The Digital Beyond » sxsw

South by Southwest Interactive 2012

Evan Carroll — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:27:38 +0000

Once again Evan and John will present at SXSW Interactive, but this year we have two panels for you. If you’re in Austin for SXSW, stop by and say hello.

Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death
Adam Ostrow, Adele McAlear, Bill LeFurgy, Evan Carroll
Sunday, March 11 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Austin Convention Center Room 9ABC

Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity
Ben Goertzel, Bruce Duncan, David Hanson, John Romano
Monday, March 12 3:30PM – 4:30PM
Driskill Hotel Citadel

SXSW 2011: You’re dead. Your data isn’t. What happens now?

John Romano — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:20:47 +0000

Following our top-rated core conversation in 2010, Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital Afterlife, we’re ramping up for SXSW 2011. But to get there, we need your help. The first round of the panel selection process is underway and that means it’s time to vote for your favorite ideas in the Panel Picker.

You should give us a thumbs up. We’d really appreciate it. All you have to do is create an account and click the thumbs up icon on our page.

Here’s some more information about our idea and the awesome set of panelists we have lined up.

Description

The Web has changed your life, your death and what you leave behind. Your heirlooms like photos, videos and letters are now stored in digital form and—in many cases—on servers that you don’t own like those of Flickr, YouTube and Gmail. What should happen to your “legacy” data? With over 285,000 Facebook users set to die this year, you really should think about it.

The Internet generation is coming of age and this issue is only growing. We have to respond with new legal frameworks and standards to support this change. The good news is that entrepreneurs, attorneys, archivists and scholars are already working on solutions. Join us to learn what happens to your digital life after you die and what’s being done to give you a say in it.

Key Questions

How significant is a lifetime of data and how should it be preserved/archived/deleted after its creator is gone? Can we keep it forever?
How is the law changing to support the legal transferability of digital assets? What can I do to secure them today?
How is the business of death changing to support digital assets? What companies and solutions are emerging to deal with this?
Today, online identity is designed for short term use, what types of information architectures and policy structures would support identity throughout and after our lives?
If the social Web is redefining the way we interact with each other, what role will it play in the way we grieve together?

South by Southwest 2010

Evan Carroll — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:48:50 +0000

John and I make no bones about how we came to start a blog about the digital afterlife. We pitched the idea for a panel talking about this for the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival. After its selection as a core conversation, we devoted ourselves to study the topic in preparation for the event. The response at SXSW 09 was overwhelmingly positive, with a heated, hour-long discussion amongst attendees. Shortly thereafter (likely by coincidence and not causality) a deluge of services came about promising to help individuals deal with digital death and afterlife. In response, we created this blog and started preparations for SXSW 2010. Now that the panel submissions are closed, I’ll share with you our proposal.

Become Immortal, Understanding the Digital Afterlife
When you leave the mortal world, your identity will ascend into the cloud. But the complications of digital preservation pose serious questions. Our panel of legal, technical and cultural experts will discuss the control, format and sustainability of the digital beyond.

Here are the questions we plan to address:

Does the past have value? Should we make an effort to preserve it?
Is it too old school to die and be dead?
With the onset of widespread preservation, will the past lose its significance? Quantity or quality?
Is the current deluge of digital afterlife services sustainable? Will they really outlive me?
Public or private? What would an open-source model for digital preservation look like?
How can current advancements in data portability across social networking services support this goal?
What new legal structures and precedents does this require?
Are digital personas an accurate reflection of an individual?
Will my legacy be more significant if I leave my content distributed across multiple sites like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter?
How will the wealth of preserved information change the way that future generations look back at us?

We’ll be asking for your vote in August, when the panel picker goes live. Hopefully your support (a.k.a. vote) will help us give this topic a proper panel discussion with other digital afterlife experts.

Update: Here’s the link to the PanelPicker: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3854