Can't embed, but this is what I think of with this subject, just picturing user names fading from the screen:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkyk80_time-goes-by-montage_shortfilms#.UN6fnob4Kgd
One of my all-time favorite posters who dropped off years ago was Makkonnen. He was such a regular and dropped so completely off the map around the end of 08 that I doubt he'll ever be back and honestly doubt he's still alive or able to post. He switched handles from Dolemite maybe around 2002 or 2003 but it was known to everyone and this departure seems more permanent and sudden. Hope for the best, obviously, but unless he's in jail or incapacitated, that's what seems to make most sense.
Funny that the old post that got bumped triggering these thoughts in me was "Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time."
I guess this would be the Internet equivalent...
Death On Facebook Now Common As 'Dead Profiles' Create Vast Virtual Cemetery
Sometime in mid-July, Anthony Dowdell put on his favorite plaid shirt, drove his Dodge pickup to the parking lot of a Sam's Club in Linden, N.J., leaned back in the driver's seat, and shot himself.
Nobody knows exactly when the 39-year-old, who went by the online moniker "Dare Dellcan," took his life. Nobody knows why the normally cheery creative director and design company owner did it. And for the first couple of days, few people besides the police officers who found his body on July 16 knew he was dead.
The day after the discovery, a message appeared on Dowdell's Facebook wall.
"I am a friend of Anthony's. I wish I could call you all to inform you personally and this is probably a crappy way to find this out but our dear friend Anthony aka Ant aka Dare Dellcan has passed away. It is confirmed. I live around the corner and I have spoken with authorities this evening … I am only sharing this because if I was Anthony's friend, I would want to know too. And I know that Anthony had friends all over the place."
Dowdell had 692 friends on the social network. They were in New Jersey, where he lived, New York City, where he was raised, and spread from Los Angeles to Miami. A few were in Brazil and Italy. As with most people on Facebook, they were former girlfriends and dates-turned-friends, high school and college classmates, co-workers. Many hadn't seen him in years. Most didn't know each other.
The message on Facebook, linked to a newspaper article about an unnamed man found dead in a truck in the store's parking lot, is how nearly all learned of Dowdell's death.
Dowdell wasn't close to his mother and stepfather, and "we knew from his family situation that there would not be any sort of memorial," says Jessa Moore, a 35-year-old friend who lives in Jersey City, N.J. "Facebook became our memorial. We could leave messages for him and each other." Moore has been posting memories of Dowdell on his page for four months. Friends upload photos of him and his dog, Bacon, and if they are at a restaurant or bar he would like, they "tag" his name so his Facebook profile shows that he, too, was there.
For some, it's been a painful experience to see constant reminders of Dowdell online, as if he were still living. Others have wondered if they're being respectful of his privacy. But for Moore, it's been cathartic. "For a month, I was there on his page every day. It just sort of kept us all connected," she says.
It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook, with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of memorials for the dead.
Since the beginning of the Web, it's been plausible that pieces of information about people with Web sites and email accounts would be left accessible after they died. But the virtual cemetery is fairly new. One of the oldest online memorials is the U.K.-based Virtual Memorial Garden, which began in 1995. A simple, alphabetized collection of tens of thousands of paragraph-long, user-submitted memories of the dead, it's still growing. Since social media first gained mass appeal a decade ago with Friendster (2002) and MySpace (2003), online profiles have outlived their creators. But the skyrocketing growth of Facebook has created a new terrain for death on the Internet.
Full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/07/death-facebook-dead-profiles_n_2245397.html
