Future Facebook Ghosts

I recently came across a friend who has someone friended on Facebook who I know had been dead for about a year.

At first my reaction was THAT'S MORBID! But within a few seconds I have moved on to No, that's respectful and honouring of their memory.

I then started thinking about how that might carry on into the future.

Imagine Facebook remains the social networking utility of choice well into the future - well after you and I are all gone. What will happen to our accounts? As we each pass away and our friends honour us by leaving links to us as friends... what will happen?

We can't check out profiles of people more than one person removed (and few of us have our privacy settings set low enough to even allow one person removed viewing)... and of course we'll all take the passwords to our profiles with us to the grave. (Right?)

So eventually there could be this web of interconnected Facebook ghosts who no-one can actually access.

Actually that's probably not realistic at all. IF Facebook were to actually last that long I suspect that there would either be some sort of protocol put in place to either delete dormant accounts, or possibly to 'de-classify' the archive of dormant accounts after 'X' amount of time. Say 120 years after an account was created, or 30 years after it's last use? Or a certain amount of time after the declared birthdate of a user's profile - say 150 years (to allow for both the death of the user and any immediate descendant)?

I don't know.

Just musing on our digital immortality.

A Television Classic

This is gold.

I was already too old to watch much Sesame Street by the time this aired, but I was getting close enough to the age where I was watching it again for nostalgia purposes. In fact, I think that it might have actually been this incident that got me watching on occassion again.

I am talking about the Death of Mr. Hooper.

I don't recall being terribly affected by it originally. Apparently it only ever aired once - on a Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. to ensure that the most families were home together so that kids could talk to their parents about it after watching, and possibly before (it was well known that what was going to happen on the episode.)

Here is some more info on it.

I recall reading somewhere about the taping of the actual bit. One take (with a multi-camera set-up). That was all anyone could handle, and it was really affecting the first time around. All the tears were real. You can really see the actors trying to hold it together - some more so than others, and those who have the most trouble are actually the most affecting... Bob stands out. David (particularly subtle and good when he talks about the store), Maria (who appears the most affected by the end) and Susan are also really good. Susan barely makes it through "Big Bird, Mr. Hooper's not coming back." and sets the tone. I'm going to make it through this despite how broken up I feel.

It was pretty tear-jerking to watch it now. What a brilliant moment in TV. Although I'm always amused by the theatrical convention of everyone sitting on one side of the table especially on TV when it's used mostly to facilitate a three camera set-up.

It also had the added effect of making me scour YouTube for old Sesame Street bits - mostly Muppet bits, that is of course what I started watching Sesame Street again for in my teens.