today i read a dead persons blog for the first time, i stumbled across a korean model´s page through some other fashion blogs and found out afterwards that she committed suicide late last year.
i went back to her oldest posts to understand someones pain in-between lines, she was mostly sarcastic, i felt a ghost lingering from the other side of that computer (still feel some sort of hole in my stomach)... how could anyone have read the signs? (denial)... they were all there.
some part of me thinks taking a look into someone´s life like this is morbid and wrong, and and another thinks this is the fate of everyone and anyone who subscribes to the public in a grotesquely public way i.e. me blogging this this second, facebook, twitter, and the endless sites that will continue exposing us even more to a faceless crowd.
a sense of belonging maybe? who knows, for all i know i´m writing this to myself, for as a person who observes and sometimes doesn´t express true feelings, i am letters without a face, so there i am.
this sense of dying and reading a dead persons blog ties into an article i read in time mag. and since lately i´ve been curious about what happens to your internet life if you die, this is what i found out:
"We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. The company responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which features such as status updates and group affiliations are removed. Only the user's confirmed friends can continue to view the profile and post comments on it.
If next of kin ask to have a profile taken down, Facebook will comply. It will not, however, hand over a user's password to let a family member access the account, which means private messages are kept just that.
Rival MySpace has a similar policy blocking account access but has fewer restrictions on profile-viewing. (This inspired an entrepreneur to create MyDeathSpace.com, which started out aggregating profiles of the deceased and has since morphed into a ghoulish tabloid.)
E-mail is more complicated. Would you want, say, your parents to be able to access your account so they could contact all your far-flung friends — whom you don't have in your address book because you don't have an address book — and tell them that you've passed on? Maybe. Would you want them to be able to read every message you've ever sent? Maybe not.
Yahoo! Mail's rule is to keep accounts private. "The commitment Yahoo! makes to every person who signs up for an account is to treat their online activities as confidential, even after their death," says spokesman Jason Khoury. Court orders sometimes overrule that. In 2005, relatives of a Marine killed in Iraq requested access to his e‑mail account so they could make a scrapbook. When a judge sided with the family, Yahoo! copied the messages to a CD instead of turning over the account's password. Hotmail now allows family members to order a CD as long as they provide proof that they have power of attorney and a death certificate. Gmail requires the same paperwork, plus a copy of an e‑mail the deceased sent to the petitioner.
Read more here.
on top of all of that, i´m browsing the old archives of jakandjil and i find this, a picture of dash snow and purples olivier zahm riding the metro in paris, feels like the grave speaking, so weird.
d.e.p.
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