But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already doing similar things.
Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we can look to that service for some kind of decorum. But as more computational power gets controlled by individuals, this content will become more dynamic and more fluid. Then it's kind of hard to know whom to, er, blame.
I can't physically get to a funeral for everyone I now know. And that's too bad, because funerals are good for people. You need a way to memorialize someone, preferably by gathering in a place, and preferably with a strong ritual component, like the lighting of candles or the gathering around a gravesite or the recitation of formal prayers or sayings.
(Because ritual, among other things, is what we do when we want to say something heartfelt but unoriginal. It's unfair to force someone who has lost a friend to write a standalone obituary on a blog. There are a lot more mourners in the world than writers, you want to be able to mourn for people that you don't know well enough to memorialize in prose, and writing public statements of memorial is often not self-effacing enough. Your real desire is to call attention to your deceased friend, so it seems unseemly to risk calling attention to oneself instead.)
Good for Facebook for figuring a lot of this out. But there will need to be more of this, because you're right: The web, and our network of acquaintances on that web, is going to outlive us all.
It's strange and touching that a site intended to discuss urban issues might also serve as a de facto online memorial, but there you have it: people will find their own uses for any reasonably open system.
Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net.
Sounds strange, but that's the trend.