Twitter 100s Attend WWII Veteran's Funeral(99 Year-Old Had No Close Friends or Immediate Family Alive)

100s Attend Funeral of World War II Veteran

LONDON November 11, 2013 (AP)

By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press

"We will remember them," says the "Ode of Remembrance" recited around the world each Armistice Day.

Hundreds of Britons took the message to heart Monday, attending the funeral of a 99-year-old former World War II airman they had never met.

Harold Jellicoe Percival died Oct. 25 at a nursing home in Lytham St Annes, northwest England, with no immediate family or close friends still alive.

A funeral home placed an advertisement in the local newspaper asking military personnel to attend the service so his passing would not go unmarked.

The ad was taken up on Twitter, and several hundred soldiers, veterans and civilians gathered at a crematorium Monday to pay respects to Percival, who served as ground crew with Royal Air Force Bomber Command during the war. Scores of people who could not fit inside the chapel stood outside in the rain.

"You have come in numbers surpassing anything that was expected," said the Rev. Alan Clark, who led the funeral service. "Not because you knew him, but because each of us has a common humanity."

Monday is the anniversary of the end of World War I, on Nov. 11, 1918. The funeral began at 11 a.m., 95 years to the hour after the 1918 armistice.

Mourners observed a two-minute silence for victims of war before Percival's coffin, draped in a blue RAF flag, was carried into the crematorium chapel to the strains of the "Dambusters March." Percival worked as ground crew for the squadron that carried out a daring raid on German dams in 1943.

The service included a reading of "The Lord's Prayer," singing of the hymn "Jerusalem" and the sounding of "The Last Post" bugle call.

"It was completely overwhelming, something we did not expect at all, this huge turnout," said Lorraine Holt, matron of the nursing home. "We have lots of veterans at the home and each and every one of them should be remembered like this."

NPR Host Tweets His Mom's Death

Tweeting his mother's death to a million

 John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer LAST UPDATED: Wednesday, July 31, 2013, 1:08 AM It was a sad, humble, spectacular performance. Before 1.2 million people, a man told of the passing of his mother, step by step, day by day. He told this most human of stories in bursts of 140 characters, on Twitter, the microblogging site. The storyteller was Scott Simon, National Public Radio host. On July 16, he first mentioned his mother's crisis in the ICU of an undisclosed Chicago hospital ("Mother called: 'I can't talk. I'm surrounded by handsome men.' Emergency surgery. If you can hold a thought for her now. . . . "). Starting July 23, his tweets ("I just want to say that ICU nurses are remarkable people. Thank you for what you do for our loved ones") focused solely on her passing. Simon's tweets are marked by humane dignity, understatement, openness ("I love holding my mother's hand. Haven't held it like this since I was 9. Why did I stop? I thought it unmanly? What crap"), and humor about death ("But as my mother said, the nice thing about being a Chicagoan is that she'll continue to be able to vote on Election Day"). Other tweeters have done similar things, but probably none has been so much in the public eye. Big celebs (Katie Couric) and venues (AARP, Buzzfeed, NBC's Today, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times) either retweeted or wrote about it. Simon's entire feed viralized. Monday night he wrote, "The heavens over Chicago have opened and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped onstage." He repurposed a couplet from Romeo and Juliet: "She will make the face of heaven shine so fine that all the world will be in love with night." Twitter responded with condolences and appreciation. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media - even largely nonverbal Instagram, which is all about photos - invite us to be storytellers around imaginary campfires, ringed with friends, acquaintances, and family. Have these media changed storytelling itself? Depends on whom you ask. John Beatty, associate professor of English and digital arts at La Salle University, does see novel techniques. "When Scott runs over 140 characters, he simply runs over into the next tweet." Steve Buttry, digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, tweeted on his nephew's death in Afghanistan in November. He writes by e-mail that a Twitter narration "doesn't flow the same as a string of paragraphs artfully crafted by an excellent writer. Just as an audio or video story isn't the same. But Twitter is a powerful storytelling platform and few have used it as well as Simon did in his mother's final days." Mallary Jean Tenore of the Poynter Institute writes (via Twitter) that "the storytelling's different in that it's more succinct. Every word counts. . . . Twitter can go a long way in teaching us how to write short & well." Robert McKee, far-famed story doctor, is head of Robert McKee's Story Seminar. "Curmudgeon that I am," he says by phone, "I see Twitter not as a revolution in communication but a revolution in banality." He is skeptical about its chances as a storytelling medium. "Storytelling is a temporal art," he says. "Telling a tale through tweets is the equivalent of a ballet dancer coming onstage and doing a single pirouette and leaving, or a musician hitting a single chord and leaving." It can't be said that Simon's account is short on emotion ("Thought that my mother won't get another glimpse of the city she loves is unbearable"). Margaret Low Smith, senior vice president for news at NPR, sees the happy/sad tweets as an extension of Simon's essays on Weekend Edition, "only one sentence at a time. He's always had this gift of walking the delicate line between humor and heartbreak." But was it right? Seemly? To share with so many such an intense, sacred story? Some would rather that Simon's grief and his mother's death had remained private. Janine Mariscotti, assistant professor of social work at La Salle University, says "it's still socially inappropriate in the United States to spend a long time talking about the process of dying, as Scott does." But Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon says that "life is no longer either or public or private." She feels Simon's story "loses none of that intimate power just because it was doled out a few hundred characters at a time, while a few million people watched." (For his part, Simon said in an NPR interview on Tuesday that "I certainly had a sense of proportion and delicacy. . . . I didn't tweet anything and wouldn't have that I didn't think she would be totally comfortable with.") Mariscotti says Simon's tweets probably had a therapeutic effect for both writer and readers. "Dying is so mysterious, and some of his tweets, such as the one in which his mother cries, 'Help me,' in the middle of the night, give us a glimpse into it. Plus we get to see the mother-son relationship. Scott even challenges our seriousness, with his humor." In her Poynter blog, Tenore writes that attitudes have changed. In 2008, Berny Morson of the Rocky Mountain News tweeted from a funeral and was reviled as "repulsive." These days, it happens all the time. The coarsening of American culture? A way to expand the sharing circle? Depends on whom you ask. There appeared to be fewer objections to the propriety of Simon's tweets Tuesday than questions about their authenticity. "People online are on their guard for things that are too well-turned," says Beatty, "almost as if professionalism is the opposite of being real. But with Simon, you have a guy who can probably generate a well-turned tweet pretty much on the fly." Meanwhile, Simon keeps tweeting. Now he's dealing with the comic aspects of mortuary science: "Cemetery at first confuses my mother w/ another Patricia. Almost interred next to total stranger. Why not make new friends?"
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20130731_Tweeting_his_mother_s_death_to_a_million.html#wqVu1ozKGSHJV4XD.99

