The Sad Side of Social Media

Mara here. I’ve written before about social media, and for the most part I really enjoy being able to keep tabs on people at a distance. I love seeing photos of people’s families, and I like to hear people’s good news, like weddings, the birth of babies, pet adoptions, and graduations.

However, the other side of social media is that it means I'm sharing people’s sad news too.

This week I found out that two people I primarily stayed in touch with on Facebook passed away.  

They weren’t people I was very close to. One was a woman who was the relative of a close friend, whom I had had over to our house for a holiday meal a couple of times. The other was a woman had been involved in the television production my daughter was in, but I didn’t stay in regular touch with her. (Shortly after I saw it on Facebook, I was contacted by a mutual friend with confirmation of the sad news.)

This is not the first time I’ve had this happen. I've found out on social media about other friends—and even a family member—passing away. But there was something about having it happen with two friends within two days that has made me think about the impact of finding out sad news in this way.

It’s difficult. It’s a bizarre combination of something being incredibly personal and incredibly impersonal at the same time. And it's so sudden. In addition, it gets mixed in among the jokes and vacation photos that pop up in my Facebook feed. It’s like biting my tongue when I’m eating something. It’s shocking and seems unreal. 

It caused me to flash back to a memory of when I found out about the death of one of my best friends from high school and college. Her mother called me. I knew as soon as her mother identified herself that there was something terribly wrong. In nine years of close friendship, my friend's mother had never called me before. But even then, I had that second to prepare myself—that second between her telling me who she was but before she tearfully relayed the news that my friend had died.

On Facebook, there's no time to prepare.

And I find the fact that the pages of people who've died live on without them to be a bit haunting.  For me, seeing their familiar avatars continue to show up in my Facebook feed, as friends and family post memorial messages on their pages, makes it more difficult for me to accept that they've passed away.

Facebook is regularly asking me to update things in my profile. It likes to remind me that I only have 20% of my personal information filled out. And they're constantly doing updates, so there are always new features they want to highlight. Last week I was a little startled when Facebook asked me if there was someone I wanted to designate to be able to post on my profile page in the event of my death.

Although the obvious people for me to designate are my husband and my daughter, I didn’t. I hesitated. It's logical as with any other piece of property, Facebook wants someone to be able to take ownership of pages of people who are deceased. Maybe family members wouldn’t want pages to be left out there in cyberspace. And like me, I’m guessing most people want to know if something has happened to their “friends,” so it’s practical for someone to be able to post and make an announcement that everyone in the friend's list would be able to see. 

But I didn’t want to fill out this new request. I’m not afraid of death, and I’m not someone who doesn’t want to think about dying. But somehow the thought of giving someone the responsibility of notifying everyone on Facebook felt uncomfortable.

People feel differently about the role that social media should play in their lives. Some people feel as if you shouldn’t post things that are too personal (like relationship problems) or that you shouldn’t post things that are political. And maybe it’s a generational thing. Perhaps my daughter’s kids will not think twice about having all their life details preserved on social media. I’m somewhere in between. People should post what they want. But when people die, should their social media presence live on without them? Is that what I would want? I’m not sure.

The web makes our ever-shrinking world even smaller. People I would never have maintained any contact with twenty years ago, are now a regular part of my consciousness through their social media posts. I guess that means there are more people who will sadly be lost to me as the years pass by. And in the end, I’m glad that I am able to have the information so I can say my own goodbye and provide comfort to people who are still alive if I’m close to them.

But it is an aspect of social media that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to. Here are a few of the things I have asked myself over the past two days that I thought I would discuss with my mom:

Have you had experience of finding out about the death of friends on Facebook?

Yes. I have several times and it can be traumatic. The most traumatic time was learning in my Facebook feed about the death of you and your brother Jamal's elementary school teacher, Marla. If I add together the years for the two of you that she was your teacher, it comes to 5 years. I used to tell Marla that she helped raise the two of you. In addition, we became good friends and hung out socially. I loved her very much. 

The way I found out was that I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and her daughter, whom I was friends with, had posted that Marla died in an auto accident. When I saw the post, it felt as if I'd been kicked in the stomach.

I will say that because I'm mostly housebound, in some ways, I was glad to find out that way because, otherwise, I might not have known for several days.

But as you discussed, finding out on Facebook was startling because there was no time to prepare. And it felt so impersonal. Even getting an email about someone's death doesn't feel impersonal because at least the email is addressed to me.

So I have had that experience on Facebook and it's pretty jarring.

If it’s someone you’re not super close to, do you think in some ways you would prefer to simply not know that they had died?

No. I like to know what happens to people. And sometimes I learn interesting things about them I didn't know because people share their memories of their deceased friend. Obviously, hearing the news of the passing of people I'm not close to doesn't have the same traumatic effect as it does when it's someone I am close to. Instead, it's just sad information—part of life.

Have you given any thought to how you would want your social media accounts to be handled in the event of your death?

That's an interesting question because I have accounts on a bunch of social media sites, even though I'm only regularly active on Facebook. I have a couple of Google accounts, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and some I've probably forgotten about. 

I've seen two approaches on Facebook. Sometimes when a person dies, his or her page disappears. But other times, the page stays up for a couple of months or even a year, and people post their condolences and memories of the person. That must be comforting for family and friends to be able to see, and they probably learn new things about their loved one. So I think it's nice when a page becomes a kind of memorial to the person who died.

But for me personally, I don't have any preferences. I have two pages on Facebook that are very active: my personal page and my professional page—I call it the page for my books but I post a lot of photos—mostly of flowers and birds and paintings. Whatever is done with those pages after I die is fine with me.

Have you gone out of your way to make sure that someone knows all of the passwords?

No, but I guess I should. I know this can be a problem because when a friend's husband died several years ago, she didn't have any of the passwords to their financial accounts that were online and it was a mess to sort it all out. So, I think your dad should know my passwords. That's something I should probably take care of!

Mara and I would love to hear your thoughts on "the sad side of social media."