Life Chronicles

Twitter and Facebook provide a way for people who don't think of themselves as writers to put their lives on paper. Status updates, if modified regularly over a significant period of time, can constitute a sort of unintentional memoir. Facebook chronicles the growth of babies into children into actual people, the blossoming of casual relationships into more serious ones, ("Jack is 'in a relationship'." "Jack is 'engaged.' "Jack is 'married.'") and vice versa (Jack is no longer 'in a relationship'.) I wonder sometimes if we'll show our grandchildren backed up copies of our feeds instead of scrapbooks or photo albums.

Clicking mindlessly through Facebook tonight, I discovered something else Facebook records, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. A few years ago, I friended a boy who'd been a very close friend my junior year in high school, and with whom I'd since lost touch. I knew he was suffering from cancer because he posted witty status updates about his chemo regimen pretty regularly. I hadn't seen him in my feed in a while, so I decided to look him up. His wall was filled with messages from friends sending their condolences to his family. Apparently, he died in February.

His facebook profile is now a sort of living monument to his memory. Some people still post to it as though he's alive to respond, while others have posted photos and poetry commemorating his life. I suppose the page will live on forever, unless facebook has a policy about deceased users. It seems morbid somehow, but also somehow...necessary? The wall posts themselves tell a story, and allow everyone to celebrate his memory, not just those close enough to him to have been invited to his funeral. The posts are thoughtful and sad, and I would imagine it means a lot to his family to know how much their son was loved. So are virtual memorials tasteful or tacky? This seems like a question that's only going to get more important as more and more people join social networking sites, and I'm still not sure what I think.