Mourning in Cyberspace

Twenty-two-year-old Hui Wang ’08 was riding with five others in a car headed for the Catskills when his Mazda swerved into the wrong lane, hitting another car head on. Wang died instantly. That was as far as I got in The Crimson article before I was logging onto Facebook.com in search of his profile.

There he was, still smiling, a Biochem concentrator with a 617 cellphone number. His interests: “Hiking, Swimming, Music, Movie, Photography, Philosophical Discussion.” His activities: “Outing Club, HTTC.” He has 85 friends and his favorite quote is, “You are welcome.”

Wang is still on display exactly as he was when living. When a user dies, his profile freezes in time. Facebook.com doesn’t allow postmortem airbrushing or rose-colored filtering. On Facebook.com, the late Wang is illuminated by the same clinical glow of the computer monitor that illuminated him while he was alive.

THE LIVING WALL

The only section of a profile remaining active after death is the wall. Posts typically function like the autograph pages of a yearbook. But when a user dies, his wall does not, sometimes growing faster than ever before. People try to contact their dead friends, posting eulogies in the arena most convenient to them—cyberspace.

One post written two days after Wang’s death reads, “ :) hallo, haven’t seen you since summer, how’ve you been?” Six hours later, another friend wrote, “I missed you.....I miss you...and I will miss you...../ I’m sorry that I didn’t keep in touch....but I will always remember our friendship.......”

After that, the eulogies stacked up. On Oct. 11, Tianyi Zhu ’09 posted, “May you rest in peace!” Earlier that day, Cornell graduate student Eva L. Zhong wrote, “we will always miss you… . peace.” Her next line—“tears coming out…”—appeared an attempt to broach the internet’s immateriality by representing a physical act.

Friends didn’t write about Wang; they wrote to him. While at funerals people typically refer to their loved ones in the third-person, on a Facebook.com wall they directly address those they’ve lost, seemingly summoning them with the second-person. The profile becomes a virtual effigy, in many ways more autonomously alive after its subject is dead.

Wang’s death has also virtually reverberated through the realm of the living, most noticeably in the profiles of his friends. Dongbo Yu ’07 changed his favorite quote to some lines of French verse dedicated to “mon cher ami Hui Wang.” He also created the group “Remember Hui,” which, at a count of 368, has four times as many members as Wang had Facebook friends.

“We thought the close friends should be notified as soon as possible,” Yu says, “and I thought the Facebook was the easiest way.” Yu says that the group spreads information, such as scheduled memorial services and how to provide financial support to Wang’s family in China.

According to Yu, some—including a friend of Wang’s who was taking a semester off in China, first heard about the tragedy through Facebook.com. Only three hours after the group was put online, Yu says the friend called him to confirm the news. One of Wang’s friends taking a semester off in China called Yu merely hours after he received an invitation to join.

“Looking at all these pictures of Hui really helps to bring him back,” Yu says. “I feel that Hui is really still with us. A person is never gone unless he’s forgotten, and with this Facebook group continually supported by all these members, I don’t think Hui will ever be forgotten.”

In the beginning, the group was “secret,” invisible to uninvited users. But now, Yu explains, the group is “closed,” meaning people can see it but must get permission to join. “We want only those who believe they are truly emotionally connected to Hui—who would like to devote a corner of their heart to the remembrance of Hui… as opposed to those who feel lightly about the issue, who just join it because it’s some gossip issue on campus.”

The impulse to create such groups reflects a reflex to preserve someone’s memory virtually. With the boom of social networking sites, the deaths of a number of their users have forced many to translate their mourning into the language of cyberspace. Because Facebook gives one an online existence, users must now account for their virtual loss.

‘FIND CLARENCE DUANE MEAT’

Leverett senior and former president of Native Americans at Harvard College Clarence D. “Duane” Meat ’05-’07 was shot in the chest while taking time off at home in Minneapolis, Minn. Meat died that morning on May 3, nearly six months ago. But until two weeks ago his virtual identity on Facebook remained alive.

