[Air-L] Introducing myself

[Anna Haverinen]

Hi Mariana and everybody,
I'm a recently graduated student of anthropology from Finland and I have
witnessed the same phenomena here too. It seems to be a natural response for
the people left behind since a blog or a webpage or a profile seems to have
this sense of personality, e.g. the personality of the deceased. In the same
way people leave candles and memorial artefacts to locations where a person
had died or used to live. People seem to think that we leave a hint of
ourselves in places, also in virtual space. This phenomena includes official
memorial websites and virtual graveyards (which I'm studying currently for
my doctorate thesis) that have been flourishing since 1995. I did my
master's thesis about virtual memorial sites, their public/private aspects
and conceptualizing virtual space experience. Death rituals (mourning,
bereavement and honoring the deceased) are changing with Internet and social
networking, and they seem to give a new way of coping with loss and sorrow.

Unfortunately my work is still in progress and my master's thesis is still
only in Finnish (will get it translated soon), but hopefully this remark has
been helpful to you.

Best,
Anna Haverinen

2009/7/3 Nishant Shah <itsnishant at gmail.com>

> Hi Mariana,
> Thanks for the introduction to your work. It sounds quite fascinating and
> indeed has seen some parallels in India. Especially with a couple of
> high-profile cases which found a lot of publicity in the mainstream media,
> and were dubbed facetiously as 'Orkut Deaths', we saw a similar phenomenon
> in India. In both the cases, the two young people who died, left active
> profiles which were at the centre of a great public debate and resulted in
> thousands upon thousands of people coming to see, to comment and to leave
> testimonials and messages of grief, condolence, and anger at the tragic
> turn
> of events. I had written a small Op-ed for a national daily that gives some
> of this information which you can research further (
> http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/09/02/stories/2007090250010100.htm ). I also
> have a chapter in my PhD thesis that deals with these two cases and gives
> more details about the same. Please let me know if you would like to have a
> look at them and I will email it to you in person.
>
> One of the more important thing about these live profiles of people who had
> passed away, was also the appearance of clones. There were suddenly many
> people who were creating 'false' accounts, appropriating the persona of the
> dead, and also receiving a lot of comments and scraps.I found this
> particularly interesting because these accounts were accurate in the
> information about the dead persons and also appropriated their pictures,
> creating elaborate false networks and photo albums to create a certain
> notion of authenticity.
>
> Hope this information is helpful to you,
>
> Warmly
> Nishant
>
> 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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>
>
>
> --
> Nishant Shah
> Doctoral Candidate, CSCS, Bangalore.
> Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org )
> Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09
> # 00-86-21-66130376
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