Living and dying on Facebook
IN MID-DECEMBER OF 2013, logging into my Facebook account at the end of what had been a spirit-exhausting day, I was shocked—there is no word in any of the languages I speak which can appropriately convey what I went through for the first few minutes after the discovery—to find the news of a Facebook friend’s sudden demise. I hadn’t met him in a conference or cafe or classroom, but Facebook had nurtured this relationship beyond it, spilling over from the Timeline to telephone conversations that had allowed much wit and humour and undoubtedly affection from both sides. Older in years by a little more than a decade, he had gently metamorphosed into the older brother I never had. He had a medical history of heart attacks and other ailments, all of which made their presence felt in our conversations about the future and also the present.
Looking at his Facebook Timeline for a week, from the day of his passing on to the announcement of details about his shraddh ceremony in a temple in Delhi’s C. R. Park, I am amazed by the number of messages. What makes the living believe that the dead will visit their Facebook page? I have to confess that I am one of those writers on the wall. Two days after the news reached me, after reading every single message on his wall, I sat down to tell him what I would tell someone who had left without bothering to inform me. On Facebook, where every kind of behaviour is documented with a self-imposed military detailing, right from what one is reading to what one is feeling, eating, drinking, so much so that one should not be surprised if Zuckerberg’s blue army soon comes up with a ‘Sleeping with ...’ option like it did with feeling-readingwriting- drinking-watching, it was the ultimate letdown. My friend would often post updates of his culinary adventures from his favourite restaurants in Delhi, he would tell us which of his favourite RD Burman songs he had in his earphones, he would also post photos from his holidays, and yet this time, he hadn’t bothered to inform us at all.
It was this outrage at the lack of intimation that I detected among all the messages on the wall: ‘I am shocked that he left like this ...’; ‘How could he go like this?’; ‘I cannot believe ... that you are dead’. I am certain that any kind of death, no matter at what age it came to the dead person, comes as a shock. It is an absence in the chair, a dent in the pillow that takes years to get used to. I wrote one such message myself, though not on his Facebook wall: look at his audacity, I meant to say to my dead friend’s favourite cousin, he leaving us like this, without a farewell.
Two things related to the incident have surprised me more than my friend’s sudden death. These have to do with the Facebook behaviour of his friends, people like us. What made otherwise sensible and rational people write messages on the Facebook wall of a dead man?
And second, if we really thought that Facebook was the new age planchette, why did we not write private messages to him in his inbox?
Twenty first century human life— with its ‘meaning-itis’ epidemic, where all we do and not do must hold some meaning—when lived on Facebook, often becomes a site where one presses the Escape button from Reason, from the taut borders of rationality and what constitutes sanity. Chances are that most of the writers of messages to the dead man do not believe in ghosts. Many of them, I found out from their Facebook profile information, do not believe in gods either. My friend was a journalist among several other things—his friends, those writing those messages, were also mostly journalists, writers, academics, people who would otherwise make snide remarks about those communicating with the dead.
What is so special about Facebook that it makes it seem like a medium between the living and the dead then? I do not know. That would be the job of a social historian or a researcher of crowd behaviour in the virtual space. I can only report what followed his death. In the evening of the day he died, I received a Facebook friend request from a woman. I had heard about her from my friend—they had been close friends, their friendship recent, once again spilling over from Facebook to the world outside it. From time to time, my friend would tell me about his deep affection for this woman. I came to know details about her life from him, so that I felt like I knew her—as if she was a character in a film that I’d watched at some point in my life, a film whose ending I could not remember no matter how hard I tried. I was aware of the misunderstandings their innocent friendship had caused my friend’s family. I had stood on the fence, for once avoiding being judgmental, all the while watching my friend do the march past.
I ‘accepted’ the woman’s friend request in no time at all. It was for my friend—that was how he would have liked it. The woman’s private message to me in my inbox was ruthlessly honest: she had no interest in me, she only wanted to communicate with “anyone who knew” the dead man. She was in a strange vacuum—she did not know a single person outside Facebook who actually “knew” our “mutual” friend, and having heard about me from him, she had sought me out as a companion in this common hour of grief and abandonment.
It is a psycho-social situation many of us face because of the strangely divided lives we lead. Making friends with strangers whose partners and families are not necessarily our friends, our online lives moving furiously inside our heads while our legs move like an ant’s, unable to resolve the public-private dichotomy in any happy measure, we are no longer sure of the living-dying mechanism. The question is not so much whether and how one actually dies, on Facebook and outside it, but the gross injustice of it all, our inability to post a status update while dying. Perhaps only that would bring closure? Until then, as I wait for more messages to appear on my friend’s wall, I wonder what Facebook would think of that expression from William Wordsworth, ‘a presence that disturbs me’.