Seance

Aug. 26th, 2011 09:19 pm
[personal profile] hwrnmnbsol
I was talking with friends about social media over lunch last week. Peter mentioned Séance, which was one I hadn't heard of before. He said he had a few invites left, and later that afternoon he emailed me one. I got on and set up a profile. The interface was clean and relatively slick; the site pushed all of my usual privacy-intrusion buttons, but no more so than any other offering; many of my friends were already on it. I decided I'd give it a try for a few days.

Séance was heavily weighted towards chat and messaging, with very clunky image and video sharing, but I didn't mind that so much. It was pretty easy to search for and friend most of the people I knew. Within a day I was visiting the site regularly.

Yesterday I checked email and found I had two new Séance friend requests. I pulled them up. One of them was a Catherine Turnbull. That wasn't anybody I was familiar with, but still the name rang a bell. I got into Séance and looked her up. Oh, ha ha. Catherine Turnbull was one of my family's earliest known ancestors; she came over on the Mayflower and was the originator of the Providence Turnbulls. Some wag in my family had set up an elaborate profile for her, complete with a black-and-white image of her in a bonnet and frock, her likes and dislikes, scriptural quotations that she found pithy, and so forth. I decided one of my cousins must have been responsible, but they had gone to so much work that it seemed a shame to let it all go to waste. I friended her and moved on to the next request.

It was for Lori Stein. Lori had been a close friend in high school. She and I had gone to junior prom together. We sat next to each other in homeroom and had three other classes together that year. Once we had stolen her dad's car and gone on a joyride that ended by crashing through the front window of a Denny's. I missed Lori terribly, in part because during our senior year she had gotten a brain tumor and died.


I checked out her profile. No, it wasn't somebody else with the same name; that was her goofy grin and her shaggy head of hair. Was this a tribute site? No, there were no messages of remembrance. A sick joke, perhaps? Maybe. I friended her and got on chat.

[Hey u], I wrote. She pinged back immediately.

[Pauly!] she said. [omigosh we have SO MUCH 2 catch up on! How r u doin?]

[Hey this is fkd up], I replied. [Dunno who this is but Lori is dead so show some respect OK?]

[No no no no, its me its me!] Lori wrote. [Séance is social media 4 dead people. Live/dead dsnt matter NE more! Tell me EVERYTHING about what u are up to!]

So I caught Lori up on my life: graduating from high school, my time at University, the bad job that ended, the good job that had just started, various girlfriends along the way. Eight years had gone by since she went under the knife and hadn't woken up. Lori didn't have much to say in return. What was there to say? She'd been dead.

The conversation petered out after a while. I got some work done, went to lunch, and when I came back I updated Séance. There was a message from Catherine Turnbull.

Catherine wasn't a joke any more than Lori was. She really was my many-generations-removed ancestor who had died in 1640 and subsequently had found the internet. Catherine was like my parents getting email, only about a million times worse.

"Plymouth Colony, August 26, 2011," her 'letter' began. I decided she probably really wasn't in Plymouth Colony, but either didn't know where she really was, or just preferred to keep up the illusion of living.

"My dearest grand-childe a great manny tymes removed," Catherine wrote, indenting her paragraphs properly. "How goode it is to write thee a missive. Alas, how and ever, that I mighte find thy eternal soul in such terrifying peril, as I may judge ye from the writings I have founde within thine blogge."

"Oh, Jesus," I muttered.

"I do considerre, out of charity, that thine failings have much to do with the co-myngled blood that is common in these moderne tymes, and when I thinke upon the undoubt-able Scottish taint in thy veins, certes of Papist breeding as welle, I feel nowt but pitty. Such is the naturre of the Lord's Workes."

"Thanks, ultra-grandma," I said to myself.

"Can I ask of ye a smalle favorre? " she went on. "If I could butt presumme upon our common heritage, I fain would have thee joine myne guilde on Hamlet-Land. This is a funne game where thou canst win armour, landes, and much morre…"

I couldn't read any more of it. I unfriended Catherine Turnbull immediately. I didn't care if she was a part of family history; the woman was a nuisance.

I went through Séance again with a new eye. The genius of the site struck me. New trails have always been blazed on the internet by providing new markets with new connections and new services. Séance was the first internet offering to take the dead, a historically underserved market, and turn it into a thriving community with access to tools and communication methods they had never before enjoyed. I didn't know if they had figured out a way to monetize this yet, but I was sure that was just around the corner.

I poked deeper. I found a community composed of those who had died in 9/11. Marilyn Monroe's profile pointed casual surfers to her for-pay website. Almost three million people had joined I Bet We Can Get A Million People Who Want to Know How Elvis Really Died – but Elvis still wasn't talking.

Instead of having a 'Like' button, Séance had 'Enjoy', 'Rue' and 'Despise'. The dead seemed to use 'Rue' a lot; as a rule they seemed a dour and colorless bunch. But I saw a lot of positives too; I saw chains of relationships that spanned millennia, families reconnecting to their past and learning about their futures, and eternally lonely people not being lonely anymore. Out of the blue I messaged Lori again.

[Hey u on?] I asked.

[Always] she said.

[So whats it like 2B dead?] I asked.

[How u mean?] she replied.

[What is the afterlife like?] I pressed. She paused a while before replying.

[I dont think there is an afterlife except for this], she said. [I have this. I dont think I am anywhere but here.]

I didn't know what to say to that. Suddenly another message popped up.

[Hath I offended thee?] asked Catherine.

[G2G], I messaged Lori.

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hwrnmnbsol

September 2012

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