[Air-L] live profiles, dead people

[Mariana Matos]

Hello Carmel!

That use of blogs are very interesting! I cannot think of anything similar 
happening here in Brazil. We can see tons of messages sent on Orkut and also 
some blogs created as a tribute to someone who died (i.e. mothers who lost 
their kids who died of cancer or commited suicide). I've never seen 
something like you described, but I can look for it to try to see if there's 
anything similar. Could you please send me some links for these blogs?

Best
Mariana Matos-Silva
PhD Student
PUC-Rio
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carmel L. Vaisman" <carmelv at gmail.com>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 5:13 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-L] live profiles, dead people


> Hi Mariana.
>
> A similar phenomenon happened in Israel with blogs of young people who 
> died in terror attacks or during army service and some after committing 
> suicide. the blogs got a lot of traffic of people writing to the dead but 
> it wasn't just family and friends, in fact they were the minority - many 
> people who didn't' know them read their former entries and got to know 
> them and spoke to them after their death. Another interesting phenomenon 
> was that in a few cases of dead teenagers their parents took over the blog 
> and shared their memories. The blog became very popular with the parent 
> now blogging. I don't' know anyone who documented this in research but I'm 
> doing a long ethnography in the Israeli blogosphere so i had the 
> opportunity to witness that. I thought it raised an interesting issue of 
> privacy of the dead, since parents didn't know their children's passwords 
> but got cooperation from the blog host owners to reactivate the blog. Did 
> you witness anything similar?
>
>
>
> Carmel Vaisman
> http://www.absolutecarmel.com
> Twitter @carmelvaisman
>
>
>
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Mariana Matos <
>> marianasantiagodematos at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello there!
>>>
>>> I've been on the list for almost 2 months, but, until now, I've just 
>>> read
>>> what people were writing. And I must say there are many interesting 
>>> topics
>>> being discussed! However, I'd like to introduce myself and share with 
>>> you
>>> all information about my research subject.
>>>
>>> I'm a psychologist from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a PhD student at PUC-Rio
>>> (the Catholic University). I'm part of a group of researchers who have 
>>> been
>>> studying the psychological and social impacts of the use of technology 
>>> such
>>> as the Internet, cell phones, games, and some others. The group is 
>>> leaded by
>>> Professor Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa, who's been researching on this
>>> subject since the very beggining of the use of Internet in Brazil.
>>>
>>> My research in on the habit of writing scraps, on Orkut (the most 
>>> popular
>>> social network site in Brazil), to people who died and left their 
>>> profiles
>>> active. As you should know, if someone dies, the profile may still be
>>> active, what happens if no one deletes it or asks the site to delete it.
>>> I've been observing that a substantial number of dead people's profile
>>> receive a great amount of messages, writen often by close friends and
>>> family. In these messages, they "talk" about their feelings, tell the 
>>> dead
>>> about their quotidian (i.e. what they did in the weekend), talk about 
>>> their
>>> memories etc.
>>>
>>> I have the impression that this is a brazilian phenomenon, and I'd like 
>>> to
>>> ask you if you see something similar in your countries, even if people 
>>> use
>>> other SNS, like Facebook or any other. Do you know people who died and 
>>> let
>>> their profiles? Do you know if they still receive messages, even if more
>>> than one year have passed since the death?
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Mariana Matos-Silva
>>> PhD Student
>>> PUC-Rio
>>> Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
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