Echoes

​Before th​​e Internet, when people died, there were very few opportunities to explore a person's life after they were gone.  Home movies let you see glimpses of their life, a diary if they kept one was a source of their thoughts.  Save for these few relics however you were left very much in the dark.  Then the Internet came along.  Or to be more precise it was the advent of social media that spurred on the act of documenting our lives in digital form.

I was scrolling through twitter and happened upon a profile of someone I know to be dead and when I clicked on it something hit me.  There was no indication at all that they were gone from their profile.  They hadn't tweeted in a while but that doesn't usually make people think someone is dead, they would probably just think they left twitter or grew bored of it.  None of their tweets gave any indication of what happened, although again it's not often that people know in advance when or where they will die, and with passwords etc being what they are - known only to you - that makes it very hard for someone else to leave a tweet to let people know.

It struck me that what I was looking at, in the form of the twitter profile of a dead man, is an echo.  Everything he tweeted, there for others to read including myself, upon viewing is an echo of what he said and what he did, to be heard again and seen again each time you view it.  It also struck me that his tweets give no sign of what was to come, which isn't surprising because no-one could have predicted what would happen, and if they could they likely would have prevented it.  No, what struck me was the oblivious nature of it, right up until the moment it happened they lived their life with no idea what was coming.

Reading through their tweets, seeing their videos, and everything they shared from other sites, I realized that we don't share that much about our actual lives.  Even when we post an endless stream of content it's hard to find anything specific about our actual lives when you strip everything away and leave only that of substance.  I know a lot has been said about data harvesting and data mining, and the profiles advertising companies create around us but really all that can tell you is a set of characteristics the person is likely to identify with, and their possible interests.  It doesn't tell you anything about the actual person behind it all.

You'll never ask a question they weren't already asked and get an answer.  You'll only find the information they chose to share, unless you get to know the people that actually knew them.  That poses another problem, the depth of connections on social media are often quite shallow and superficial.  We can have thousands of friends or followers on these platforms, but how many of those people actually know us, rather than knowing of us?  There is a distinction to be made there, knowing someone exists, and actually knowing that person, are two very different things.  How much do you actually know about the people you interact with?