The social benefits of the Internet are endless. The web provides instant communications with distant friends, vast resources for people looking for a mate and a platform for sharing the print, video and audio milestones of life.
It’s appropriate, then, that the Washington Post’s Yuki Noguchi takes a look today, on Memorial Day (a U.S. holiday), at yet another social benefit of the Internet: online memorials. Not only do grieving loved ones set up sites that memorialize the lives of those who have been lost, but there is a sub-industry of web companies devoted to helping users set up memorial web sites.
Companies such as Legacy.com, mem.com and memory-of.com, plus others, help bereaved individuals establish central locations on the Internet to remember lost friends, family members and co-workers.
Viewers use the Web sites to find and comfort one another — not only to facilitate communication from far-flung or long-lost friends who couldn’t attend a funeral, but also to send messages from one dead soldier’s wife to another, from one mourning mother to another or among those galvanized to fight a disease.
While at first blush it seems kind of, I don’t know, hollow, to treat grief in such a technical way, these sites provide much relief to bereaved people. This is particularly true in the U.S., where the social bonds of communities are far weaker than in the rest of the world.
While many non-Western cultures build rituals around death that allow a person to grieve over time, in highly individualistic societies, losing a loved one can be isolating, some psychologists say, which may be why some turn to the Web to reach outside their traditional social network.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:57 AM | Print | Comments (0)
“When death happens, we’re so alone,” said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. “It would be nice if we had a sense of community, and maybe that’s what the Internet provides.”
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