Reality, virtual or otherwise: 2

No, I can't just leave it alone.

Ok, so some messed up teenagers threw themselves off a bridge in Glasgow. Ok, fine, I respect their decision. But you know what, the whole virtual memorial thing is a bit creepy.

So one question raised in this Guardian article is whether it's a good thing that grief has moved from the private sphere to the public sphere. (They blame Diana, but I'm sure it happened looooooong before that.)

I question the actual genuineness of the emotion displayed. Can a person really have hundreds or thousands of "friends" as their social networking sites suggest? Even the cyberbullying mentioned earlier has a quote that says "you can have 60 people bullying you on the internet, but in real life there wouldn’t be 60 people beating you up". If people "friend" you for shallow or superficial reasons, or people bully you because they forget you're a human, it stands to reason that few of those internet mourners actually give a crap.

I wonder what the average ratio is, of real to virtual human interactions. What proportion of all those "friends" are really "friends"? What proportion of the people who write on websites such as Gone Too Soon or Missing You are feeling genuine care for the person they memorialise?

A cynic would say that all sadness felt at someone else's death is the rising of the fear of our own death. This doesn't detract from the reality of the fear/sadness that the shallow git is feeling, but it does detract from its validity.