a.k.a. V.J.

Earlier today, I was on Facebook and glanced at the list of “contacts” down the right-hand side of the screen. This list is a very small subset of my Facebook friends. I’m not sure what causes a friend to be displayed there, but there is an uncomfortable fact about my list: two of the people on it are deceased. One of them has been gone for several years.

At this point, some readers may be wondering why I keep people as contacts if I know that they are dead. There is a reason for that, although an arguably ridiculous one. Years ago, I unfriended the accounts of some deceased contacts and it felt weird…bordering on callous. It was sort of like the recent Apple iPhone commercials where people feel guilty about deleting photos of pets and loved ones from their phones. So, after that experience, as contacts passed on, I just left them as connections. It’s not as if I ever expected them to turn up after the fact like so many social-media apparitions.

This experience has led me to wonder how many deceased contacts I have across all of my social media platforms. It might potentially be a large number on an app like LinkedIn where I have over 500 contacts, the vast majority of whom I haven’t seen or heard from in years and probably would never find out if they passed away. It’s all very morbid, but it does beg some philosophical questions about the nature of online “friendships” and the degree to which a person’s social media accounts are extensions of their being. (I’d really hate to think about my Facebook account being a component of my immortal soul, but it seems like only a matter of time before Mark Zuckerberg starts unironically floating that idea out in public.)

My hope is to live long enough to see a day when social media is obsolete, and the accounts have all been shuttered. That way, I would never show up as a digital specter on somebody’s device screen. Failing that, my Plan B is to change all of my profile pictures to an image of me dressed as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. At least then, if I do show up on social media after death, a few of my contacts might have the presence of mind to check for a PM instructing them to avenge me.