Handling death on the Internet

[AnimeFrog]

Well After Reading these posts * Sorry about your Father Renegade ):* 1 or 2 options I would pick out of to be able to let my online friends know that I have passed is... #1.That you could tell people that after so and so month,days,weeks etc. that I haven't contacted you or logged on then you can start having the thought that I have "Passed away"unless I have told someone that I would be away that long..
My other option which most people are saying xP is to give a few trust worthy people my password in case of the emergency.. :s

[technomo12]

to me already made a will and other set of instruction pertaining to when i die my sister will handle all my acct and focus on sending post adn email to people saying im dead

[-Kh-]

I actually always wondered what would happen when I die and vanish from the internet, would people think: haven't seen this dude in a while, where could he be, what's he up to, etc.

Just this week, something unfortunate happened, a friend from school back at home died on monday, I found out through Facebook, seeing other friends posting some sort of goodbye messages on his wall, it was shocking, sad and disturbing at the same time.

So I guess in social networks where you have 'real life' friends, everyone will eventually get to find out, but as Vexx said in the OP, what about the other places I frequent and some people might remember my posts once in a while, if anyone likes playing MMOs as I do, what about the friends in there or people from the guild. And there's always people you might talk to only by messenger and not really having them anywhere else (not even in facebook).

Since many years ago, I've been reducing the amount of people I talk online to, compared to 10 years ago I barely 'socialize' with people online anymore, just a few here and there. There's someone that always emails me when my MSN and Yahoo messengers are offline for more than 3 days, since I always leave my PC on 24/7, she used to said that she gets worried when she doesn't see my contact online, even if we don't talk too often now.

But it is true, that I've never really thought about making a will or something like that. I don't own anything worthy at the moment, I live away from home and from my family. The day I'll cease to exist, my couple of online friends which I still talk to, will just never see me online again. And I think I've told them once, that I would never block them off and stop talking to them out of nowhere, I'd rather tell them myself that I don't want to talk or relate to them anymore, and so if I ever go offline and don't come back or report myself by email in a short time, then that's because something happened to me. It's probably better and easier that way, I wouldn't want to trouble my family making them contact some stranger online just to tell them that some stranger they never met, but talked to, died.

[Master_Yoma]

Originally Posted by Kyero Fox

Just like in movies, someone dies, people cry for 3mins then 10mins later their forgotten, it be the same for me.

This seems right but I would got for no crying just fill a little sad and forgotten in 3mins

[TinyRedLeaf]

This thread reminded me of a story that originated from a MUD that I used to play in long ago, before the Internet became mainstream.

A story about a tree

By Raph Koster
(May 5, 1998)

I'D LIKE to tell you a story about a tree.

This tree grows in a different virtual world than Ultima Online — one of the many text muds that exist on the Internet. It grows in a Garden of Remembrance, and the ground around it is littered with flowers and boxes of chocolates and pieces of paper with heartfelt poems written on them. And there is a plaque there as well — "In memory of Karyn", it reads.

The story I'd like to tell is the story of that plaque and that person, someone I never met.

Karyn first logged on to that virtual world quite some time ago. She was from Norway. She kept coming back, and brought friends with her — some of whom did not speak English very well, but for whom she served as an interpreter. She made friends. Eventually she ran a website all about that virtual world, and posted on that site pictures of herself, where all could see she had a lovely smile.

As her ties to the world grew, she started a guild. She called it the Norse Traders, and with a lot of hard work, she got it off the ground and developed it into one of the most popular and well-known guilds in the game. It was a merchants' guild that also adventured together, and pretty soon the folks involved had made good friendships.

In March of this year, some of those friends started to notice that they hadn't seen Karyn in a while. You know how it goes in the online world — people don't leave, they just fail to show up, usually, and you never know what happened to them. But in this case there was her website to go to. So people went looking for Karyn.

A day later the news filtered out across the bulletin boards, via e-mail, and eventually onto the welcome message when you first logged in: Karyn was dead. She had died in a head-on collision while test-driving a new car. And it had happened two months before, in January, and none of us had known.

Her parents knew that she had friends on the Internet — they didn't quite understand what she did online, or who those friends were, but they knew that there were people out there somewhere who might want to learn the news. It took them some time to find her webpage, and to learn how to put a message up. But they did it, and they attached news items about the car crash, in Norwegian.

The outpouring of grief on the virtual world was immediate. People who had not logged on in months heard about it from the game's e-mail newsletter. A memorial service was organised. And eventually, a Garden of Remembrance was created, and a tree planted in Karyn's memory. Players made the pilgrimage to the garden in order to leave tokens of their grief. Code was changed so that items left in this manner became permanent parts of the world.

Throughout all the events, however, there ran a common thread. People could not get a handle on feeling grief for someone they had never actually met. They could not quite understand feeling a deep sense of loss over someone they "just played a game with". When describing their loss, they had to resort to "I once formed a party with her and we went into a dungeon". They couldn't quite express the feeling that a member of their community was gone.

