Death Reporting

Since the Ontake eruption the death toll has been rising (to over 50) with more and more tragic stories of those who didn't make it down from the volcano. What has made this even more eerie is that many of these reports have come directly from the victims through phone photos etc. This is one of the many consequences of new technology and probably not a good one as it allows people to obsess, which obviously you would do given the chance. Receiving messages from the dead seems new and like a massive drawback of modern technology, but is it actually so new and just that the methods have changed? I know that Pliny the Younger did survive the Vesuvius eruption (he is dead now) but it is his accounts that have been useful for volcanologists and is often considered the first recording of an eruption. And maybe that's a comforting way to look at things that actually the videos and photos are probably really useful for studying eruptions. Probably when people die in such tragic circumstances then everything would make it worse, knowing what they were doing just before they died but so would not knowing what they were doing.