On Feb. 23, three months before Meat’s death, Daniel B. Weissman ’05 wrote, “holy shit, you’re alive. what’s going on?” A couple posts later someone asks, “are you coming back for the POWWOW?! may 6.”

In the next message, the day after Meat’s death, Marcel L. Anderson ’03 wrote, “Words cannot capture what I feel right now. My brother has passed, and the world

has yet to realize how great of a gift he was to the world.”

And three days after Meat’s death, on the day of the powwow, Meat’s girlfriend Barkisu Cole, then a Roger Williams University student, wrote, “i promise to staay strong for you and will continue to pray. BABY!! Thank you for making me who i am today! I LOVE YOU and miss you soooooo much!!!!!!!”

Several months before Meat’s death, his former roommate, Dominique DeLeon ’04, founded a Facebook.com group titled “Find Clarence Duane Meat.” In Meat’s time off from school, friends hadn’t heard from him in at least five months, so DeLeon started the group to try to track him down “and get him back in school.”

Since Meat’s death, the group has become a sort of memorial with the description, “Duane was lost, but is now found. Rest in Peace my dear friend. We love you.”

DeLeon says that he was originally going to close the group after Meat’s death, but didn’t out of respect for the Ojibwe tribe, to which Meat belonged, which believes that a deceased person’s life should be continually celebrated. The ability to write these comments, DeLeon says, is “healing.”

MEMORIAL PROFILES

According to Facebook.com Director of Marketing Melanie Deitch, once company staff become aware that someone has passed away, they mark the profile in their own database as a “memorial” profile to be shut down in 30 days’ time.

She says that other users write to Facebook.com about the death of a friend.

Other times, Deitch says, Facebook.com is contacted directly by the family. But before marking it a memorial profile, the staff verifies that the individual is dead through a news article or recent wall posts.

Death, Deitch says, “is something that happens more than you would think in this demographic, so we had to form a policy. Initially, when I first started, we didn’t have a policy around it, and I think we took down profiles too soon before people were done memorializing. That’s when we decided on thirty days. Thirty days seems like enough time to mourn, but is not awkward.”

PRESERVING A PROFILE

“Whether it’s 30 days or two weeks, obviously I would like Hui’s profile to be around a little longer,” says Yu. “But if the taking down of Hui’s profile did some emotional damage to some of the people, then I think [the Remember Hui] Facebook group would more than make up for it.”

Yu pointed out Monday that Wang’s profile was taken down, nine days before Facebook.com’s official memorial period. This past week, the profile has been in Facebook limbo, going from online to off in a matter of minutes. As of press time on Tuesday, a search did not bring up Wang’s profile.

Though Yu thought it would be eerie to retain Wang’s profile forever, he still wants a copy of the profile that was taken down.

“We want to give people an opportunity to mourn that person,” Deitch says, “but it’s not something that should stay up indefinitely on the site once they’re gone.”

MySpace.com, another social networking site, takes a different approach. Recent searches showed that the site allows many profiles to linger after death.

But Deitch, speaking for Facebook.com, argues against preserving profiles.

“Since Facebook is about real people connecting with their friends, once someone is no longer with us they don’t have control over what their profile is anymore,” she says.

This policy reflects the theory that a profile is not merely an elastic document, but a living extension of a being, something like a finger or a toe, which must die when the pulse stops.

STICKING TO POLICY

At the end of my interview with Deitch, I asked if profiles were ever kept up past the 30-day memorial period.

“I don’t believe that’s the case,” she answered. “Every case is a little different. We stick to our policy as much as possible.” Then I asked about Meat, whose profile was open on my screen five months past the expiration date.

“Clarence Duane Meat? The name’s not familiar. I’ll check up on him. How do you spell his last name?”

A couple hours later, with his profile still open on one window, I opened another to search for him.

The page loaded: “No matches found.”