An article about animal mummies in the latest National Geographic got me thinking about death and culture. There's nothing quite like death rituals to boil down the essence of a culture. The way we treat and honor the dead, the things we keep, the things we don't, the things we care to remember, the things we try desperately to forget--these all reflect basic human needs and basic cultural values.

And so it goes, in a world increasingly lived online, Facebook is becoming our digital graveyard:

Facebook is to give people the option to "memorialise" the profile pages of friends and relatives who have died.

The site invited family members to report when one of its users had died, to enable it to remove sensitive information such as updates and contacts.

Dido had a funeral pyre, Basho had a death poem, Farrah Fawcett had a television special. We prepare for death with the most familiar elements of how we lived our lives.

I remember getting chills when, a few years after a friend of mine died suddenly, I happened upon her old Facebook page. Like the abrupt ending of Anne Frank's diary, her profile was perfectly preserved in time, a snapshot of a life that would unexpectedly end a few days later. But unlike Anne Frank's diary, her Facebook page was just as active as ever. Friends could still post and chat to her as if she were still alive, with updates about their goings-on and "check-ins" on how she's doing in the afterlife.

I do wonder how her profile would look today, if she knew she was about to die. In the Zen poetic tradition, the jisei, or death poem, is a deep and honored practice, a final thought in a culture steeped in the way of poetry. I think back to Michael "Ohenrosan", a very kind Buddhist blogger, poet and photographer I met a few years back, shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer. His blog became an incredibly moving and powerful meditation on life, and he posted his own jisei a few days before the cancer took his life. But in some sense, the entire blog was a death poem, not just the final poem itself. It remains active today, with the torch carried on both by his family and his readership.

Might the memorialized Facebook profile become the 21st century jisei, a carefully-constructed and carefully-crafted digital epitaph? We are born online, we find love online, we grow up, we think, we live our lives online. It only makes sense, I think, that we are also finding ways to die online.

Labels: culture, internet, poetry, zen

"The next billion people who will be getting online will be using cellphones, not computers," Anderson said. "That gets you thinking about how you can leverage this."

--D.C. Denison, The Boston Globe


With developed markets now saturated, the developing world’s rural poor will account for most of the growth in the coming years. The total will reach 6 billion by 2013, according to the GSMA, an industry group, with half of these new users in China and India alone.

All this is transforming the telecoms industry. Within just a few years its centre of gravity has shifted from the developed to the developing countries. The biggest changes are taking place in the poorest parts of the world, such as rural Uganda.

--Tom Standage, The Economist

For one reason or another, I've been thinking a lot about mobile phones lately. I remember when I first had a cell phone, in late high school before I could drive. Minutes back then were insanely expensive, so my ride would call me, let it ring a few times, and hang up, to let me know I should wait by the curb in about 15 minutes. A year or two later, I found myself in the Philippines, where almost everyone I saw, even those who clearly didn't have much money, was texting and tapping away. It would be a few more years till texting became mainstream to the same level in the US.

I wrote this a little while ago, when trying to raise funds to help victims of Typhoon Ketsana/Ondoy:

When Mt. Pinatubo erupted, I had to rely on television, frantic, unreliable phone calls, and a letter that would arrive weeks later with assurances; and worse, given our limited resources at the time and limited ways to send money, we weren't able to send much more than good will. Now, I can text, tweet, Facebook and YouTube my way to news and, importantly, galvanize aid for a country that is almost literally on the other side of the world.

I do wonder how different the world will look in a few years, when not just the developed world but the developing world is connected and online. I think and talk a lot about the game changing impact of e-books, augmented reality and Twitter Lists, but none of these strike me as game changers on the same level as something like Avaaj Otalo, a program giving farmers in India access to important agricultural information:

Avaaj Otalo ("voice-based community forum") is a system for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. The system was designed in the summer of 2008 as a collaboration between IBM India Research Laboratory and Development Support Center (DSC), an NGO in Gujarat, India.

By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record questions, review and respond to others, or access content published by agricultural experts and institutions. In addition to the Q&A forum, Avaaj Otalo includes an announcements board of headline-like snippets updated regularly by DSC staff, and a radio archive to listen to past episodes of DSC's popular weekly radio program.

Until recently, I've been using a five year-old Nokia candy bar phone, a model similar to what now sells for under US$20 in China. With it, I was able to update my Facebook and Twitter accounts, check Google, receive subway service alerts and send text messages to the Philippines. Except for checking my email and getting GPS, what I'm able to do with my new Blackberry isn't too much different--it's just more organized. And I could always use my computer to check email and figure out directions.

Putting a Blackberry in my hand makes it easier for me to get online anywhere, to keep in touch with friends, to tweet on the fly. But putting a phone in the hand of someone who's never had a computer before and who may not even be literate? Oh, this century is just getting started.

In the grand scheme of telecoms history, mobile phones have made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology. They have spread the fastest and proved the easiest and cheapest to adopt. It is now clear that the long process of connecting everyone on Earth to a global telecommunications network, which began with the invention of the telegraph in 1791, is on the verge of being completed. Mobile phones will have done more than anything else to advance the democratisation of telecoms, and all the advantages that come with it.

--Tom Standage in his excellent special report on mobile telecom

Labels: internet, mobilephones, technology