Virtual death shrines
@RANDOM
| He posted pictures of his tattoos online "" he was proud of the "hellraiser" tattooed across his back and the "666" on his stomach. |
| In February this year, he posted to his MySpace page under the heading The Nature of the Beast!!!: "A tiger Cant Change its Stripes!!! So STOP trying to change ME!" |
| A few hours later, Ulysses Handy III killed three of the buddies who had shared their online and offline lives with him on MySpace: Daniel Varo, Darren Christian and Lindy Cochran. |
| Officially, Handy's MySpace page no longer exists. Neither does Daniel Varo's page. Nor does Darren Christian's page, which had pictures of the three friends horsing around. Handy on his knees, Christian holding a gun to his head; Handy mock-whipping Varo. |
| Unofficially, I know about the pictures thanks to Wired.com's detailed investigation of what was dubbed the "MySpace murders" "" but also because they can be found with marginal effort on the Net. If you go to Handy's 2sadistic page at MySpace, all you'll get is the standard "Invalid Friend ID: This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted." |
| But Wired has a complete, and stomach-turning, set of MySpace documents archived. They're at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/ internet/0,72121-0.html. |
| Please think very hard before you click on the links. The comments left by MySpace users at Handy's page are angry, obscene and abusive; the pictures posted by one particular sicko are genuinely stomach-turning. Sometimes surfing the Net can make even the most hardened among us want to take a bath. |
| So why do this at all? Part of the answer lies in a site called MyDeathSpace.com, which provided, until recently, a directory of dead MySpace members. |
| The site has been offline for the last week, but again, a brief search for cached pages brings it up. It makes for grim reading: Daniel Varo and Darren Christian are listed here, and so are hundreds of deceased MySpace members. Murder and suicide ("shot", "stabbed", "stabbed and beaten by hammer", "heroin overdose", "drug overdose") appear to be the chief cause of death, with accidental death and cancer coming up next. |
| MyDeathSpace was rapidly becoming one of the most notorious, and controversial, sites online "" friends and family members of the deceased were often shaken by the sometimes insensitive comments left behind on MyDeathSpace forums "" and this may be one reason why it's gone offline. |
| I think it'll be back, though, for a grim but inescapable reason. The online shrines that have been built to the memory of Daniel Varo and Darren Christian are there as a reaction to the murder. |
| But Varo and Christian shared this in common with less notorious MySpace members "" they lived most of their lives online. Like many members of their generation, they left visible records of their lives, silly photographs, dumb comments, party plans, job changes, friend lists and their favourite music albums online. |
| At www.virtual-memorials.com, photo galleries and brief anecdotes commemorate ordinary people; Kurt mourns his mother, Jean Rose, and remembers her wonderful singing voice, elsewhere, a mother mourns the 17-year-old daughter who died in a traffic accident. |
| At www.immortalpets.com, owners ensure that "Whiskers" and "Bonnie the terrier" will always be remembered. I'm not so sure about http://www.thelastemail.com/, a service run by Spanish company Global Spectrum that offers to help you organise beyond-the-grave emails (also called deathmails or dmails) to loved ones: not a bad idea, but the site's copyright seems to have, well, expired. |
| Varo and Christian are enduring, virtual ghosts for a terrible reason. We often see their generation as the first generation to live online; what is easily missed is that this will also be the first generation to die online. |
| All those who lived their lives on the net will have their virtual shrines, their virtual mourners. Until someone blows the cache forever. |