There are a lot of occurrences that make me wonder if society is collectively off its rocker. Maybe its odd, but this isn't one. They might not admit it easily, but most people have a fascination with death—particularly because we are so carefully insulated from it in today's society. Except for the dwindling number of hunters (who, perversely I think, are often regarded as sickos or “gun nuts” with a fetish for killing) people don't see the food animals that society consumes until they've been dismembered and packaged beyond recognition. When a human dies, if the relatives ever see the body at all, it's generally only after it's been whisked away as quickly as possible, and plasticized, painted, sewed, stapled, and glued into what might as well be a poorly-formed sculpture of the person, positioned as if merely asleep. While films show lots of simulated (if realistic) deaths, images of actual deaths and of corpses are almost universally verboten. And truly realistic images of violent deaths, simulated or not, are almost never seen by anyone outside of the criminal justice system, accident investigators, and medical professionals. When I've been near people who are or have recently witnessed the non-violent death of someone other than a close friend or relative, I almost always observe someone commenting on how surreal and odd it is that the death and the corpse actually resemble something that they've seen in a movie. Which, among other things, just goes to show how many people just aren't sure at all about what death really looks like. And so most people who live in today's Western societies end up being very curious about death precisely because they are so sheltered from it. We all know that we will one day die, and few if any of us are able to wrap our minds around this fact—so in a society where it is entirely possible to live one's entire life without once seeing up-close the body of a mammal in death, let alone that of a human, it sort of makes since that people would make use of a (supposedly) anonymous tool like the internet to satisfy their curiosity and fascination about death and the inevitable end of their own lives. The sad part of this sort of thing is that anonymity shields folks from the collective societal judgment they'd ordinarily experience for an act that causes a terrible sense of violation and a huge amount of additional grief and suffering for the friends and relatives of the person who has died. Even though those sitting in collective judgment would probably be secretly wishing that they could get a look as well.