participatory spaces and mourning

Since I've been investigating my thesis topic on memorialization and port-mortem data storage and all things digital death-ness, I've wondered how virtual spaces designed to be participatory deal with mourning. In general, most of these spaces lock users out of participation (ie. Second Life memorials to the Virginia Tech shootings, 9/11; static html memorials, post-mortem MySpace/Facebook pages - all of which are usually maintained by one person or by a select group), but an interesting counter-example is the funeral in World of Warcraft that took place a little over a year ago. The funeral was meant for the avatar of person who died IRL, and was raided by a rival guild:

Skip to about 5 minutes for the raid


My question here is how can mourning, a very private, solemn and personal experience be shared, created and carried out in spaces that are for the most part out of the control of users? At the same time, how can we experience death - particularly mass-death or high profile deaths, which often effect large groups of people - in spaces which are built upon a participatory culture without bastardizing or harming that experience?

To be honest, I'm having trouble relating this to the readings we've done so far in class, but there are a few points of correlation I've been interested in exploiting:

• Zizek's "Virtual Reality to Virtualization of Reality" explores the role of the hacker in the computer universe and the goal of breaking consistency. I really see the rival guild in this case trying to maintain consistency, as WOW was really a space created for for fighting, not a space for communal meeting. However, what has evolved between its users are deep relationships and bonds. It appears from this that hacking in virtual spaces means to impose an IRL meantality on worlds that are not IRL. I can't say that this is necessarily successful, so I don't know what that might say for the success of memorials in these spaces. There's definitely a new type of memorial rules or concepts that needs to evolve for mourning in these spaces.


• I've always walked away with Haraway's concept of the cyborg as an irreverent, non-genetic (in the sense of not arising from the same origin), blurred being. The standards are different for all cyborg, and they must always be evolving. I don't think the cyborg mourns, perhaps because as each material body dies and decomposes, a closer coupling with the natural world exists, erasing boundaries between culture and nature. However, what happens when a virtual body "dies?" What is the decomposition there, and what boundary might it erase?


• Virilio's "Cyberspace Alarm!" brings up a good point about democracy being threatened by the "caricature of gloval society being hatched for us by big multimational corporations throwing themselves at a breakneck pace on the information superhighways." How can we create methods of mourning in virtual spaces when these spaces are controlled by the few, rather than by the many. For example, while Second Life allows you to experience "an online digital world imagined and created by its residents" Linden Labs (SL's company) is still limiting in what residents can do. Self propogating objects are banned, guns are disallowed, under 18 humans not allowed in the regular space of Second Life! How can a democratic method of creating memorials and public mourning be created in such a limited space? Why can't a user under 18 visit the VT Shooting memorial in regular SL?