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Preparing for your Digital Afterlife

There are currently over 30 million dead people on Facebook and their profiles provide a picture of grief in the 21st century.

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Traditionally, preparing for death was anchored in the real world. Funerals were planned, the dead were farewelled, and you got on with disappearing into the ether. These days, most of us have online personas that will outlive our physical ones. There are currently over 30 million dead people on Facebook and their profiles provide a picture of grief in the 21st century.

The culture of online mourning is one of the more interesting side effects of social media, as it enables (albeit limited) interactions with someone online long after their body is gone. As well as bringing attention to how we view our own lives and legacies, this strange quirk of digital living has spawned a new industry that’s centered around dealing with death online. Last Friday Google premiered their Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to plan your “digital afterlife” by specifying, among other things, who gets to inherit your YouTube videos.

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Evan Carroll is the co-author of the book Your Digital Afterlife, looking at the budding digital afterlife community. It addresses the philosophical side of what it means to have a part of your life survive you, and serves as a strangely practical guide to navigating the digital river Styx.

VICE: Has the presence of social media and the Internet has changed the way that we grieve?
Evan Carroll: The way that we grieve is largely influenced by the way we live, there’s no doubt that the Internet and social media has changed that. I do believe it has directly changed the way we grieve in that grieving used to be constrained to a specific time and place. We’re seeing with social media people can share their memories of an individual online, if we take the example of a Facebook profile that’s been memorialized we’ll see friends and family sharing memories of the deceased. It’s an interesting public forum that’s not fixed to a time or place. Anyone, no matter where they are, can remember this person and have this virtual place they can go. It’s really fascinating, the person who’s passed away can connect others even in their death, and they’re still having an impact in the world.

As people invest more in their online presence, and store things in the digital world, do we risk our legacy being less permanent in the physical world after we die?
That’s an interesting question. I would argue the more we place online the less we have as far as a tangible memorial. But I don’t think we’ll ever reach a time where everything we own will be digital.  As a society we have a lot of tradition built into the way we bury our dead or scatter their ashes, those traditions won’t die because of what we can do technologically.

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Talking about cultural death traditions, have you noticed any kinds of new rituals developing around an online presence after someone dies?
With things like Facebook profiles we’re seeing a new space for communal bereavement. The comments that are placed there are a new way to remember, so in many respects there are new traditions that are coming about there.

Something interesting that I did see coming out of eastern countries like Japan and China was that they’re simply running out of space for burials. They’ve set up free online cemeteries where you create an online memorial. They offered a free virtual boat service that allows you to scatter ashes at sea, and use the digital memorial as a way to respect their traditions and take care of their deceased ancestors. As well as dealing with massive amounts of people and the small amounts of space that they have to bury them. That was an interesting shift. I do not unfortunately know how well that’s taking on. I imagine there are some who think it’s a great idea, and some who don’t think it’s a great idea.

As our digital selves outlive our physical selves, do you think we’ll start preserving and memorializing our digital lives more than our physical ones? Maybe a grave will be less a physical point than an online space.
I think that’s absolutely plausible. A digital grave would be much more convenient and much easier for people to interact with than a physical one. So I think we’ll start to see that shift. There are some interesting thoughts about this idea that our digital memorial can live on longer, we’ve heard people say a million times the Internet is there forever. They’re right that you lose control over that information, but they’re wrong that it cannot disappear, it’s durable and fragile at the same time.

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Stepping back, I guess our generation is the first one that is really aware of how we create our own online presence. Looking at our generation as a whole, will we be remembered differently to our parents or grandparents because?
I believe we will be remembered differently and that’s simply because the advent of social media has brought about the idea that it’s OK to share things. 20 years ago, I wouldn’t take out an advertisement in my local newspaper to announce what I did this evening. But with Facebook and Twitter I can tell everyone what I did and it’s stored for what could be longer than my time on earth. That’s a wild change from anything we’ve seen. Even though much of this might be considered ephemeral, and if we were cleaning out someone’s home after they passed away, we might choose to discard it, those are the things we might be sharing on social media that will be preserved.

It represents a huge opportunity for everyone to have their story remembered and tell a much richer story. In hundreds of years there may be an entire field of archaeology dedicated to this idea of digging through the digital remains of our generation. Let’s say our Library of Congress here in the United States is keeping an archive of Twitter, imagine what a researcher would learn from Twitter that a researcher wouldn’t be able to learn from the scrolls of Alexandria, for instance. You would see a different view of the everyday person and how they lived.

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I hadn’t really thought of that. I suppose if you think of history as an illustrated timeline from the past 30 years, suddenly everything is going to be more detailed than it’s ever been.
Absolutely and it’s worth making sure of that we think we’re about protecting our digital information because even though these things may seem ephemeral and might not seem of interest in the future, chances are that all the tweets around military or political action today will be as relevant to us as letters written to the battlefield from four five hundred years ago.

Do you think people are aware of how they might be remembered long term through social media?
I don’t think individuals are aware of their long-term legacy when interacting with social media. Users are very cognizant that what they share can spread widely. However, I don’t think they’re cognizant of what the long-term story of their life looks like. This goes back to something that’s very core to us as humans, we don’t like to think we’re mortal. If we were to start thinking about our legacy, we’d have come to terms with the fact that we’re going to die.

For so long we’ve seen the Internet as a very young technology, but that’s not true anymore. Does this combined with the aging population and the development of things the Inactive Account Manager mean we’re starting to face up to death on the internet?
Absolutely. When I started researching this topic in 2008 it was very difficult to find any information on the topic. And since then I’ve seen the amount of information grow exponentially. This move by Google to release the account manager is really the first time we’ve seen a service provider say this issue is important enough for them to take time and build a tool to address it.

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What’s fascinating about it is that it’s the first service that’s said to users, “Tell us what you want to happen when you no longer use this account.” That’s a significant step forward because Facebook’s policy is it can be memorialized or deleted at your family’s request. You cannot say what you want to happen ahead of time unless you express that wish to your family. Google is the first service we’ve seen proactively ask you, I think that’s very significant and it’s an indicator we’re going to see more services do this type of thing.

Upwards of 30 million people on Facebook have died, is this changing attitude a result of that or is it a reflection of a growing sophistication between our online and physical selves?
The short answer is both. As the Internet grows older we’re going to see more users pass away. That’s the way the mortality rates work. I think part of this is in response to the fact that we’re seeing individuals who have robust online presences pass away and their families and friends want to make sure something is done about it that’s appropriate. Secondly I think that by virtue of people using these tools more and this issue being brought up more, individuals do realize it’s an issue that needs to be dealt with and they’re choosing to deal with it on their own or talk about the need for this issue to be addressed.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @WendyWends

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