The Blog as Gravestone

Consider it:

Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.