Mourners and media turn to Facebook.com after tragedies
By Corey Ryan
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
May 12, 2008
People come to pay their respects, leaving condolences and remembrances like flowers in a burial plot or a burning candle in a church.
When tragedy strikes universities, as it did on May 3 when an Ohio University student and her Hocking College boyfriend were found dead in her apartment, friends and family can flock to a personalized, virtual memorial to mourn.
According to the deceased OU student Kelly Armbruster’s Facebook.com page, she was a “very liberal” native of Dublin, Ohio. Her name as an acronym is Keen, Elegant, Likeable, Light and Youthful. In an album titled “Chris and I,” Kelly and her boyfriend, Chris Theil, who also died, smile in the album’s lone picture.
Not much else can be determined by Armbruster’s Facebook profile page, except that a lot of people miss her. The first of many May 3 posts on her Facebook wall reads “:(”.
Social-networking Web sites like Facebook have grown into functional media tools and an aspect of everyday life, so much so sites now can help users deal with death. Facebook walls, a message board where friends can write messages on user profiles, serve as a place for grieving when tragedy strikes.
Friends of Sarah Merritt, the OU soccer player who died in March 2007 while on a spring-break trip to Hilton, Head, S.C., created a memorial Facebook group where friends still post over a year later. “Sarah Louise Merritt in our hearts forever” gives over 950 members the opportunity to continue a relationship with Merritt.
“When I write on Sarah Merritt’s wall, it’s kind of like I’m writing a letter to her,” said Christa Puccio, a sophomore goalkeeper on the OU women’s soccer team. ”It’s kind of awkward because other people can read it, but it doesn’t bother me. I know in my writing to Sarah, if a stranger is looking, that speaks to what impact she has had.”
On April 27, Puccio wrote about paying forward the kindness Merritt bestowed on her to the incoming freshmen joining the soccer team. She said it comforts her to share insights with Merritt in any way possible.
“I think there are a lot of positives to people reading shared sorrow,” OU Associate Dean of Students Patricia McSteen said. “It’s good to know you aren’t alone in grieving a loss.”
In her position, McSteen deals with such tragedies. She said she can remember sitting in the living room of three OU students, whose roommate had just died. When dealing with sudden deaths, she said the office of the Dean of Students tries to find those affected by the death or deaths and help them commemorate their friend(s).
“Unfortunately, I have coordinated a lot of memorial services, and they all look very different,” McSteen said. “Some students want to do something in Galbreath Chapel, which feels very formal and churchlike, and then I have had students say ‘we want to do this up on the Ridges around a tree.’
“What I try to do as far as advice for students is try to get them to think about their friend and what feels like the most appropriate way to commemorate them,” she said.
The Internet allows students to band together in vigil. When tragedy struck at Virginia Tech, OU students organized a memorial service utilizing a Facebook group “Students of Ohio University Praying for Students at Virginia Tech.”
But students were not alone in using Facebook during this tragedy.
“If I’m not mistaken, during the Virginia Tech shootings, some of the news channels were using Facebook as a source of quotes,” said Bob Benz, a former vice president for interactive media at the E.W. Scripps company’s newspaper division and current partner at Maroon Ventures, a professional services firm.
An April 2007 USA Today technology column by Andrew Kantor agrees with Benz’s assertion that the Virginia Tech shooting galvanized the news media into routinely using Facebook.
On April 30, Benz was a guest speaker at OU’s Journalism Day, where he presented in a discussion panel titled “Making New Connections: Social Networking, Blogs & Mobile Media.”
The message of the presentation by Benz; Columbus Dispatch reporter and blogger Randy Ludlow; and Steven Siegel, vice president of brand solutions at mobile marketing firm HipCricket was the rise of social-networking Web sites and other interactive, digital media.
Following the trends set by national media in covering the Virginia Tech shooting, both the OU Post and The Athens NEWS utilized Facebook in covering the deaths of Armbruster and Theil. In a May 5 article, the Post cited Facebook as a means of linking Theil and Armbruster as in a dating relationship. A May 4 article posted on The Athens NEWS Web site also cites Facebook, pulling a quote from Armbruster’s profile.
Athens NEWS Editor Terry Smith confirmed the benefits of using such sites for news-gathering. “I originally got my own Facebook profile a year or two ago, for the express purpose of gaining access to the site to use as a news source,” Smith said.
However, he did note one substantial limitation to using the site for news gathering. “Increasingly, it seems like most people’s profile pages are closed to anybody but ‘friends,’” he said.
“Using social networking sites is becoming required in this society,” said Benz, who stressed the need for caution when media use networking Web sites as sources.
Now Facebook has become like a public meeting place, Benz said, giving free reign to use the Web site any way possible.
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