Life Tombstone 2.0
posted by on November 17 at 11:07 AM
The gravesite of one dead Jewish Great-Grandfather has just gotten a little more dynamic. Relatives of the fantastically-named Hyman Victor connected his tombstone via satellite to his real immortal resting place — several internet sites with information about his life and family.
While these include the expected links to geneology sites, you can also visit his Flikr photo stash and Facebook profile. This upsets the whole concept of burial: that there is one (possibly grassy) place where your dead great-grandfather resides and visiting him there is part of the memorial process. Now dead great-grandfathers can reside in multiple non-physical places, as well, and “visiting” them via clicking through links on your desktop isn’t the same asthetic or personal experience at all as driving to the cemetery and standing at a graveside. Especially when their post-mortem profile can bump shoulders with Hugh Foskett’s.
It increases accessibilty, it increases ease, it increases the deceased’s relevance to those still alive (young relatives will probably connect more with a Flickr photo collection available on their bedroom laptops than a hunk of stone located outside Chicago) and, for better or worse, it seems a sort of immortality. Information about the person can still be collected and gathered and shared — his internet personage is growing and changing while his actual person is in the ground. As long as his family keeps the sites running (and assuming they keep upgrading the sites as the Internet develops) his internet self could exist and grow forever.*
The family will definitely be criticized for trying to create internet immortality for Hyman (they’ll probably also be criticized for having a tacky video display in a graveyard) but I, for one, think Hyman Victor’s visage is worth preserving as long as possible. Just check out that sweet hat. Let us never forget the vast superiority of 1940s fashion sense.
Via boingboing
*”forever” meaning “until the end of the relevance of the human race” which will definitely be sooner than any of us would hope, due to global warming or robots or whatever.
I was going to post this a couple hours ago, but I thought "Mmm, too nerdy, even for me, so certainly for everyone else."
Thanks for, uh, Going There.
love your posts, sarah. i'll be sad when you have to leave :(
Nerdy? I don't know. The journal Death Studies says bereavement, loss, and death attitudes is a fast growing area.
The website was created by his grand-daughter, Cheri Buster.
But I like the idea of an interactive, web-based family tree. Perhaps a niche business for an entrepreneur with all the boomers getting older and worried about being forgotten.
And look at the shoulders of that sharpish suit! Damn sweet.
By "prototype" does the website mean "badly photoshopped image"? I think the name "Hyman" is just a little TOO perfect here.
Fake, fake, fakey fake.
Worst photoshop. Ever
Heh heh.
It's a real photo, not photoshopped:
http://flickr.com/photos/lincolnwood/sets/72057594067266534/
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