The Alphaville Herald

Facebook Reaches Beyond the Grave

by Alphaville Herald on 08/08/09 at 4:16 pm

Dead unlikely to confirm friendships

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnngggggggggggg. The pointer on my irony meter smacked against the max irony peg – hard – and wobbled slightly backwards with a nasty permanent bend. I had just logged into Facebook – a leading contender for the coveted corporate crown in a race to package and commodify lives, relationships, and everything else.  As usual, Facebook felt I needed to document more relationships and offered some helpful suggestions.

This time Facebook guessed right, and included a friend and Herald colleague on my list. But – bad luck for me! The timing was a bit off. Carmen Hermosillo died almost exactly one year ago.

But why would Facebook want to limit life-mapping to only the living? Ubiquitous access and continuous growth are certainly worthy goals, and small details like no logins for a year and iffy internet connections to the afterlife should not be a barrier to sharing even more personal information with the über-fashionable Facebook data-mining operation. I do hope Carmen's ghost will confirm we are friends – her profile looks a bit sparse.

Fanboys tell me Facebook helps them stay connected, and the endless requestsfor more detailed personal social mappings validated with constant posts and tweets to build traffic – why this is just the price of admissionin a happy, friendly community provided free of charge.

Of course, the real agenda is providing everyone with a deeper, more meaningful andengaged relationship with anything that might monetize Facebook for it's owners. The rest of us are just the volunteer labor in agrand endeavor. Now even the dead have been enlisted to help. 

If Carmen were alive, I imagine she would have something scathing tosay about the whole experience.

I settled for the next best thing andre-read two of her classics: Pandora's Vox and The History of the Board Ho.

What Carmen wrote 5 years ago is a far more incisive analysis than anything I have read lately: