The story of Mac Tonnies and his death is certainly tragic but the experience and what has been felt and understood by those he left upon this mortal plane lends itself to something greater. His constant blogging had developed a tight knit community that were only rendered stronger together in his absence. The article addresses the mass of 250 comments that were left upon the blog by members of the direct community that considered Tonnies a close friend.<\/p>\n
It is especially interesting in that these same members are grieving together over a fallen friend in the same manner that anyone would mourn a next door neighbor and yet many of them had never met the man in person. Grieving parties such as Plattner and Sobin take their own time to propagate Tonnies’ image and maintain aspects of his digital personality post death in remembrance of their loss in the same way that family members may maintain a deceased’s home. It is really intriguing in that their grief and maintenance takes place in the cyberspace because that is where their relationship existed. They shared digital relationships that were only formed through the power of technology and thus it is only fitting that their grief also be formed in that same space.<\/p>\n
Viewing digitized grief and the shared experience of community mourning as emulated forms of physical grief of traditional communities causes one to question the idea of cyberspace and its purpose. It is often viewed that one ought to lay off technology and engage with the “real world”. While I totally understand the need to experience face to face interaction and human connection, that is doing a disservice to the power of social media and the relationships formed upon numerous platforms. Tonnies’ story is a perfect example of this characterization as it is clear the raw power and emotion behind these digitized relationships in the way that the community of blog followers mourn his death. The grief that is both represented as well as empowered by technology appear to exemplify the powerful connections formed with technology and it seems wrong to denigrate these relationships as being “not real” simply because individuals have never met in the physical world. In today’s world cyberspace is just as real as the physical spaces we inhabit and thus the feelings and emotions attached to it are authentic as well. No better case of the true feelings empowered by technology can be seen than Mac Tonnies and the death of his physical self and the impact it had upon his digital self and its relationships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The story of Mac Tonnies and his death is certainly tragic but the experience and what has been felt and understood by those he left upon this mortal plane lends itself to something greater. His constant blogging had developed a tight knit community that were only rendered stronger together in his absence. The article addresses …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-c"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-dR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":860,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions\/860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}