At a pivotal, yet perhaps under-appreciated moment of Aaron Sorkin's film "The Social Network," Justin Timberlake says, "We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the Internet!"
It's true.
We do live on the Internet, and something many of us have not considered is that we will die on the Internet as well.
Our lives are on Facebook. Every party we attend, every mood swing that inspires a status update, every friend we catch up with: it's all chronicled on the Internet. It has become an extension of our social selves.
What happens, though, when the person whose life the Facebook page is chronicling dies?
Facebook gives us options. The page can be "memorialized," leaving a snapshot of the person suspended in Internet space where friends and family can post memories of and send messages to the deceased.
The concept may be unsettling to some, but just as the nature of social interaction with the living changes with technology, so too must the nature of mourning the dead.
We are a people spread across the globe. We do not remain in the towns or even the countries in which we are born.
Growing up in a generation that is always on the move and always in front of a screen, this is our way of visiting a headstone.
Perhaps it seems impersonal. Perhaps it's a way for distant acquaintances who really had no tangible connection to the deceased to garner attention on Facebook after a death. Perhaps it's unhealthy for family members to maintain this shred of their loved one's life on the Internet when closure is what's truly needed.
However, is there any real difference between staring at a Facebook page, pondering the memory of a friend or family member, than opening a desk drawer filled with photographs and doing the same thing?
Facebook will be forced to confront this problem in greater depth as a generation of users that is still largely young and thriving will one day age and, eventually, die.
If the short history of the Internet is any indication however, the Facebook generation will long have moved on to the next best social network before Facebook is forced to consider the death of its user base.
However, whenever a Facebook user moves on, be it to another network or by passing away, the life of that person lives on in the shell of their profile.
As unsettling as this may be, it is the hard reality for 500 million Facebook users who, as Timberlake's character predicted, live--and die--on the Internet.
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