And it was that sense — the Norse Traders had fallen apart since January, and now they knew why. Because Karyn, the person at the centre of it, was not there. In a very real sense, they came to realise that the strange unease they had felt about hearing of her death with a two-month time lag might have originated in the fact that the loss to the community was actually felt when she stopped logging in — not when the news finally came.

In the end, that garden and that tree served not only as a memorial to a well-loved and much-missed person, but as a marker of a moment, a moment in which the players of an online game realised that they weren't "playing a game". That the social bonds that they felt within this "game" were Real.

The story goes on about the significance of relationships built up in virtual environments. Raph Koster, incidentally, was the lead designer of Ultima Online, and was also a major implementer of LegendMUD, in many ways the text-based precursor of UO.

But there is a single massive twist: Karyn was not real.

As later proven, in 2002, by journalist Tracy Spaight and virtual worlds researcher Richard Bartle, Karyn's supposed real self, as described on her website, was an invented persona. Spaight's investigation, driven by Bartle's suspicions of Karyn's existence, discovered that the University of Oslo had no records of student deaths in road accidents during the respective time frame. Spaight also found that the person in the photographs of Karyn was a contestant in the Miss Norway contest; however, the contestant had never heard of LegendMUD. The story was later published in Tracy Spaight's report for Salon.com.

============================

Despite the eventual realisation that the death was an elaborate hoax, the story still had an impact on me. Since then, I have wondered what would happen if I were to suddenly disappear. Friends and family in real life would no doubt mourn, but what about the people I knew solely online?

To what extent is the friendship I had with them "real"? To the point that, out of courtesy, they should at least be informed that I was gone?

The irony of the situation is that, thanks to the ability to hide behind a virtual persona, I have had greater freedom to discuss sensitive, private matters online than I do in real life. So, in a sense, the "strangers" I know online may actually know me better than people in real life.

Over the years, though, I have come to a couple of conclusions:

(1)
No matter how real the virtual relationships feel, if you've never met those "friends" in real life, that's all they really are: Virtual. They are "Real" only in as far as they exist in the collective memories of a virtual society.

That being the case, there isn't any immediate need to let virtual communities know that I've gone on to the Next Big Adventure (assuming there is one). In those communities, my persona remains real — not dead — and there is therefore no actual need to mourn.

(2)
If at all possible, it really doesn't do any harm to meet people you've got to know online in real life. I should stress that, in this case, I'm not referring to people of thinking of starting romances online before taking it into real life — that's a different kettle of fish involving a lot of other considerations.

Rather, I feel that it's quite interesting to see the people you've "met" online, because that, ultimately, is what makes the friendship Real. Both parties confirm that the other is not a hoax, and trust is deepened further.

That being said, I can count on just one hand the number of people I have met this way.

So, I don't really know the extent to which it's worth the effort for those I leave behind to inform these people when I'm dead and gone. Barring a fatal accident, this is a matter I accept that I will cross later when I come to it.


As for all my real-life, personal effects, official procedures are in place for people to sort them out satisfactorily, should it come to that. I have no dependents at the moment, so there isn't much to deal with, thankfully.

[sergho]

Oooooo, set up a bot and keep the accounts active for years. You can rent a cheap server for about 20$ a month now.

On the Internet, people are used to others just not showing up even after years of participation. To me, it wouldn't be worth it to contact people on bulletin boards and game accounts.

Not to mention that your Internet accounts are ephemeral. They are here now but might go down tomorrow.

At best other account holders would find my death interesting. At worst they would make fun of it.

My Internet life < my real life.

[mindovermatter]

I've had a few friends online that have seemed to just disappear one day, but more often than not a bit of research turned up that they were still active on other sites so at least I knew that they didn't die.
besides E-mail and IM, my online friends know nothing about how to contact me so they probably would wonder if I went *poof*. I've never really discussed it with my brother, but he would probably log onto some of my more active web communities for me and post a message. that is, if it even occurs to him. If someone in the family were to die, posting an obituary on every forum/IRC that they frequent probably wouldn't be first thing on his to-do list.
There is another forum that I've been on for like 5 years. I think maybe once we got a post from an account claiming that it was X's sibling logging on to tell us that X had died, but no one really believed it. We did have a few times people from the forum went into major surgery and we didn't hear from them for a while so we got worried...

[LeoXiao]

I've thought about this before, and decided that if I died I'd prefer that my presence on the internet simply disappear. Now that I think of it my family may or may not do something (to say that I'm dead) if they were to look through my browser and see the forums I visit; most likely they would leave them be.

EDIT: Wait, there was once one guy who mailed me a copy of a DS game he wasn't playing anymore. If I died I'd like to let him know what happened.