Memorials On The Web

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Everlasting Memories Difficult To Maintain Forever

With the advances in the Internet since the 1990s it stands to reason that memorials on the web have become a certifiable trend. What is somewhat counterintuitive is that many of the memorials established just a few years ago, with the intention that they would be around for the ages, are already defunct – or at least inaccessible as of this writing. The following is a summary of some of the more notable examples of once well-known on-line memorials that are no longer to be found in cyberspace.

The City of Berkley, California prides itself on being on the cutting edge in almost every walk of life. So, in that vain, it built in the mid 1990’s an on-line memorial to the city's citizens who had died in the Vietnam War. This project, it was hoped, would serve as a nice compliment to the city's other physical memorials to its favorite sons, and city leaders thought it might help to ease some of the city's still-lingering tensions over the controversial war.For a few months, the memorial had exactly the intended effect. But that changed quickly when a "flamer," as authors of anonymous critical messages are known in the Internet world, began to infiltrate the memorial with notes that were critical of the deceased soldiers. Messages accusing the soldiers of murdering innocent Vietnamese children became more and more common and, thus, more and more disturbing for family and friends. So organizers eventually dropped the memorial all together.

Other memorials on the web suffered similar fates. In Montoursville, Pennsylvania, much was made of an effort in 1995 to build a memorial on the web for the 16 students at Montoursville High School who died when the doomed TWA Flight 800 exploded near New York. That memorial was quickly overtaken by heartless pranksters and it, too, was relatively short lived.

In both of the above cases, planners eventually decided that memorials on the web are no substitute for the traditional, physical memorials sculpted of metal or stone and permanently fixed to some symbolic location. It is true that memorials on the web have advantages: a convenience of participation and a diversity of ideas are just two. But, as one commentator noted in a nationally known blog, memorials on the web also offer this same ease and convenience to those who would destroy or deface a traditional memorial as well. Only, in the case of the web, the vandals handiwork is much more noticeable.

This problem of keeping the anti-memorial spirit at bay for memorials on the web has continued to plague this type of memorial into current times. It is true that on-line security systems have made great strides in keeping pranksters and mean-spirited souls away from memorial sites, but, alas, the vandals have also made strides, too. So the battle continues. And, for sites such as memorials on the web, the emotional consequences of even a single breach are often just too much to risk.

To be sure, there are a number of great memorials on the web currently operating that have been in service for years. But these all seem to have one factor in common: they resist the web’s ever present temptation to allow uncensored, freely solicited comment, and they are all tightly edited and maintained by one person or a small group of friends and family.

So, the lesson to be learned is that, as the early innovators of memorials on the web seem to have suspected, the Internet is a great tool for memorializing a friend or loved one. But it does have its limits, and tight control of each memorial is, practically, a requirement.