Over the weekend, a Facebook friend – who’d been back and forth to Boston from his new home in LA – reported that his mother had passed away. This gave me great pause – for a few reasons.
As some of you know, my own mother has been unwell the last many months, so the story resonated there first. Secondly, it hit me that this young man had lost his seemingly young mother. Lastly, it occurred to me that this was the new form of public obituary. Facebook is the new obituary page. Now that is a change. Initially, it struck me as odd that Facebook (or the internet as a whole) could serve this purpose. The more I considered, however, the more I realized that this is the further democratization of the world. This young man could control his own information and what he wanted the world to know about him, his family and whatever else. Some argue that this is information overload, but they probably just don’t have as much to share. This is what people refer to when they talk about a more open society…it’s only going to get more open.