It's not just in kindergarten and in elementary school
that we love "show and tell". We love it as adults as well. The problem
is that while as kids we like both the showing and telling, and the being
shown and being told, as adults we're fearful that other adults don't want
to see and hear what we want to show and tell, and this fear leads us to
develop inhibitions that keep us from exhibiting this behavior too frequently
in public. Grandmothers are, of course, permitted to exclaim "my purse
is so heavy with the new photographs of my grandchildren", but nobody would
let me get away with that.
Which brings us to one of the wonders of the web. The
web is the ultimate stage for showing and telling without feeling that
we're forcing ourselves on other people. They no longer have to politely
look at the new photographs of our grandchildren (or children) and then
find some way of excusing themselves from our company. Show and tell via
the web satisfies our need to tell, without coercing anyone else to listen.
It should come as no surprise that many people take the opportunity offered
by the web to tell. Perhaps it's more surprising that many people actually
want to listen.
I've more or less made it my business to seek out what
sorts of information "normal" people put on the web about themselves. I've
tried to examine part of the phenomenon of home pages in a previous
edition of the Boidem, but the emphasis of that column was on how the
building of a home page reflects and builds our identities. This time the
question seems like a simpler one - what do people choose to tell about;
but on close examination seems pretty problematic - why do people flood
the web with "information" that seems, on examination, to be purely of
personal interest.
I have personal
reasons for this examination. Because I spend a very large percentage
of my waking/working hours online, when my daughter was born it was only
logical that I'd prepare a web page (or a group of pages) devoted to her
and to the occasion. If other people aren't embarrassed by doing this,
why should I be? And anyway, how
many people are going to see those pages? But of course I then had
to ask myself for whom was I writing those pages? If it was only for myself,
then why was I posting it to the web? If it was for others, were these
"others" a known entity, or an amorphous, ill-defined presence? Of course
I like to think that my personal involvements somehow reflect other people's
thoughts and feelings, but after an in depth exploration of "personal"
information on the web, I have to admit that I'm far from sure that others
don't see me in the same light that I see them. This column grew out of
those thoughts. As to the directions it took ... let's just say it sort
of grew on its own.
Before continuing: a short confession and perhaps an apology:
Births and deaths are, I suppose by definition, transitional
events in our lives, and they cause people to want to report on them. Among
the numerous services offered by Childbirth.org
is a section devoted to birth
stories. On the main page of this section is a list of approximately
150 stories that mothers have sent in. Some of these stories are only a
few paragraphs long, others substantially longer. The majority of them
seem to report a wide range of difficulties encountered during birth. Perhaps
the sheer bulk of so many reports cause each individual report to lose
whatever effect reading it may have had on us. The mothers who write have
no claims toward being authors (and apparently few of the necessary qualifications
as well), and all too often the effect of reading these reports is a numbing
of our sense of empathy rather than an enhancement of it.
The World
Wide Cemetery is perhaps the best known of a number of examples of
a "virtual cemetery". The idea is very simple, and at the same time very
convincing. Friends and relatives of someone who has died submit a short
memorial to their loved one which gets prepared as a web page. What follows
is an explanation of the basic idea, taken from the memorial page for the
person behind the establishing of the World Wide Cemetery:
But on the web, one successful and well thought out realization
of a good idea usually means that there are quite a few realizations that
are severely lacking, and virtual cemeteries are a good example of this.
Numerous companies have established virtual cemeteries, though it's far
from clear that anyone I know would feel honored to be interred in any
of them. A North Carolina Company, Cire Computer Productions, has created
Eternal
Memories. They write:
Finding a memorial page is something that can be done
by chance or by mistake, but rarely purposefully. You have to know what
you're looking for. So perhaps it's fair to say that your "web page can
be viewed by millions of people", but it's certainly not accurate. It can
be,
but rest assured that it won't be. What's perhaps even more distressing
is that the $35 fee buys you a standardized web page, or part of one, that,
judging from the examples so far at this site, tells the visitor close
to nothing about the deceased loved one.
That''s the case with Eternally
Remembered - Virtual Cemetery as well. This is a site established by
a Spanish company, which I suppose means that it's improper to make fun
of the English, but sometimes it's hard
to resist:
Then this is our homage, acknowledging that the memory of all our loved
ones, anonymous to the rest of the world, but remembered and missed buy
us and will always be in our thoughts. World Gardens
lets us know a bit more about those "buried" there. But cyberspace can
be as hard to come by as a real plot: When your contract with World Gardens
expires, your loved one's internet page is removed and they are given a
plaque in the site's "mausoleum". This service is provided at no charge.
The general lack of content of these pages, and their
far from satisfying formats hardly makes your love one seem to be someone
special. One particular aspect of the Eternal Memories site convinces
me that this isn't the company with which to do business. One page of the
site carries a memorial to the father of the family, and another page,
designed in the same format, holds a memorial to the family dog. I'm well
aware that pet owners have real love toward their pets, but there's something
uncomfortable about giving what amounts to equal billing to your dog and
to your father.
