Death On Facebook Now Common As 'Dead Profiles' Create Vast Virtual Cemetery. Sometime in mid- July, Anthony Dowdell put on his favorite plaid shirt, drove his Dodge pickup to the parking lot of a Sam's Club in Linden, N. J., leaned back in the driver's seat, and shot himself.

Nobody knows exactly when the 3. Dare Dellcan," took his life. Nobody knows why the normally cheery creative director and design company owner did it. And for the first couple of days, few people besides the police officers who found his body on July 1. The day after the discovery, a message appeared on Dowdell's Facebook wall."I am a friend of Anthony's. I wish I could call you all to inform you personally and this is probably a crappy way to find this out but our dear friend Anthony aka Ant aka Dare Dellcan has passed away. It is confirmed. I live around the corner and I have spoken with authorities this evening … I am only sharing this because if I was Anthony's friend, I would want to know too.

And I know that Anthony had friends all over the place."Dowdell had 6. They were in New Jersey, where he lived, New York City, where he was raised, and spread from Los Angeles to Miami.

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A few were in Brazil and Italy. As with most people on Facebook, they were former girlfriends and dates- turned- friends, high school and college classmates, co- workers. Many hadn't seen him in years. Most didn't know each other. The message on Facebook, linked to a newspaper article about an unnamed man. Dowdell's death. Dowdell wasn't close to his mother and stepfather, and "we knew from his family situation that there would not be any sort of memorial," says Jessa Moore, a 3. Jersey City, N. J.

Facebook became our memorial. We could leave messages for him and each other." Moore has been posting memories of Dowdell on his page for four months. Friends upload photos of him and his dog, Bacon, and if they are at a restaurant or bar he would like, they "tag" his name so his Facebook profile shows that he, too, was there. For some, it's been a painful experience to see constant reminders of Dowdell online, as if he were still living. Others have wondered if they're being respectful of his privacy. But for Moore, it's been cathartic. For a month, I was there on his page every day.

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It just sort of kept us all connected," she says. It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media.

Facebook, with 1 billion detailed, self- submitted user profiles, was created to connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of memorials for the dead. Dowdell - - "Dare Dellcan" on Facebook - - died in July.

Since the beginning of the Web, it's been plausible that pieces of information about people with Web sites and email accounts would be left accessible after they died. But the virtual cemetery is fairly new. One of the oldest. VMG/" target="_hplink"> online memorials is the U.

K.- based Virtual Memorial Garden, which began in 1. A simple, alphabetized collection of tens of thousands of paragraph- long, user- submitted memories of the dead, it's still growing. Since social media first gained mass appeal a decade ago with Friendster (2.

My. Space (2. 00. But the skyrocketing growth of Facebook has created a new terrain for death on the Internet. VIRTUAL MEMORIALSDowdell is just one of an estimated 3. Facebook have outlived them. By the end of this year, 3 million Facebook users' pages will have become memorial sites for their owners, according to calculations by Nate Lustig, the founder of Entrustet, an online company that helps people access and delete online accounts after someone dies.

Lustig arrived at the number by culling data on the total number of Facebook users, their ages and geographic distribution, and international death rates. There are clear rules for how next of kin can inherit or delete accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the countless other online manifestations of ourselves that have proliferated. Watch Werewolf: The Beast Among Us Dailymotion. Usually, family members have to submit an obituary, news article or death certificate to verify the user is dead.

But unless there's a request, the rules on death are rarely enforced on social networks. Facebook allows only the living user of a registered account to have access to it - - families can't get full access to profiles unless there's documented instruction from the deceased. In a rare case in June, a Wisconsin couple obtained a. Facebook to give them access to the personal messages in their 2. It's easy to track who joins a social network, but it's hard to keep up with who dies. Some accounts exist in perpetuity.

Others are shut down by friends and family who have access to passwords or prove their relationship to the dead, or by social media companies because of inactivity. Facebook is largely hands- off with dead users unless there are specific requests from families.

One unique site, My. Death. Space. com, tracks social media profiles of the dead and maintains an extensive message board and Facebook page, where the morbidly curious can discuss the passings.

The site, which has archives of 1. Looking at the My. Space and Facebook profiles of the deceased that haven't been altered by family members is like looking at a snapshot of a person's life the moment before they passed away," says Michael Patterson, the 3. San Francisco resident who founded the site seven years ago. You can see what the person was into, what music they enjoyed and so many interesting things that were important before their passing."Other services, such as Lustig's Entrustet, have formed to assist the living in planning for their digital legacies. One called My Wonderful Life not only offers digital estate planning, but schedules posthumous emails to be delivered to friends, coworkers and loved ones. The Web is profoundly changing the life of someone’s memory after their death."There aren't really any norms around death and social media yet.

People are kind of making it up as they go along," says Jed Brubaker, a leading scholar in the relatively new field of digital identity and a doctoral candidate in informatics at the University of California- Irvine. But what's known is that this Facebook generation will have more experiences with death than any generation before it. Because anyone you ever knew, people who have naturally faded from your life, will remain there and you will stumble into them and realize they are dead."That's what happened with Dowdell.

Moore, a communications student and actress, had met him six months before July 1. They first contacted each other on Ok. Cupid, a dating Web site. There were no romantic sparks, but they became friends."We texted or talked or Facebooked every day. He was supposed to come over for dinner that week," Moore says. But Dowdell’s Facebook page, peppered with photos of him with dogs, pictures of his design projects and videos of him dancing, had been quieter than usual. Since his death, Dowdell's Facebook has become a virtual memorial to his life.

Click photos to enlarge)Moore didn't come across the post about what happened until a few days later. A friend posted a message on his Facebook wall after speaking to Dowdell's mother, with whom Dowdell had a strained relationship. He would be cremated with no ceremony. So Moore and a handful of Dowdell's friends began exchanging messages, planning for a celebration to keep his memory alive. They posted photos of him ahead of the gathering: a dapper Dowdell at a friend's wedding, him with a good friend's dog, him wearing a blue baseball cap and posing with a friend, one that captured his fun- loving spirit: him sticking his tongue out in a grainy i.

Phone photo. On July 2. Dowdell was posthumously tagged at his own wake at Stout, a bar in Manhattan.

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