The social role of 'In Memoriam' notices

Today I attended a talk by Stephanie O'Donohoe (Edinburgh) at the MCCi study group entitled:

Consuming, communing and coming to terms with loss:
the social role of In Memoriam notices

This is obviously very different to the information and communication stuff that I usually report on, but I have a background in Psychology and a deep interest in Philosophy as a whole. Stephanie had gathered some really great interviews with people who report anniversaries of family deaths in an Irish newspaper. This work really showed how the memory of the individuals involved were kept alive by revisiting their past in a particular form and manner. The notices paralleled a kind of singles ads column, in the sense that, the author had a limited number of words in which to express a wide array of sentiment. In Stephanie's findings, this typically meant that people used powerful phrases from the bible to express the loss of a loved one. Until later in the talk, there were many references that I was used to hearing in CMC (e.g. public/private, Anderson's Imagined Community and even the fact that In Memoriam notices had been simplified to 'IM'). This made me raise the similarities of another SNS that I commented on in the form of Mydeath space. A neat comparison here is that Stephanie has a very tight-knit community of people who were writing notices for loved ones that many of the newspaper recipients would have known. Mydeath space, however, is a much more global enterprise. I think this is a neat example of how our technological ability to do things like memory is evolving. More and more our everyday lives our becoming intrinsically in twinned with the connections growing SNSs have to offer. I wonder how the small community that typically reports deaths in a certain way would react to someone posting a death to somewhere like Myspace?

I understand memory in constant flux. For me (and many others) memory is not something that is stored in the brain. Instead, it is mediated through our close social environment by way of objects, people and experiences and this allows us to draw upon a vast myriad of experiences to invoke action in a particular setting. In this way technology allows us to constantly store up the past in emails and SNS and as technology develops so does our ability to commemorate past experiences. I am keen to think about old notions of a person or being and how that relates to the current technological environment.