THE NEW YORK TIMES

September 11, 2002

Real Solace in a Virtual World: Memorials Take Root on the Web

By AMY HARMON

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/11/nationchallenged/11GRIE.html?todaysheadlin
es

THERE is no grave site for Tracy Orr to visit. The body of her husband, Alex
Steinman, was never found in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and her
guess is as good as any as to when a permanent memorial to the victims will
be built.

Instead, Ms. Orr makes weekly trips to a virtual memorial - a Web site that,
like thousands of others, sprang into existence in the days after Sept. 11
and continues to attract throngs of visitors each month. The steady stream
of tributes deposited there by friends and strangers is, she says, a source
of tangible comfort despite their electronic form - and because of it.

"I went on the other day and saw an entry from someone from high school,"
said Ms. Orr, 35, of the site, www.legacy.com/legacytribute. "We all have a
need to go somewhere and just sit and be with our loved one. A lot of us do
that on the Web."

The Internet drew attention in the immediate aftermath of the attacks for
its central role in helping people communicate as phone networks overloaded
and travel routes snarled. Family groups and government organizations
continue to rely heavily on the Web to disseminate information about 9/11
compensation funds and various memorial projects.

But a year after an event that shattered the lives of so many people in so
many different ways, the Internet's main contribution may lie in the way
disparate groups are using it to weave together a different kind of memorial
in a seemingly endless digital construction process.

At a time when consensus on a World Trade Center memorial is difficult to
come by, the Web offers a platform where sentimental memorials, angry
memorials, political memorials, poignant memorials and 19,000 ideas for the
physical memorial (www.imagineny.org) can coexist.

"The Web allows everybody to be a memorializer," said Jeffrey Hyson, a
historian at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, who has studied Sept.
11 Web sites. "It's not just the family members or survivors that can claim
some stake. There's a sense that anybody, no matter how distant their
connection to 9/11, has the ability and the right to offer their version of
some memorial."

The patchwork of Sept. 11 Web memorials includes Legacy.com, a commercial
obituary site that created a special section for victims of the attacks, and
www.cantorfamilies.com, where many of Cantor Fitzgerald's employees have
made a mourning ritual of clicking through photographs and memories of their
colleagues who died in the attacks.

A vast majority, though, are sites cobbled together by friends and relatives
of victims, and by amateur programmers and professional Web site designers -
mostly outside New York - who set up sites in the days after Sept. 11 in a
gesture of solidarity, and find themselves still playing host to visitors
from around the world a year later.

"It was a bit intimidating at first to e-mail with the victims' families,"
said Alan De Keyrel, who owns a Web design company in Rochester, Minn. On
the day after the attacks, Mr. De Keyrel created his site,
wallofamericans.com. With several hundred people still visiting the site
each day, he continues to absorb the costs, which would have exceeded
$10,000 for a typical commercial project.

He enjoys fulfilling requests like the one he received recently from a
friend of Charles Burlingame's, the captain of the flight that crashed into
the Pentagon, asking that the middle initial "F" be added to the name on the
site. "It's things like that which continue to amaze me," Mr. De Keyrel
said.

It is hard to miss the common thread of patriotic sentimentality running
through many of the sites, with their multimedia montages with patriotic
music, images of flags and eagles and video clips of the collapsing towers.

Also striking are the public displays of grief on sites that invite people
to comment on the dead. Some mourners say the entries from strangers are
particularly meaningful. Others, emboldened by the shield of the computer
screen, may take solace in spilling their pain into cyberspace.

In an entry on Legacy.com dated May 7, Louis Massari wrote a note addressed
to his wife, Patricia: "Tomorrow is May 8, 2002, so you know what that
means; we celebrate our three-year wedding anniversary," Mr. Massari wrote
in a long, anguished entry. `I am writing you this to let you know the only
difference this year is I don't have you here to celebrate it with. I am
never going to accept that you are gone. Not like this. Not the way we are
supposed to grow old with each other."

Not all of the memorial sites are devoted to those who died. Carol McDonald,
30, who escaped from the World Trade Center, said she has felt too
uncomfortable to attend support group meetings for the relatives of victims.
But in a forum for survivors at wtcunitedfamilygroup.org, she found others
who shared her own sense of guilt and loss.

The Sonic Memorial Project (www.sonicmemorial.org) is an audio documentary
of the World Trade Center itself.

And Wherewhereyou.org, run by three college students, is one of many sites
that invite visitors to write accounts of their own experience of Sept. 11,
no matter where they were or what their relation was to the event.

"I've been kind of addicted to the Sept. 11 Digital Archive lately, because
there are so many stories," said Anna Boudinot, 24, a New York University
graduate who lives in Berwyn, Ill. "I'm not so emotional about it that I
can't function anymore. I can think about it and tell myself that I want to
learn from it and learn from other people."

At the archive, www.911digitalarchive.org, visitors can browse through more
than 1,000 personal accounts, as well as e-mail, instant message logs and
other digital artifacts of the event. Financed by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, the site is essentially seeking to memorialize the Web's
memorials by creating a permanent digital archive of them.

"For the first time in history we have grass-roots, spontaneous records of
how people were feeling and how they reacted and what they were saying
during this kind of major event," said Tom Scheinfeldt, the site's
co-director and a historian at George Mason University. "But with the touch
of a delete key, it could be gone forever."

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************