Mar 31st, 2006 by Jesse Moore
Every once in awhile I come across a site that I find interesting, but my mere interest in the site leads me down a train of thought that makes me ponder why it’s interesting to me, and what that says about me.
Case in point: unless you live under a rock (or any rural community), you’ve probably heard of MySpace.com. MySpace is essentially a free webhost with a great business model: allow people to have their own webpage, complete with bio, photo, likes and dislikes, blog, etc - for free. In exchange, the traffic driven by the millions of personal pages turns into revenue for the webhost in the form of advertising.
It sounds innocuous enough, but free access has its price. In the universal sense, parents have the greatest concern. MySpace is most popular among teenagers and young adults. Friends of mine (parents) have found their child’s site hosted on MySpace and were able to learn more about their kid’s lives than they had ever hoped to know. Even well-behaved kids can fall victim to cyber-stalkers, and the information provided on almost any MySpace site (age, favorite places to hang out, school they attend, even class schedules) can be read by any number of people with less than noble intentions (one such story HERE).
Another phenomenom that’s developing is a form of internet tabloid journalism, where people thrust into the spotlight can see their fifteen minutes of fame extended by a rush of visits to the profiles on MySpace. Remember the story of the boy who killed his girlfriend’s parents (I think in Pennsylvania), and then they ran off together? Both of them had pages on MySpace, and it wasn’t long before the “internet media,” i.e. weblogs, had found the pages and shared them with the world, depicting them as normal people who liked the Black Eyed Peas and “Braveheart” (as an example. Both of these pages have since been taken down my MySpace.com).
I say all of this to explain a site that I found recently. The domain name alone gives you a little hint at it’s morbidity: MyDeathSpace.com. The site links readers to the pages of the recently deceased and recently infamous on MySpace.com. For example, the Seattle mass murder that left six people dead - four of them had pages on MySpace - all four are memorialized on MyDeathSpace.com. I clicked on the bios, and it made me sad on a lot of levels that I didn’t really expect. Sad because of the way that they died, sad because of the way that they lived, sad that they didn’t have another chance to step out of the darkness.
I haven’t posted in awhile, and perhaps necessity was the birth mother of this post. I don’t encourage you to explore beyond the links above to the profiles of those that are featured on the site - just say a prayer for their families, and maybe remember them the next time you feel encouraged to talk to someone about God. Then do it - you might be their last chance.
