by Flemming Funch
User Not Found is a weblog by Dana J. Robinson, devoted to dealing with the death of online friends. Here, from a piece called 'Not knowing is the hardest':"Given the nature of communicating online, one person's failure to log on for days, weeks or months at a time can cause concern in the people who continue to log on regularly. It's especially worrisome when the person who isn't signing on was living with a known illness. While "killing" online personas happens all the time, the real tragedy occurs when a real life death happens and is chalked up to a person just not logging on anymore." Hm, indeed. How do we know? I can think of online friends who've died where it was only very coincidental that their other online friends heard about it. For one it was only because a family member was so bright and knowledgable to go and send an e-mail to her whole contact list. For another, I didn't know before several years later that he died. It would be nice if we could engage in networks of trust tight enough so that we quite naturally would file next of kin information with others in the network, so that we'll never just disappear without an explanation. Or, maybe, a deadman's switch, which releases certain kinds of contact information if we haven't logged in for some length of time.
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