When your contacts die

I admit it: I don't use LinkedIn. Sure, like everybody else, I set up an account back in the day and, sure, every once in awhile, I get requests from people who want to LinkIn to me (or whatever they call it) and every once in a great while, it's a request from somebody I actually know, rather than somebody who wants to sell me insurance, and so I'll add them to my "network" (which now has some ludicrous number of members, given that, like a public-service ad about a communicable disease, their members become my members).

Today, I friended (oops, wrong social network) somebody. Curious, I went to the My Contacts page - where I saw that my very first LinkedIn contact was still there, even though he'd died several months ago. He was a very nice guy, so  it was kind of sad to see his "current" profile.

But also, what happens when a member of a network like this dies? Where's the final virtual resting place for the deceased? Do such disembodied accounts just keep getting LinkedIn requests? What happens if LinkedIn survives and I go back in 40 years (well, if I survive that long as well) and everybody I knew is dead, and then I notice that my network now has 3.8 billion members because on the Internet, nobody knows you're dead?

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