《英语流行话题阅读:语境识词4500》90 Virtual Grave

　　Unit 90

Virtual Grave

People are mortal. The bodies in which we live our real existence simply have a restricted life span. Ultimately we all die of old age, or sooner of an illness or accident. When one person's life ends irreversibly, it is the beginning of a period of deep mourning for the survivors 1, in which they try to deal with the loss of their loved one, friend, parent or child. The relatives mourn over the definitive 2 departure of their loved one. And mostly they find this extremely difficult. More and more people explicitly 3 look for a personal way to cope with mourning. Nowadays our North-European civilization permits us to express the feeling of dismay, of loss, of sorrow.

The use of the Internet penetrates 4 all aspects of our social life. This does not only change the way in which we work, learn and play with one another "from a distance", but also the way in which we have contact in intimate and ultimate events such as love and death. How does the use of the Internet change our funeral rites 5 and rituals and how does it affect our ways of coping with death? The Internet can be used in three ways: to involve all survivors in the organization of the funeral ceremony: virtual funeral services; to honor the deceased in a respectful manner: virtual graves; to cope with the loss together with fellow-sufferers: virtual mourning groups.

Modern people live two lives. One in the real, physical world and the other in the virtual world created by the Internet. People who are online for their work or for fun increasingly wonder what it means to die online. Survivors feel the urge to make death public. This is usually done by way of an obituary 6 in a newspaper, the compilation 7 of a memorial book, and by erecting 9 a tombstone. While a memorial site in the real physical world can be very beautiful, but it can only be a one place at the same time. An online memorial site can be visited by anyone with a computer and Internet connection. The Internet, as an ideal place to announce the loss of someone we cherish and to erect 8 a permanent memorial sign, offers some additional possibilities and alternatives.

At the death of a beloved many people fantasize that the deceased finds a place somewhere on a little cloud, watching the survivors. Via the Internet this fantasy can be more or less acted out. With a personal memorial page, the deceased actually floats through space, even if it is cyberspace 10: "Lisa, darling, beautiful woman. Dead for a year now. Now everybody can look t you, read about, listen to you. Forever, on your own little cloud."

Coping with death reveals the most crucial social processes and cultural values of a society. Virtual memorial places go beyond the borders of "modern" societies in which death is separated from daily life banishing 11 the dead to institutional or religious enclaves, usually strongly determined 12 by outdated 13 rituals. In the future the virtual graveyards 14 and memorial sites will have a more prominent position as cultural institutions that dramatically symbolize 15 the values and norms as to what a society is or ought to be, and who her members are and what they would like to be.