The unholy union of online funerals and location-based social networking

Twas a lovely Friday afternoon, meeting some friends for a cheap lunch of Cuban sandwiches at the famed El Margon restaurant in the equally  infamous Midtown.

As is our habit, my friends and I started talking about interesting events that had transpired between the 12 hours we last saw each other and my contribution was the story of how I met a fellow Filipino at the graduate lounge who introduced herself to me because she had overheard me trying to define the word “kinikilig“. I was describing the young lady, how she was in the second year of her master’s degree and that she was in the NYU ITP program and that:

Me: Oh oh! She’s doing her thesis on online funerals, e-funerals! Have you heard of this?

Friend: What are those?

Me: Oh my god it’s crazy…

And so I went on to describe what I had read in the New York Times just days, previously: “Private Funerals Now Streaming Online“. Essentially, an e-funeral (I don’t know if this is what it’s actually called but I am following 21st century digital convention with this neologism) is a live stream or webcast of someone’s funeral, for those who are far away or unable to attend the funeral of a loved one for various reasons. The article argues that it is a useful development in this age of rapid mobility, a way for friends and family to grieve and digitally “be there” even if they are thousands of miles away. The article also mentions the negative reaction to this, how it devalues what a funeral means, among other things, a position shared by most of my interlocutors. And I paraphrase:

Friend 1: A funeral is one of the most personal events that could ever happen to a person, you should make the effort to be there and if you can’t, then that speaks of your relationship to that person.

Friend 2: I guarantee you most of those people will click on the link then step away from their computers.

Friend 3: That’s just bizarre! It’s making a spectacle of something very private.

… and there were many more.

I largely agreed with these points. I had first heard about e-funerals in the Philippines (a translation would be e-libing or e-burol for live streaming of the wake, which I feel is the next stage of this innovation) and laughed at the absurdity of it. And in keeping with the unavoidable tendency to blow things up into comic proportions…

Me: Yeah! It’s like, people are just ‘checking in’ on the funeral like its FourSquare or something. Oh hey look, I’m “here”! What’s next, “I’ve been here so many times I’m the mayor of your funeral?”