How Long Should You Wait Before You Shut Down Someone's FaceBook Account After They Pass On?
This question just came up in the current WIRED Magazine (FEB. 2016) issue by Jon Mooallem. In talking about Marty McFly's character in Back to the Future, Mooallem says of him, "While travelling through time, he's learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke ___ a haphazard product od so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed."Mooallem continues to say that in the gym scene where Marty McFly watches some red-headed stud take his future mother away from his future father, his essence starts to pale and he starts to become translucent. It's as if his whole persona starts to disappear.
Or, as Mooallem says, "Marty is being 'erased from existence.' He continues to say that not only is Marty McFly vanishing, but his whole existence is as well --- like he doesn't even exist.
So, you can see where this is going. Jon Mooallem's response to the question:
"You ask how long should you wait before you shut down someone's FaceBook account after they pass on (my words)? I ask why you'd EVER want to delete it."
IS:
It's like the premise of Back to the Future, or how erasing someone's digital memory --- or past, is like erasing them. Mooallem makes the point that everything the deceased had said or done on any other person's FaceBook page would disappear up in smoke. So would any comment, expression or interaction that anyone would have had with them.
Mooallem ends his article by saying, "Granted, none of this necessarily damages our actual memories of that person; there are other ways, arguably better and more meaningful, of preserving a person's spirit than on FaceBook. But why purposefully erase any shred of that memory from existence when time and the universe (multiverse?) have already erased so much? Please, leave the page. Leave it there as a digitally living memorial --- a few traces of an earth angel . . .
I agree so much so that I will be putting an amendment into my will to leave it alone! Check out what I am talking about losing! Hah!
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