Murder of Anna Svidersky - Aftermath

Aftermath

The murder dominated the news in her home town. A dedicated page put up on MySpace by Svidersky's friends received 1,200 posts in 3 days. Internet users on other sites such as YouTube also posted tributes.

The McDonald's restaurant where she worked in Vancouver held a fund-raising day for her family, hoping to raise $15,000, but actually achieved nearly $85,000, as of April 28, 2006, and finally ran out of food. McDonald's Corp. matched $1.50 per dollar and other local McDonald's franchises 25 cents per dollar.

The news of Svidersky's murder spread worldwide within days through internet sites, creating a phenomenon of collective grief from users, the great majority of whom were complete strangers to her. In Britain, The Guardian newspaper compared the widespread expression of grief by strangers to that seen after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The paper cited the 2004 CIVITAS think-tank, which described such grief as "mourning sickness", related to people's own emotional needs, rather than any real rapport with the deceased. De Volkskrant likened the mass mourning to that which followed the death of Dutch singer, André Hazes, and also pointed to existing personal loss as the major cause.

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at Leeds University, said that Svidersky occupied a "shared space" with other young people, who wanted to comment, as they identified with her and shared a common discourse; distance and lack of physical encounter were not significant factors. Philip Rayner, Senior Lecturer in Media Communications at the University of Gloucestershire, saw the reaction to Svidersky's death as pointing to a change of social interactions that had occurred in the previous few years, and in particular the phenomenon of almost immediate global dissemination of information, but that in her case a significant aspect was also "the sense of community and shared emotional response".

Richard Watson, in his book Future files: the 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years, discussed "digital immortality" through internet records, and cited Svidersky, whose MySpace page would "remain, potentially forever" as her "digital afterlife". Der Spiegel said that Svidersky was famous, albeit posthumously, in a new way—not via traditional media as in the time of Andy Warhol, but as with the Star Wars Kid through the web page/blog/video and google hits.

A memorial video In Memory of Anna Svidersky on YouTube, which has now been removed, was viewed more than 3,000,000 times by April 2011, five years after the incident.