When a friend from university sent me news of a classmate’s death last year, my first impulse was to log on to facebookbook.com to remind myself what the classmate looked like. I opened my facebook profile page and searched for his page. I discovered that he was listed as a “friend” of mine, but like most of the 264 “friends” that this phenomenal social networking website displays for me, he was really only an acquaintance.
I looked at the top right corner of his profile for his personal stats: he was from Manhattan, 23 years old, heterosexual, prepped at Trinity School and was, of course, a member of the Princeton class of 2005. I scanned left and saw his profile picture, which featured fetchingly dishevelled hair, tanned cheeks and a background of a campus lawn. I clicked below to view pictures others had taken of him. I scanned right and noted his favourite films, bands, books and quotations. I darted left and saw that, according to facebook, we had over 20 friends in common. At the bottom of the page I scrolled down his “wall”, where friends had written two years’ worth of blurbs.
He had died two days earlier of bone cancer, but he seemed eerily alive – more alive than many other acquaintances I had also not seen in a year, but whose updates and fleshing details were a click away.
Of the 16 victims of the Virginia Tech massacre identified as undergraduates, each still has a facebook profile. If their parents do not shut down these virtual personas, the dead students will continue to “live”, in a sense, in a cyber community that western students under the age of 25 are increasingly engrossed in. Since facebook’s launch at Harvard in 2004, the site has become so influential that it has altered the social paradigm of most incoming undergraduates.
“If you’re not on facebook as an undergraduate now, it’s probably because you have a principled stance against it,” an Oxford grad-uate student says of the site, which currently has 19m members worldwide. He says he knew an Oxford friend who had shut down his profile because he was addicted to checking it.
Facebook’s most seductive feature is simple: it allows students to stack up their own popularity numerically against their peers. It allows them to craft and tweak projections of their personalities that they are comfortable with. It also allows them to monitor by the minute their friends’ new photos, love interests and group affiliations. The site expresses what a dour professor might call the frivolous attachments of youth, as hundreds of new facebook groups pop up daily with names like, “I Heart Jake Sloan”, “Pearl Jam Rocks My World”, or “Old Etonians for the Eradication of Elitism”.
Death features no more prominently on the facebook playground than it does in youth. In the days after the Virginia Tech massacre, however, the system was struck by enormous surges of grief. Grief coursed through the system’s viral pathways, connecting the shock of 22,000 Virginia Tech students with the confusion of each of their hundreds of friends and, in turn, with the condolences of strangers from across the world.
Facebook groups were set up within hours to honour the dead. The first student that Cho Seung Hui killed, Emily Hilscher, now has three memorial groups: “Riders Remembering VA Tech Equestrian, Emily Hilscher” (1,077 members), “Truth for Emily Hilscher” (104 members) and “Why Emily Hilscher was Cooler Than Me (862 members)”.
“RIP all VT souls that were lost,” posted Chrissy Capo, of North Shore High School, on one of Hilscher’s memorial group pages at 6.39pm. “I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t know this girl Emily, but may they all rest in peace, and I will keep them in my prayers.”
By midnight on Wednesday, the facebook group called “A Tribute to Those Who Passed at Virginia Tech” had over 285,000 members and over 15,800 individual postings. It was created by a student in Greece.
This outpouring was not just a demonstration of new media’s community-building capacities, or its ad hoc utility as the most efficient condolence forum ever devised. It showed an online mourning impulse of the new media generation.
“I’m sorry to Omar, Randa, Mona and Joey for doing this,” wrote Vincent Posbic, after setting up a facebook group in memory of Virginia Tech victim Reema Samaha. “I don’t know if this may be inappropriate, but right now, I feel incredibly lonely and helpless. I want to do something, but there’s absolutely nothing I CAN do. Except for this. Please understand that.”
For the students who have always known the internet, the first place to channel grief was online. And the best online forum was facebook, where everyone had always gathered.
Postings are still stacking up on some of the Virginia Tech victims’ facebook profiles, as friends tell the victims that they are in their thoughts and that they miss them. I asked a colleague, a 22-year-old intern, about this phenomenon, which seems like some postmodern version of talking to ghosts.
In the past two years, she said, nine students have died at Boston University, where she is still a student. Some of the students’ facebook profiles are still intact. One BU student, “Sarah”, posts facebook messages to her former boyfriend Andrew, who died in November 2005.
At 1.21pm on February 1 2006, Sarah wrote, “happy anniversary baby . . . i love you forever.” At 4.06pm on February 1 2007, she wrote, “happy anniversary. thank you for the memories, your love, all that you taught me, and for shaping who I am today...love you.”
Some people have criticised the fact that people like Sarah keep posting photos or wall messages days and years after a death. It could seem morbid. It could seem like shrine-building. But this is probably no more curious than a generation that is accustomed to a blend of the virtual and real.
Many students this term will cruise facebook while sitting through dull lectures about funerary traditions in ancient Rome, where families commissioned death masks to remind themselves of the role the loved one played in their lives. When they are confronted with the same impulse, many of those students have a more vivid and energetic way of keeping memories alive, and of connecting to others who grieve.
Additional reporting by Johanna Kassel
