{"id":1438,"date":"2010-01-27T01:09:17","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T16:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2010-01-27\/1438"},"modified":"2010-01-27T01:09:17","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T16:09:17","slug":"on-the-permanence-of-ones-online-and-offline-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2010-01-27\/1438","title":{"rendered":"On the Permanence of One’s Online (and Offline) Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Some people subscribe to my blog posts (and\/or the comments left on\nposts) by email, which means that my system sends them a message<\/span> from time\nto time. This is all done automatically, so I normally<\/span> never see these\nmessages, but the other day I received<\/span> a reply<\/span> to one, from a guy<\/span> whose\nname I recognized<\/span> from the comments he'd left on my blog over time, and\nfrom some private email exchanges we'd had about Lightroom.<\/p>\n\n

This particular guy lives in Bangkok, but is British, so I didn't<\/span> expect\nthe bordering-on-gibberish broken English of the short message in his\nreply. After looking at it for a few<\/span> moments, it dawned on me what the\nwriter was trying to say. Translating in full, it said “I'm his wife; sorry\nto tell you he died.” <\/p>\n\n

I went to his blog, which normally has two or three new posts a day,<\/span> and\nfound it showing nothing new for the last two weeks. The most recent<\/span> post\n(the last<\/i> post), about some photographic technology, had accumulated\na few<\/span> comments from regular readers along the lines of “dude, where have\nyou been?”<\/p>\n\n

I went to his Flickr site; the last photo was uploaded on the same day\nas his last post, of a rotary<\/span>-dial phone, with a “don't see these around\nmuch any more” caption.<\/p>\n\n

I didn't know the guy.... I didn't know how old he was, what he looked\nlike, or even that he had a wife,<\/span> but two things were apparent from the\nmessage I'd received: he was dead, and he had a Thai<\/span> wife whose English was\nnot good. For some reason<\/span> that latter part had a big<\/span> impact on me. I could<\/span> envision a grieving<\/span> wife trying to come to terms with things, finding his\nemail account and seeing all these long English-language messages from the same address (my\nblog's automated system, though I'm sure she didn't know what it was), and\nwanting to at least try to let the sender know that he'd passed. She wanted<\/span> to get the word out to his friends, but didn't have the linguistic or\ntechnical ability to do so.<\/p>\n\n

His blog sitting there in the state he left it seemed somehow wrong,\nsomehow unfitting. If his online<\/span> friends didn't know of his passing, those\nin a position<\/span> to help his wife wouldn't be able to. Like I said,<\/span> my\nimagination of the situation had a big<\/span> impact on me, and I wanted<\/span> to try to\ndo something. <\/p>\n\n

To try to get the word out, I first<\/span> added a comment<\/span> on his last blog\npost telling what I'd heard from his wife, but it turns out that comments\nwere moderated, so no one would see the comment until he manually approved\nit, something that seemed unlikely at this point. There were comments\nasking “where are you?”, so I figure<\/span> for me to see them they must have been\nfrom friends he trusted enough to white-list in his moderation system, so\nthat their messages would bypass the moderation queue and appear\nimmediately. So I followed<\/span> the link trail, and was eventually able to\ncontact someone who knew him in Bangkok. \"He didn't show up for lunch\nand I was<\/span> getting worried, but I only<\/span> have his email, so couldn't call him\nto ask what was up<\/i>.\" Now he knew.<\/p>\n\n

I also was able to contact a blog friend in North America who had also\nbeen getting worried. He was able<\/span> to then follow his own contacts and\nfinally confirmed that indeed the man had died. I have no<\/span> idea about the\ncircumstances, other than “unexpected”, which one could gather from the\nfull-steam-ahead online presence he had that suddenly, unceremoniously,\nstopped. I suppose<\/span> it was a car<\/span> accident or heart attack, but I don't<\/span>\nknow.... in any case, the result remains the same.<\/p>\n\n

I'd felt compelled to do something, and however little, I had,<\/span> which\nthen allowed my thoughts to wander. It's a vastly<\/span> different world now than\nfor the first umpteen thousand years of human existence, where one's\npresence can be extended all around the world with unprecedented ease (just\nstart a blog,<\/span> or upload some photos), garnering a friendship<\/span> of global\nproportions, yet, still, have all those links be of the most tenuous,\nfragile nature that can completely miss an event as significant as\ndeath.<\/p>\n\n

I wondered what will happen to his blog, to his online photos? Without\nhelp from an English speaker, I suspect<\/span> his wife won't do anything (but\neven if she could, what would she want to do?). Will his Flickr site stay\nthere until.... forever? Or will Yahoo<\/span> eventually decide that since no one\nhas logged in for X years, delete it? Will his blog stay there until a disk<\/span>\nwears out, or will someone come in and dismantle it? Will someone put up a\npost<\/span>-mortem post telling the world that the author died?<\/p>\n\n

I wondered about all this without much direction, but with a profound<\/span>\nsense of sadness related to, I guess,<\/span> the disconnect between our offline\npresence (our life) and our online presence, and how when one is turned off\nat our death, the other is left.... hanging.<\/p>\n\n

I wondered what post will be at the top of my blog when I die.<\/span> I doubt<\/span> it'll be something like “Heading across the street to get the mail; hope\nI don't<\/span> get hit by a bus!<\/span><\/i>” or “Doctor says prognosis is not\ngood<\/i>.” Given the demographics of my posts, it'll probably be something\nmundane and boring, like “Hey Look, a Pretty<\/span> Flower!<\/i>”<\/p>\n\n

So when my posting frequency slows due to a slight<\/span> case of death, how\nlong before people notice? Will they notice? In my case<\/span>, my wife can speak\nEnglish very well, and my technologically-unchallenged brother in America\ncould figure out how to put a note<\/span> on my blog informing of my untimely\ndemise, but what about if Fumie and I died<\/span> in the same accident... how\nwould word ever even get to my family in America?<\/p>\n\n

I suppose I shouldn't worry about this stuff.... heck, it won't matter\nto me because I'll be dead<\/i>.... but thinking about it still makes me\na bit<\/span> melancholy. Of course, I've thought about death plenty before, as\nanyone does, and the amazing abruptness of “we know neither the\ntime nor the place<\/i>” remains as impactful as ever, but for some\nreason this new angle seems to make things a bit<\/span> different... just a touch<\/span>\nmore real.<\/p>\n\n

I prayed for him and his wife. It felt a<\/span> bit odd, since I don't<\/span> even\nknow who they are, but I trust<\/span> that God does.<\/p>\n\n

For the record, should I die unexpectedly any time soon, I'd hope my<\/span>\nblog could remain available, for Anthony to read when he gets old\nenough.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some people subscribe to my blog posts (and\/or the comments left on posts) by email, which means that my system sends them a message from time to time. This is all done automatically, so I normally never see these messages, but the other day I received a reply to one, from a guy whose name I recognized from the comments he'd left on my blog over time, and from some private email exchanges we'd had about Lightroom.<\/p>

This particular guy lives in Bangkok, but is British, so I didn't expect the bordering-on-gibberish broken English of the short message in his [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}