[Air-l] deceased on the ether

Andy Roberts aroberts at gmail.com
Sat Apr 8 17:22:58 PDT 2006


I had a strange experience involving the deceased online. I'm not sure
if there's anything to learn from the story but I'll tell it anyway.
The context is Flickr, the photo sharing service. It happened because
my son started tagging a coulpe of photos of myself with my full name.
When I then clicked on the public tag for "andyroberts"  up popped
lots of photos of another person with exactly the same name as me, and
also a guitar player.  I'm quite used to that, since there are plenty
of us with this not at all uncommon combination of names in the world.
 But then I noticed that a lot of people had posted photos of that
particular Andy Roberts all in the same period and were leaving
comments about him in the past tense. He had died young, and had a lot
of friends in the London music scene. His friends had set up a Flickr
group and collected photos and stories about him, as a kind of
memorial, and even documented the clearing of his flat and sorting out
of his CD collection.

I felt uncomfortable that I had inadvertently intruded into the
private grief of a group of people  who were nothing to do with me,
and that's still the case really, although logically, I suppose they
must have created a public group in order to share their grief and
memories, as an enduring public memorial.

--
Andy Roberts

Blog:  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/

Action Research Coffee Shop
http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Coffee_Shop



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