At first glance it might seem that the internet has little to do with funerals. After all, the essential ritual of the funeral service has hardly changed for hundreds of years, despite swathes of other technological and social changes. Why should death suddenly start involving the internet?
Yet however surprising it may seem, people have actually begun using the internet in a variety of ways to assist them with the grieving process. These are just some of them:
1. Broadcasting funerals online
One of the most remarkable ways that people are using the internet to help them remember people is through the recent phenomenon of broadcasting (or “web-casting”) funeral services over the internet, so that more people can watch them around the world. Originally used as a way of enabling their fans to watch the funerals of celebrities (over 10 million people watched the online web-cast of Michael Jackson’s memorial service back in 2009, according to CNN), many funeral directors in the US now offer an online broadcast option to ordinary families who are organising a funeral.
Some funeral directors charge extra for this service, while others offer it for free. It can be as public or as private as clients wish: the people organising the funeral are usually able to choose if they want the web-cast to be available to anyone who wants to view it, or if they want password-protection so they can exclude people who haven’t been invited. Many funeral directors will even offer an on-demand video playback service afterwards, so that relatives can re-watch the memorial later on if they find it comforting to do so, while the web-cast may also be given to the family on DVD.
Online web-casts make great sense in a country like America where people are likely to have friends and relatives spread out over a very large area, which makes it harder to travel for a funeral, and also given the growing number of people who live abroad. It’s not clear if any funeral directors in the UK have started offering this service, but it’s probably only a matter of time before they do.
2. Memorial websites
For people who want to leave a lasting memorial to someone special in public, the internet has also created new possibilities.
Websites such as Online-Funeral.com enable the friends and family of someone who’s died to create a kind of permanent obituary for them, complete with a picture and some text explaining who they were and saying how much they are being missed: www.online-funeral.com/vmt.htm
With the number of people who read traditional obituaries and death notices in printed newspapers falling, memorial websites have stepped in to fill this gap. Furthermore, through email and social media, it is now easier and quicker than ever to signal that there is an announcement to be viewed, so more people can be reached – and with greater certainty – than in the days of print notices.
3. Social media and blogs
Deaths are now often mentioned on Facebook and Twitter, with peoples’ Facebook pages becoming impromptu memorials where mourners post messages of condolence when they learn that they have died. Twitter can be used to spread news of someone’s passing virally, making it a good way for getting the word about a death out quickly to large numbers of people.
Meanwhile, there are also a growing number of memorial blogs devoted to people who have died, both celebrities and ordinary members of the public. These are often very long obituaries which can contain large amounts of text explaining who the person was, as well as photos from their life, and even videos and music. The project of producing a memorial blog can be a great way for someone to work through their sense of grief, and they enable collaboration between different people who’ve been bereaved, who can all collect their memories, photos and videos together in one place.
To read an article from the New York Times about web-casting funerals, just
follow this link.
