ABSTRACT
This chapter examines cemetery gravestones on the one hand with the more recent emergence of online web memorials on the other, tracing the differences and relations between material forms. Memorial stones in Melbourne General Cemetery are deliberately made of robust materials such as granite, marble, and bluestone. Gravesites, web memorials were pay due regard to family connection, dates of birth and death, religion, and profession, but in addition to this objectified, structured orientation, web inscriptions serve to position the deceased in a network of subjective and intersubjective relations. Memorial websites draw on the traditions of the funeral and the cemetery in many respects, but they also draw on the architecture, design traditions, language, and aesthetics of website design rather than building architecture. The expansive nature of the content afforded by site architecture, and the portrait of personhood presented through what can be richly descriptive, multi-authored media, reinforces the marking of the social position of the deceased in relational.