And that brings us to another topic that gets its fair
share of "show and tell" - Pet Memorial Pages. Once again, there are numerous
examples of this sort of page, and a number of sites that offer this sort
of service. For the purposes of this column, one will be (more than?) sufficient.
Though some sites of this sort offer individual pages
for each deceased pet, The Virtual
Pet Cemetery strings each memorial one after the other on lengthy pages
of text. About itself it states:
All of us, at one time or another, have had a pet we loved and lost.
If you wish to immortalize your beloved pet in the tombs of cyber-space
for eternity, now is your chance. Of course there's no need for a page in a virtual cemetery
in order to memorialize somone. Anyone who has access to a site can upload
to that site whatever they choose, and examples abound of memorials for
deceased friends and family members. Part of what's interesting about these
sites is that instead of going to a virtual cemetery to find a memorial,
you find them as an integral part of regular (normal?) web sites. Death
is, after all, an inescapable aspect of life, and there's something logical
and proper about our memories and our memorials being linked as integral
parts of our ongoing lives instead of concentrating them in one area reserved
for the dead.
That's it for this edition. Reactions and suggestions
can be sent to:
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From the Boidem -
an occasional column on computers and information technologies in everyday
life
May 23, 1997*:
It seems to me that one of the major arguments against the
ascetic life is that all too often people who go off to live by themselves
come back later to tell us about it. If people are satisfied living all
alone in the middle of the desert, why don't they stay there instead of
returning to this world and writing a book about the experience. This seems
to me to be one of the proofs that we're social animals and that the desire
for interaction is a central part of our nature.
I take an honest interest in the personal messages that
clutter the web. A surfing session for useful information that has to be
found quickly can be easily sidetracked by a memorial I stumble across.
At the same time, I'm also attracted by extremes, often extremes of banality.
What follows is only part of the accumulating result of an ongoing search
for "personal" materials on the web. But though some of the results I bring
here may seem extreme in their banality, my goal isn't to poke fun. For
all I know, others visit my own personal pages and can't restrain a laugh.
Is
any of this coherent?
It meant that a son, now living in Australia, say, could "visit" his
father's grave just by turning on a computer, even though the body may
have been physically interred in Canada. Visitors could leave "flowers":
typically a short poem, or message of condolence. The site could have photographs,
sound clips, even short video clips. The wonderful interconnectivity of
the Web made it easy to link deaths (and the marvelous details of lives)
of family members who may have died years apart and in different countries.
It's worth noting that the description of the original idea
describes a son visiting his father's "grave" even though he's geographically
far away. Surely this is a logical use of the World Wide Cemetery. But
my guess is that family and friends don't need these memorials for themselves
- they will remember their loved ones without a web site. They want these
memorials because they hope that others will visit them and be touched
by what they perceive as the specialness of their loved ones. The World
Wide Cemetery has about 100 entries, and it's satisfying, perhaps even
relieving, that often the writing is good, and we're actually touched by
people's lives.
The best part is that for as little as $35, your web page can be viewed
by millions of people.
which seems to suggest that, if nothing else, they seems
to grasp quite well that a web page is for web surfers who somehow find
the memorials rather than for friends and family.
When sombody close to us passes away, they leave us at the end of a
cycle, we always ask if it is the beginning of a new life perhaps it is,
perhaps not. We do not know for sure, we have hopes but also we have our
doubts. What is certain is that it is the end of a life, a time in which
are shares with many people many memories. Time that one does not forget,
that are should remember.
Is it surprising that after an introduction such as this,
Eternally Remembered has about five people listed in its Virtual Cemetery,
and that what's written there is little more than name, rank and seiral
number. The bulk of the site seems to be devoted to an explanation of how
to pay the $25 per page required.
Welcome to The Virtual Pet Cemetery, a unique cyber graveyard for pets.
Over the years, this special place has grown to become one of the world's
best known and largest online burial grounds. Thousands of visitors from
all over the world visit the cemetery every day to read the epitaphs.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the
claim of thousands of visitors every day, but it may well be true. And
a claim such as this once again shows that sites of this sort aren't for
the personal memories of the pet owners, but are instead a way of making
these personal memories public. As to the content of those memories, I
can't be the judge of that, and instead offer two
examples.
Anyone
who visits the Israel Yellow Pages
web site, will find a link at the bottom the main page, a flame, and the
inscription (in Hebrew): In
Memory of Alon Cohen. People use the Yellow Pages for various tasks
in their daily lives, and in the midst of those activities they're invited
to visit a short and very respectfully prepared page that memorializes
someone who was involved in the preparation of the Yellow Pages site. The
web connects everything. It not only connects those who want to show and
tell to those who are willing to be shown and told, it even connects between
life and death.