Death comes when life comes to an end, but this certainty seems to be illusory denied on social media and especially on Facebook (fb). People who die in their lifetime remain “active” on the Internet, unless someone shuts down their “wall”. So funny things happen sometimes. But even a living person, who is not on Facebook to talk about himself or his work, sometimes looks “dead” in digital reality. Writer and visual curator Maria Giannou came up with the original idea to post a spartan but deep prose essay on death on Facebook, virtual and real. Her book titled “REEF – Death on Facebook” has just been published by Stereoma.

“Having learned that friends and relatives who have passed away still receive public wishes for a long day on their birthdays from friends who were unaware of their deaths, I felt this strangeness move me. I found myself right at the intersection of happiness and sadness, I saw that there is some kind of treasure of human knowledge that I can touch. As everything that shines on the surface has its opposite, so here, in the case of Facebook, it was the celebration of life that showed me the mourning of death.

– I am amazed many times when the birthdays of dead people appear, and we either see faces as if they are here, or read messages from strangers or even acquaintances who write “happy birthday” with practiced speed.

Social networks are also a duduk, with which we shout out our personality through ads that we consider to be its constituents.

– It is logical that this happens, since dead profiles are active there. At the same time, a huge “amount” of communication and networking deprives all of us, users, of an attentive attitude to people and events. How can you know or remember that one of your 5,000 friends has gone to the Lord and into Cyberspace if you only knew him from a photograph? The ghosts still wear their beautiful birthday clothes, their photos and posts never disappear, so they are deceiving us.

– Removal of loneliness! We invite others to love us (regardless of whether we love them in return). But it also covers a kind of obligation, since our calendar is a digital calendar where such entries are too important to miss. Alongside this is the duduk, with which we scream our identity through the ads we think constitute it. When you announce death publicly and in writing, you are writing a letter to others and to yourself. This letter is very conducive to grief and at the same time there is a memento mori, a reminder of death, which, under your own letters, cries out: “Live! Live while you can!

“He is strong, lively and interchangeable. It is beautiful when it feeds reality, and disgusting when it drains it. This is a kind of self-invention, meaning that it gives many people a second chance to exist. However, it remains life in the mirror. The chain question that your question causes me is how many lives there are lives in social networks. For example, the life of a “traditional” reader can be multiplied with the help of books – he is able to live many parallel lives while reading. On the contrary, the life of a Facebook user is not only not multiplied, but divided! While he sort of expands it (because of the multiplicity of himself), in the end he breaks it into dozens of small pieces – like the heroine of the “fearing Infinity” of one of the RIF epitaphs, which is being transformed. into a big puzzle.

Let’s write to save ourselves…

– Humor should surprise, come from where you least expect it. This is how the shutters open in the dark, the light of laughter falls and we breathe. Baudelaire writes that the ideal comedian needs “incredible poetic lightness”. I’m not claiming to be an absolute comedy, just tongue-in-cheek outbursts and a funny emphasis on weirdness. Yes, people often take our pain very seriously, very godly, and we are not joking. However, it is worth raising the raid from time to time so that the raid does not cover us ahead of time.

“It seems to have happened to me a few years ago, when my beloved relative was going through a dangerous adventure. In the evenings when I would come home and go to Facebook—having recently published a novel—I would find messages and messages from friends saying kind things about my book. This digital joy was a gift I received from the platform. The “RIF” notes the benefits of the social network, it is not “Luddite”, it does not fight against social network technologies, but observes them with critical curiosity. I’m sure in a few years we’ll be looking back at Facebook with nostalgia, as well as the special power (benevolent or malevolent) of posting.

– The big bet is whether digital writing will survive the emergence of the Metaverse (which still hasn’t convinced enough investors). In the Metaverse, which means the metaverse, but in “RIF” I also read as “After the couplet”, the spelling is completely replaced by the image. An image so soothing and calm in fine art would be narcotic and dizzyingly present in an augmented reality universe. So we need to write to protect ourselves from digital images, to keep our minds in order. And if the Lite River takes away our writings, it doesn’t matter. At least some trace of us will be left on the shores of the Internet to remind us that we existed.