Arrested Pulse

The internet is changing the way people grieve the death of a loved one. I learned this one evening in 2005 when I was “MySpacing” while watching CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight. At one point the program aired photographs of U.S. military personnel who had recently died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I happened to look up when one of the “Fallen Warriors” was being featured. His youth struck me--the soldier was just a kid--and I wondered if he, like so many of his generation, had a MySpace site. So I typed his name in the “Find Friends” field and within seconds was staring him in the face.

His smiling and animated profile picture was very different from the serious military headshot CNN aired. I saw from his profile that he’d last logged in two days earlier. I scrolled down the page to where his MySpace “friends” (people he’d added or accepted as friends who could post comments and whose profile pictures appear as thumbnails on all MySpace users’ profile pages) and saw that already some of them had posted messages to him—yes, to him—lamenting the news of his death. Some were fellow soldiers, others were civilian friends from his hometown who’d just heard the bad news and logged in to say good bye. Reading these comments, and seeing the faces of the people who left them, really touched me. I’d never experienced strangers’ private grief expressed in so public a forum as MySpace.

But what I find to be most touching is how the living continue their relationships with the dead in the social networking community of MySpace. In a very real sense, the deceased individual's death becomes the starting point for a new life story, one that is told--in many ways--from those who continue to communicate with their lost friends online.

The Ongoing Relationship with the Late Clinton Tyler McCormick

I was nothing to Clinton Tyler McCormick. We never met in real life or in MySpace. But I learned so much about him as a person, and as a fallen soldier in the Iraq war, through his MySpace page and the small network of friends who drop by occasionally to post messages there to him.

His MySpace site, which I will link to shortly, is one of hundreds of sites left behind by young soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (three-quarters of those who have died were under thirty) prior to May, 2007, when the U.S. military, citing “recreational traffic impacts,” barred access to MySpace and other social network sites from all Department of Defense computers and ended online networking by all military personnel deployed in overseas operations. But those profiles of MySpace soldiers who died prior to that date have become public outlets for grieving loved ones.

Private McCormick was not one of the fallen soldiers I saw on CNN that night. I went to his profile page after coming across an article about the MySpace sites of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq by Associated Press journalist Kasie Hunt. Featured in it was the profile of McCormick, a twenty-year old enlisted soldier from Jacksonville, Florida, who was killed by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in Baghdad, Iraq, on December 27, 2006—-less than twenty-four hours after he last logged into his MySpace profile.

The article spotlighted what I learned the night I goggled those names while watching CNN News. “In earlier wars, families had only the letters that soldiers sent home; often, bits and pieces were removed by cautious censors,” Hunt reports. “Iraq is the first war of the Internet age, and McCormick is one of many fallen soldiers who have left ghosts of themselves online - unsentimental self-memorials, frozen and uncensored snapshots of the person each wanted to show to the world.”

I learned a lot about Private McCormick by visiting his MySpace site off and on in 2007-8. The profile's design tells us so much about him. He went by the name “Tyler” but he posted another name, “Dixie Boy,” over his profile picture--a term with connotations that may reveal something about how he identified himself. Unlike so many other MySpace sites (including, sadly, my own), Tyler's didn't reek of narcissistic self-promotion. His profile is just an ordinary head shot; he isn’t smirking or trying to mimic that classic male MySpace "gotcha look.”

The profile's background color is black-—the most common and “masculine” color chosen by young men for their MySpace pages-—and images of September 11, including a picture of smoke billowing from the Twin Towers superimposed by an eagle with a tear drop clinging to its eye, occupies opposite corners of the page. In the profile’s “Details” section he identified his status as “In a relationship,” his orientation as “Straight,” his religion as “Christian,” his educational background as “High school,” and he indicated that he has no children but will “Someday.” The presence of html code--(style type="text/css"> body { background-color:000000; background-image:url) in sections of the profile indicates that the profile page was either hastily put together or that Tyler didn’t care much about its appearance.

He didn’t write about himself in the “About Me” section. Instead he has pasted personality details he got from entering her birth date in a Celtic Horiscopes page. He does have two short, hastily composed blogs he posted before his death. In them, we read of legal troubles he got into in the Army “b/c of a female” and that he was demoted in rank as a result. In another he reveals that he has “a mental disorder I am bipolar and skitsafrentic” and hints at suicide: “It is now to te point i wish at times i could just lay down and die. I have a lot of things people in the army dont know about me and they wont understand.”

He has only 35 MySpace friends, a relatively small number (in those days especially) for young men on MySpace. There are a couple “hot babes,” shapely women in bikinis, who appear among his friends and whom apparently he didn’t know personally. A profile of pop singer Beyonce appears among his friends, as does the famous Tom-—the founder and creator of MySpace who becomes the default first friend of everyone who opens a new profile.

Just one quick visit to Tyler's page and already I knew so much about him: he’s not extremely narcissistic, he made mistakes in some dealings with women, he’s depressed and confused, he’s very patriotic and affected by the events of September 11, he’s attracted to sexy ladies, desirous of one day having a family, aware of Celtic horoscopes, and not extremely invested in MySpace—if he were he’d have deleted Tom (or at least not kept him in his top friends list) and fixed that glaring html code.

But these details are just the very basic first steps toward a much larger story about this young man's life and death.

