When the Posting Stops, You'll Know They're Dead

Social media has revolutionized information-sharing and, more specifically, the ubiquity of
communication and connectivity between humans. Facebook has become a way to
stay in touch with extended family, Twitter for following the general discourse, Instagram for a
more visual look into one’s life, and so on. This connectivity—the ability to be everywhere and
nowhere at the same time, to be alone yet engaged with the entire world—has been
technology’s greatest achievement, but it has also revealed that online communication, amidst a global pandemic, has a precarious backstop.

When the posting stops, you’ll know they’re dead.
Before the dawn of the internet, relationships were mainly centered around human-to-human
interaction; you rarely heard about the goings-on of people’s everyday lives (and therefore
made to care much less) unless they were public figures or members of your family or
workplace. The reliance on one another, and therefore the need to be connected, was
narrowed—the stakes were much lower, your knowledge and empathy more contained.
The internet, however, has allowed us to place the lives of others on our ever-widening
periphery; while you may have never met the vast majority of the people you interact with
online, they are nonetheless there, with their postings—snippets of their lives as living, breathing
creatures—becoming the only notifier of their existence at all.

As the days go on—the death toll rising by the hour—more and more people are posting that
they are showing symptoms, or that they have tested positive for the virus. Did I know this
person’s mother, father, brother, sister? How would I receive an update if their condition
worsened? The only degree of separation between many people in this world seems to be the
internet itself—this facade of meaning, of knowing someone, of reason and purpose—and I
hoped that they would keep posting, that they would hold on, because otherwise, I would never
know if they were still alive.