The dark side of MySpace

Perhaps you use MySpace regularly to keep up with friends, family or even meet new people. Say one of them were to die.

It's not an alien concept, over 150,000 pop their clogs every day. Statistics suggest that MySpace users total around 65 million, and that the site is the fifth most popular English-language website online. Quite a title to hold.

Well to satisfy your morbid curiosity or genuine concern, MyDeathSpace.com has been established in order to keep an online tally of deceased MySpace users. Not only does each entry link back to the profile pages, but news articles and testimonies are used as evidence.

Take the poignant suicide of a young, 16-year-old girl who lived in Churchville, New York state. This user chose to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train.

Adorning the front page of her profile are messages both paying hommage to her death and profane statements that would surely shock the average mourner. A closer look reveals a frightful final blog entry and an ongoing struggle amongst the comments for blame.

But of course, not all MyDeathSpace entries are suicide. There are tear-jerking car accidents, the rather sobering method of alcohol poisoning and even a member of the US army who was killed in action in Iraq.

As macabre as it seems the internet should welcome this site designed to perform a simple service. It doesn't glorify death, or taint the seriousness of the sitation with humour. It is simply a compendium of online memorials.

So sit back as the undeniably curious human brain takes you on a virtual-graveyard tour amongst heroin overdoses, police shootings and medical mishaps.

When a system like MySpace escalates to the size it already has, there are undoubtedly going to be off-shoots such as this and now we face the question - what next for the MySpace phenomenon?

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