phillyburbs.com:

Social media: Till death do we part

By Catherine Laughlin Correspondent | Posted: Sunday, February 3, 2013 11:15 am

When Matthew Ray logged onto his Facebook page a little while back, birthday wishes were being posted on his wall for his good friend.

But Ray’s friend had died more than a year ago.

“At first, it was surprising to see her,” said Ray. “Her family has been using her Facebook page as a memory board in her honor.”

Nowadays, people from almost every demographic have adopted some form of online networking or platform, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, email accounts, online gaming or photo sharing sites. And with the pervasiveness of social media, it might be a good idea to establish paradigms of who will be responsible for our accounts should we die.

Ray’s attitude to being reminded of his friend’s birthday was initially jarring, but it also gave him time to reflect on her again. But he acknowledges that strategies should be in place for relatives who might want to disconnect their departed loved ones from cyberspace.

“The truth is social media isn’t going away anytime soon,” said Ray, who is copartner of the Philadelphia-based ChatterBlast Media, an organization that helps Internet-connected users develop social media strategies.

Recently topping 1 billion monthly users, Facebook has had to figure out ways to deal with those who’ve passed on, said Johanna Peace, a company spokeswoman. She said member profiles can be memorialized or shifted into a tribute page where only confirmed family and friends can leave posts in remembrance. “We also will honor requests from immediate family members to deactivate an account, which will remove the profile and any associated information from the site.”

But Peace said the complete removal of a Facebook page can only be requested with the completion of an online form and the submission of valid verification such as a death certificate.

People are not in the habit of drawing up online site passwords for their heirs, said Edward Tenner, who has written about technology in his books, “Why Things Bite Back” and “Our own Devices,” and is a visiting scholar in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. “Society is not very organized for the transmission of digital property among families. I see all kinds of potential problems in the future because there are no legalities set up,” he said.

In a bygone era, folks needn’t have worried about user names. But times are evolving. As part of its directives on writing a will, the U.S. General Services Administration is now suggesting on its website (www.USA.gov) that setting up a “social media will” that details how you would like your online identity to be handled should be established.

On a personal level, estate-planning attorney Thomas D. Begley lll has also seen ghosts from the grave while visiting Facebook. “One person I know passed away within this year. And for the other person, who died a couple of years ago, I ended up deactivating him from my profile,” said Begley, of the law group Capehart Scatchard in Mount Laurel.

From a legal perspective, Begley thinks the time is coming when people should have instructions in place for their digital assets along with economic holdings like frequent flier mileage points. To cultivate uniformity, these stipulations — such as canceling an account, allowing access to emails or keeping a blog up for some time — can be set up at the time a will is drawn.

“On a real world level, most of my clients want to know who’s getting the house when a death occurs, as well as, who’s going to handle the funeral arrangements. But clients might need to list passwords and specify who gets access to online accounts, too,” he said.

Moreover, email servers have been grappling with ways to handle the accounts of people who die. Not to mention, seeing the last written messages of a loved one might offer solace for family members. So Katie Hamachek, a spokesperson for Microsoft, the operator of Hotmail and Outlook Express, said that in the event of a loss, the next of kin should contact Microsoft’s account custodian of records to learn the delicate tasks of accessing or closing an account.

“Protecting the privacy of customers is a huge priority for Microsoft,” said Hamachek. “And it’s something the company respects both in life and in death.”