She was listed as "Anne - 78 - Female." When I got the friend request in August, her last login was July 30, 2007. I made a note and put it aside, hoping to return to this post at some future point. Now, as of today (but probably before), her profile was deleted or she canceled her account.
If this does not show you how odd internet life is and how it can often tread the border between inspirational and bad taste, nothing will.
Some people would hear this and be shocked; they'd say that reducing Anne Frank, the unfortunate, yet inspiring poster girl for all the Jewish children whose lives were cut short during the Holocaust, to a MySpace profile is unconscionable, a derision of her suffering and a potential tool of hatred.
But others would have said that this is a truly contemporary Holocaust memorial; Anne, one of humanity's most famous and likely most enduring diarists, is symbolically the perfect MySpace user: although she had no expectation that her diary would be read, let alone on a daily basis that the technology age now permits, she certainly had dreams of being someone someday, of rising above the restriction of living quietly in the annex, and becoming a movie star or a famous writer.
I wish Anne's MySpace page were still around. Somehow, losing the page
itself strikes an additional chord of sadness on a story we assumed had
concluded so many years ago. Part of Anne's appeal has been the fact that, for all of the anti-Semitic circumstances of her incarceration, she was at her essence a teenager, going through teenage things, and this has remained one of her most enduring qualities.
True, there was also a maturity to her writing and an optimism-within-despair that has buoyed her diary to the lasting fame she always dreamed of. But to teens who read Anne's words, they're involved in a "there but for the grace of God, go I"; they know that she wrote in another time, under extreme circumstances, but she also wrote from the universal, collective teenage heart.