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TW//DEATH (MyDeathSpace, Grief, and Sensationalism on the World Wide Web).

ok hi so i want to talk about a website i think is really interesting called MyDeathSpace.

i stumbled on mydeathspace about a year ago. i can't remember exactly how i found it, but i was immediately enamored and horrified by this staggeringly large monument of online grief; memorializing car crashes, overdoses, suicides, shootings, illnesses, murders, freak accidents, and all other sorts of devastating events involving generally pretty young myspace and facebook users.

scrolling through the almost two-decades worth of stories on this site is a surreal and honestly pretty moving experience; pages and pages of life-shattering headlines like "Kennetha Jordan (18) was shot and killed a day after her high school graduation" or "Jordan Wayne Allen (15) died from drug and alcohol poisoning", with selfies taken by the deceased. it feels strange how ordinary they all look, but i guess it's not.

parts of it do feel a little morally tricky. i found out from an old news segment about mydeathspace that the site's origin was as a gesture of anti-drunk driving sentiment by reporting the many car-related deaths of myspace users, but they would also offer early-access to death stories if you paid them like $30 to become a member (???) so yeah, still very much has that old internet exploitation/sensationalism thing. there are aspects to this site which get can feel potentially pretty insensitive to families, especially in its emphasis on reporting causes-of-death, but it also seems like families/friends would utilize mydeathspace as a place to get the news out on the passing of a loved one as well.

grief on the internet is weird, and the bluntness of mydeathspace in the context of social media, which creates all these degrees of separation between real people and real bodies, is grounding. it brings the context of the material realities of death and loss to the forefront of the conversation. mydeathspace is DEEPLY, stomach churningly sad, but i also see it as a tribute both to the many, many myspace and facebooks users who have passed, but in a larger sense, to a very-long-gone era of the internet which seemed to be a lot more personal and, uh, human, i guess.

idk im rambling now but yeah really beautiful and terrifying and thought-provoking website on the internet. ummm... yay!