Quotes from Ryan article, The Digital Graveyard: Online Social Networking as Vehicles of Remembrance.
Online social networking practices entail the inscription of personal identity, cultural tastes, and social relations as well as their archival. As such, they provide a rich framework for understanding the complexities inherent to new technologies, which blur preexisting boundaries of space, time, privacy, communication, representation, and memory.
Our digital traces serve as artifacts of ourselves; the dead live on in the public and persistent realm of the Internet, enabling ongoing dialogue between their memorial traces and those left behind in the land of the living. When even the dead can join the dialogue, today’s social networking sites come to resemble a haunting electronic nebula populated by everyone you’ve ever known, interacting in new modes of spatiality and temporality.
