http://thedartmouth.com/2008/08/12/news/ritger/
Disturbing web site reports deaths of MySpace users
By Matthew Ritger, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The other day while enjoying a late lunch on the Collis porch and perusing my new favorite web site, I learned that 22-year-old Tim McLean had been stabbed to death and beheaded on a Greyhound bus by a fellow passenger.
Tim’s seatmate blew a psychopathic gasket in the middle of the night on a lonely stretch of the TransCanada Highway, somewhere in Manitoba.
After a break to grab another iced coffee, I next read about the demise of 25-year-old Tia Poklemba, who was found bleeding to death in the middle of the street in Bonita Springs, Fla. Her clothes were torn off, she was missing an ear and reportedly looked as if she’d been dragged behind a car.
Welcome to MyDeathSpace.com, a website dedicated to reporting the most extraordinary and tragic deaths of MySpace users. MyDeathSpace displays the lurid details of each user’s death and — thanks to their MySpace pages — the even more graphic details of the users’ former lives.
As social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have redefined our lives, it was only a matter of time before death, too, was redefined. This is death in the digital age.
After reading the C.S.I.-worthy circumstances of Tim McLean’s murder, I immediately navigated to his MySpace page, where I learned who Tim would like to meet in life (grammar his): “…the wolfman, frankensteins monster, a vampire, every kewl canadian, every kewl american, every kewl every body…” as well as his favorite activities: “gettin [sic] the most out of life.”
Tia, for her part, grins in a tank top with her arms around two friends in her profile picture. It’s hard to imagine her without her ear, or life.
The reporting on MyDeathSpace is unflinching with its irreverent commentary, deadpanning (no pun intended) details such as: “Friends
started a Facebook group called ‘R.I.P. Tim’ after news of the attack.”
“‘He was a great person, he was kind, thoughtful, and he did not deserve this,’ Jossiee Kehleer wrote on the site,” MyDeathSpace’s coverage notes.
Does anyone deserve to be stabbed to death and decapitated on a bus in Manitoba? And does anyone deserve to have his death publicized in such an undignified way?
According to Michael Patterson, the answer is yes. The 26-year-old paralegal from San Francisco and creator of MyDeathSpace has said he started the site to teach teens about risky behavior. The vast majority of deaths reported on the site are due to car accidents, drunk driving or drug overdoses.
But whether Patterson’s intentions were ever truly to raise awareness about risky behavior is questionable; since its inception in January 2006, the site has been an undeniably sarcastic and cruel form of voyeurism.
MyDeathSpace got its big break thanks to the Virginia Tech massacre of April 2007. Seventeen of the victims in the shooting had MySpace profiles, and The New York Times web site directed users to MyDeathSpace for information. Tens of thousands of users discovered the page following the Times’ plug, and that number has since grown exponentially.
MyDeathSpace’s 8,000 registered users now patrol the internet, searching for deaths in the news and submitting obituary suggestions to the web site.
The site has yet to face any serious legal challenges. MySpace profiles are effectively public information, and it’s legally impossible to defame the dead. There’s no First Amendment basis for a suit, so it appears the death parade will go on, despite the ire of family and friends.
MyDeathSpace is most disturbing for the way its regular users ridicule the dead. Suicides are skewered particularly cruelly, with strangers on discussion boards arguing over what the causes might have been and surfing the deceased’s MySpace pages for embarrassing information.
It seems that there’s no longer any rest for the wicked, nor for the accidental — and especially not for the suicidal.
Although I’ve been fascinated with this site for the past week or so, watching Tim McLean’s family continue to post on his MySpace page (and keeping up with their efforts to fend off some insane evangelical church that descended upon his funeral) has simply proven too creepy for even my morbid sense of humor.
While the internet has allowed us to “connect” across the globe, we are now more “disconnected” from humanity.
These are people, after all. Or they were.
The message for MyDeathSpace users is clear: Get a life.
Disturbing web site reports deaths of MySpace users
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