The deadman switch

HEN I first started writing this blog in 2006, mass social media platforms like Facebook hadn't taken off yet, so it was fairly common for people to read each other's blogs and make comments directly on the site. I had a few regulars who would come by, read the latest post and make a few comments. In turn I would often follow links back to their blogs, read what they were up to and make comments as well. (This was how I got to know Gretel, for instance.) As Facebook and other social media sites took off, however, and as blog-supporting software like RSS no longer received updates, the number of regular commenters on most blogs slowly dropped off. It's now quite rare for me to get a comment on any blog post, old or new.

Social media is now old enough that we're starting to think about the greater consequences of what we say and do online. We think about the future more than we did back when the medium was still a novelty. And one of the things we rarely thought about in the early days was mortality.

Back in the day I had a regular poster on my blog, an artist who lived in middle America, and in return I'd often visit and read her blogs and make comments on her posts. A while back, I realized I hadn't heard from her in ages. So I popped over to her blogs and noticed it had been multiple years since her last update.

Now, it's quite possible that she just fell out of love with blogging. That happens. Or it's possible that she was going through a dry spell. (My last entry on this blog was back in May, for instance.) But I also knew that this particular blogger was past retirement age when we first started exchanging pleasantries online. I'd never met her in person; she lived thousands of miles away from me, albeit in the same country. Blogging was my only connection to her. So it's also quite possible that she stopped posting because she passed away. And other than searching for her name in online obituaries, I have no way of determining what really happened to her.

I'm not much of a musician, but I know how important it is for any musical piece to have a coda. As human beings, we crave definitive endings -- what is sometimes cloyingly called "closure." And I've been thinking about how human mortality fits into online writing. When you know you are sick, for instance, and that your illness is likely to end you, you have the time to think about how to craft an ending and how to say goodbye to anyone who might be reading. But there are many other people for whom death comes swiftly and without warning, as it did for both my parents. Unless you have some real-world connection to such people, there might be no online indication about what happened to them. They just seem to vanish.

So although I have no intention of kicking off any time soon, I now have the literary equivalent of a deadman switch on this blog. It's scheduled to post automatically at a set date many years in the future, assuming Blogspot is still around, to let potential readers know that if they're reading the post, it means I've died. I'll update it every now and then to make sure the particulars are as accurate as I can make them. I'll push the publishing date into the future as necessary. And I'll let CM know it's there so that, assuming he survives me, he can publish it immediately upon my demise if he chooses.

I know this might seem a touch morbid, but the way I see it, it's a good idea to be prepared for eventualities. And whether or not we want to face it, every one of us will die eventually. But this way, no matter what the circumstances of my death may be, my little story online will have the ending I choose for it.