Respectance.com

(Statesman.com) My parents’ generation grieved in graveyards. People my age mourn online. Less than 24 hours after the Virginia Tech shootings, as people used the “submit a death” link to send more victim names to my Web site, MyDeathSpace.com, our server crashed. We had just updated to a host that was supposed to be able to handle a much larger daily traffic load, but even that wasn’t capable of containing the surge, which at one point hit 50,000 visitors.
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(Washington Post) Jesse Carter and his friends have spent the past week wondering what that means for them, for the vast majority of 26,000 students at Virginia Tech who never knew any of the 32 victims, who didn’t witness any of last Monday’s horror, who didn’t survive the worst massacre in modern U.S. history so much as avoid it. “Where do you place yourself?” wonders Jesse, a 21-year-old senior from Lynchburg. Where do they belong in this collective grief, they want to know, how should they be, what should they feel?
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(DailyReel) While clips of Seung-Hui Cho’s self-made video testimony continue to dominate YouTube, user-generated tribute videos offer a positive counter to this disturbing footage. The tribute video is a popular drama amongst the YouTube crowd, who use it to memorialize everyone from 9/11 victims to Anna Nicole Smith. The format is simple — cut together copyrighted footage of the tragedy to a soundtrack of copyrighted music.
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The social habits of the ‘iGen’ are changing the way we interact globally in a dramatic fashion, including how we grieve. Following the Virginia Tech tragedy this week, people began creating online tributes to the innocent lives lost. Myspace, YouTube and Facebook have thousands of postings dedicated to the victims. The Facebook tribute has over 360,000 members and there are thousands of YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views.

It appears that going online to share memories is becoming a new tradition. Here is some recent press covering this phenomenon:
• Social Media, Technology and Tragedy: On YouTube, Facebook, MySpace Today We Are All Hokies
• VTech Victim Memorials on Facebook
• A virtual hand of sympathy
• Virginia Tech Shootings: Role of Social Media & Search in Journalism
• Sharing grief, digitally

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I have been thinking all week about what happened at Virginia Tech. It is a tragic story, and my anger over what happened clouded my perspective on what to write. Then I watched a program on PBS last night called Crossroads. Two entirely unrelated news items and yet it became clear to me what needed to be considered.
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