The first time was last year, but then it hadn’t really struck me to look anything up. A few weeks ago another person whom I’d known only in the briefest of passing from Maryland Faire had passed away from an auto accident. Given the number of people we know, it’s tragic but bound to happen, and we make the best of remembering them in each of our own ways.

What had struck me as different this time around was that it was the first time a person I’d known that had passed away that I also had both on MySpace and LiveJournal. I went back and perused his pages, and it makes it much more of a real person that’d just vanished off the planet. One day they’re blogging about having gone out to the movies w/ friends, or complaining that their job was dull. The next they’re just gone - and their SO is posting a message saying they’ve passed on.

It’s how the world has gone, and I think it’s a good thing, definitely. We can go many years after the fact, and have a much clearer sense about the feel of the person. How they wrote, things that struck them to talk about, what annoyed them, and of their photos. It’s always been that we might have had a few letters from a lost loved one, but that’d be about it. Now there are the photos, the quips, their musings, even their postings on DeviantArt. Those lives are not longer subject to being lost in the vagaries of a shoebox photo album in the back of a closet. They’re able to be pulled up and revisited as the mood strikes from time to time wherever one may be. And you can post comments/thoughts/feelings on their pages like never before.

It’s a sad time to think that another senior member of the community will soon be lost due to age, but they’ve never had any of these things, and I’m sad to think that I’ll not have those same memories available.

How technology has changed how we live, and also what we leave behind when we pass on…

Technorati Tags: Blogging, MySpace, Musings