Friendships That Continue to Grow in Cyberspace

What really matters here is not what his page was as originally designed, but what it has become: A virtual memorial to a guy known by some as “Peanut” (his Army nickname) and by others as just “Tyler” (his middle name). The first postings after his death revealed disbelief and grief. Many people posted once, saying good bye, and never posted again. But others have come back. And a few of his closest friends post there on a fairly regular basis.

One of these is "Junior," clearly one of Peanut's most devoted friends. “[W]ell man it's been 2 years with out you and you're still on my mind.....,” Junior posted on his friend's profile at 5:19 PM, December 26, 2008, one year to the day after Tyler's last login. “[M]an i wish i can spend time with you this Christmas..... heck i remember our last christmas when i gave you your present from my mom..... man... it seems like yesterday.”

On February 24, 2008, Peanut’s girlfriend at the time of his death, Stacey, checked in to assure him that her new boyfriend (and now her husband) is not replacing him: “[H]ey hunni, well if u've been watching, then you know all my good news. I'm excited about Justin and I. i hope u know that i'm not forgetting u. i'll never forget u. i love u and i hope that you'll always keep watch over me and try to keep me safe.” According to Hunt's article, Tyler had sent an engagement ring to Stacey, which she opened after finding out about his death.

Tyler Memorialized in his Friends' Albums

Obviously, this online space provides for an ongoing relationship between the living and a deceased young man who, by virtue of his MySpace profile, is still very much alive in the minds of his MySpace friends. The story of his life continues on. And it’s not confined just to his profile page. As of this writing, Stacey’s profile is public and in her Photos section I found a folder called “Tyler—-I love and miss him” containing pictures of Tyler in both civilian and military attire. This album carries the story of Tyler and of his relationship with Stacey to all of her MySpace friends.

Junior, who served with his pal Peanut in Iraq, put up a commemorative photo album in honor of his friend. Called, simply, “Peanut,” there are nine photos dedicated to Tyler, including close-up shots of his name engraved on a monument (the caption reads: “Peanuts Names on the Fallen soldiers wall”) and on a KIA combat bracelet purchased by Junior for his friend, a photo of the helicopter bearing his casket being saluted by marines as it is about to take off (the caption reads: “The last time i saw peanut....I'm Saluting in the far left close to the Helocopter.......Man I miss him”), and pictures of a makeshift memorial made by troops in his platoon.

For some time after his death, another of Tyler’s MySpace friends, his brother Daniel, actually renamed his personal profile “In Memory of my fallen brother, ‘Peanut.” By posting a memorial article about him by Lisa Burgess from Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the U.S. military, this site adds yet another piece to the story of Tyler McCormick. We learn a little more about this young man, including his love of guns (he called his rifle “baby”) and that he got his nickname because “he looked like the guy on the Planters Peanuts jar.” In the “Heroes” section of his profile, this individual cites his heroes as being Tyler (‘my brother is my hero he was a good soldier”) and his new wife Dianna “for being there for me when my brother died if it wasnt for her i dont think i would be here.”

Daniel has gotten a tattoo on his left arm of a cross, shaped by the chains of two Army tags, and the words "My Fallen Brother." Pictures of him and other family members on a recent visit to a memorial for fallen soldiers appear in a folder on in his MySpace photos album. His grief is apparent, especially in the photo that shows him standing at the side of a podium while another man speaks, looking down. The title of the photo is: "I couldn't talk cause I was crying too much."

A network of relations has formed around the MySpace site of Private “Peanut” McCormick. Stacey is MySpace friends with Junior, Junior is friends with “In Memory of my fallen brother, ‘Peanut’,” and their separate memorial activities altogether construct a story that I, as an online observer and MySpace user, am able to silently participate in four years after his death. As Hunt's article suggests, though, stories such as this one are not solely limited to MySpace. Hunt herself contributes to this story when she tells us of how Tyler was adopted by parents he didn’t get along with, that he lived with another family most of the time, and that one reason why he went into the army, according to the minister of a church that looked after him, was because “he didn’t have a family.”

What this all means to me... and to you

At a cultural level, these left-behind MySpace sites reveal how digital technology is changing the ways in which we (those who are wired) memorialize those among us who have died-—in ways both intended and unintended-—creating spaces in which our individual stories combine to create larger, ceaselessly unfolding ones that continue on (Stacey is getting married; Junior has a new dog named Peanut; Tyler’s “brother” has married the woman who helped him get through the death) and remain connected to the single event of this young man’s violent death in Iraq.

At a personal level, these sites are a place for people to process their grief, establish new relationships with those who knew their loved ones, and maintain an ongoing friendship with their friend who has died just as they had, through MySpace in this instance, in life. “I'm not sure how you write something like this but this profile and these pages are like a virtual memorial which is why I am writing tonight,” posted “Karla Fritz and Family” at 9:30 PM on May 26, 2007 in Tyler’s blog, the only space on a profile where someone who is not an accepted “friend” of the user can post messages. “My little brother Michael enlisted about a year ago and arrived in Iraq a few days ago he will be 21 on June 2nd and he is very loved,” she writes.

Shazam!-—now Karla Fritz and her family and her little brother are part of the story of Peanut’s life and death as well. And so am I. And now, upon reading this, so are you.