I guess that makes you a ghost writer, albeit of email.......Alex Kuskis ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barry Wellman" <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> To: "aoir list" <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 3:15 PM Subject: [Air-l] deceased on the ether

I may have said this before, hence will be brief.

Another e-role re the deceased:

I have been the Email Executor of the late great sf author, Judy Merril. Sacrilege to do an auto-respond, so I used her account (fortunately, I had the password) to respond to all messages to her personally for several months. My last act of friendship and homage to a great person.

Barry _____________________________________________________________________

Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162

You're invited to visit -- and contribute to -- my new fun website "Updating Cybertimes: It's Time to Bring Our Culture into Cyberspace" http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________

I had a strange experience involving the deceased online. I'm not sure if there's anything to learn from the story but I'll tell it anyway. The context is Flickr, the photo sharing service. It happened because my son started tagging a coulpe of photos of myself with my full name. When I then clicked on the public tag for "andyroberts" up popped lots of photos of another person with exactly the same name as me, and also a guitar player. I'm quite used to that, since there are plenty of us with this not at all uncommon combination of names in the world. But then I noticed that a lot of people had posted photos of that particular Andy Roberts all in the same period and were leaving comments about him in the past tense. He had died young, and had a lot of friends in the London music scene. His friends had set up a Flickr group and collected photos and stories about him, as a kind of memorial, and even documented the clearing of his flat and sorting out of his CD collection. I felt uncomfortable that I had inadvertently intruded into the private grief of a group of people who were nothing to do with me, and that's still the case really, although logically, I suppose they must have created a public group in order to share their grief and memories, as an enduring public memorial. -- Andy Roberts Blog: http://distributedresearch.net/blog/ Action Research Coffee Shop http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Coffee_Shop