My [Death] Space

Jonathan Sterne introduces a variety of ways in which we may read our media, and our fascination with an ever-growing gamut of new media technology, as intimately connected to human anxieties about death. The idea, even, that recording technology helps us through a conceptual switch from the idea of "live" music or sound (as it is termed) to "canned" (preserved) sound, and that our terminology for it has developed thus, is further evidence that this is eerily the case. Sterne's discussion of Nipper, the RCA dog, is an early example of where we might see media technology hotly pursuing the dream of immortality (and, by the way, I have a reproduced version of Nipper hanging in my house, and it's totally a coffin. Like, totally. It's right above my piano, the dead and the living side by side ... )

And while I'm on the subject ... if you haven't been there before, take a little trip to MyDeathSpace.com, a site which collects, and editorializes upon, the public MySpace profiles of the deceased. The site can't actually contain the profiles, so it links to them and categorically organizes them. It is interesting to note how many of the dead who now populate and sustain the pages of the site are under the age of 35; this, I think, points to some telling generational markers that reveal the modern relationship of death to media and the technology which enables that media. MySpace, thus, appears in fundamental conception to bear a lot of resemblance to early sound recording -- namely, that the ephemerality of human life can achieve permanence in digital format -- since it is able to chronicle a person's chosen public identity, including sounds, pictures, movies, etc., and sustain that public identity into the great unknown.

MyDeathSpace.com, claiming to be "MySpace.com's cemetary," presents an veneered array of the dead much the same way MySpace.com does of the living. And, as with the living, people are allowed the opportunity to "interact" with the deceased. They can leave them messages, make public comments about them, or merely flip through catalogues of pictures, evincing an "active audience role" in the context of these pages. Perhaps these pages constitute, for this new generation, tombstones of the 21st Century.

But, then again, maybe MyDeathSpace.com will have a run for it's money once these babies really take off -- digital tombstones.