were open to the public. The media were able to use those pages to track individuals down, write personal information about them in newspapers and even confront other people in friend's lists who may (or may not) have also been planning a suicide.
Understandably parents of these children wanted Bebo to take control of the situation and get rid of the pages to stop any other people getting ideas or any further harassment by journalists to take place. Now this is obviously an extreme example of this but one worth considering I think.
I'm also interested in Niamh's suggestion that the internet might be more efficient if these pages were deleted. There must be hundreds of thousands of out of date pages on the internet even now but I'm unsure as to whether these could slow the system down? And even if they did who gets to say why and when the pages can be deleted?
Say it was the case that a page went unused for 6 months and was deleted only for the user to return and find their work gone. To me that is a little bit like Big Brother (1984 Orwell). Being controlled by an outside source.... Perhaps I'm just being paranoid but I like to think if I go to the effort of creating a website or a blog, I would have the say so and the control to delete it when I decide.
I actually listened to a radio show recently about the Wales suicides - Bebo had nothing to do with it - that was a story circulated by the press. I think the main issue with the Bebo pages was that the kids were stupid enough to leave them open to the public, and there's not really much we can do about that. When you consider suicide you're not thinking straight and you're certainly not too worried about what happens once you're gone. It was simply completely insensitive and absolutely immoral of the press to interfere. Humans should have more respect for one another. And I know there's not much we can do about that either...
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