While doing some research recently, I started to think more about the  fields of study that together form a foundation for the digital afterlife.  I have always maintained that this is a multi-faceted topic, but I didn’t realize how true that statement was.

Identity – online content is a projection of our identity into the digital world.  E-mails, photos, connections and conversations provide a corpus of data allowing for unprecedented study and preservation of identity.

Human-computer interaction – the study of how we interact with computers.  Closely linked to identity, computers have become our companions in life.  They’re contents provide records of our thinking, communications and pleasures.

Estate planning – the traditional practice of law that helped individuals plan the disposition of their assets.  Our digital assets are becoming increasingly valuable.  It’s time for a legally-sound process to protect them and allow us to pass them along to the next generation.

Funeral service - end of life care and remembrance.  The way we remember and honor the decreased is changing.  Online memorials and gatherings are an increasing occurrence and are no less real than their offline counterparts.

Archives and preservation – archivists have worked for years to collect and preserve tangible information for centuries.  Now in an digital world they are working to collect and preserve not just physical, but “born digital” assets as well.

I’m sure that I missed a few.  Can you think of any others?  Comment it up, folks.

What’s Your Preference? What do you want to happen to your Facebook profile. Should it:

1. be turned into a memorial
2. be archived
3. be deleted
4. something else?

Let us know what you think.

With the recent increase in visits to this site, I’ve been explaining its purpose more often in conversation with others. Generally speaking those who are technically-minded understand the issues with digital death and are surprised that they hadn’t considered them before. That epiphany is my favorite moment in any conversation about this. But I’ve talked with more people recently who don’t get it. One person today told me this “I think of it just like I think of what happens to my body: I won’t be here to care.” I may have paraphrased that inadvertently due to my memory, but I must say that I completely disagree with that sentiment.

Digital assets are rapidly replacing tangible ones. Consider family photos. These days they are more likely to be digital from the time they’re taken. Archivists refer to this as a “born-digital” asset. These born-digital assets, in this case digital photographs, are family heirlooms, a vital part of your identity. Passing these heirlooms to the next generation is not just a luxury, it’s an integral part of identity preservation. We’ve been doing this for ages. By passing an object of our identity along, we can leave a story or memory behind. It’s important to know how your survivors will obtain your born-digital assets, because they won’t find a drawer of printed photos in your residence, they’ll have to go looking on your computer or in the cloud.

The issue of identity preservation is just one of many others.  What about access to vital information like emails or web hosting accounts?  How about the necessity to delete some content, to hide things you wouldn’t want others to know?  I could probably think of a million other reasons why this issue is important, but the bottom line is that the more digital assets you have (and it’s growing, trust me) the problem will only grow.

To that thought, I’d like to hear some of the reasons you’re considering the digital afterlife.  Comment it up, folks.

Once you’re dead and gone – past the time when anyone that you know is alive – will your digital identity remain? Will your future descendants be able to look at your images and videos, read your writing, and get to know what your life was like here on Earth?

Most likely, but currently there is nothing to guarantee that. We would need an institution devoted to maintaining an individual’s digital identity, kind of like a digital cemetery. But instead of cutting the grass and tending flowers, the cemetery will tend your personal data.

There are companies that are beginning to offer services like these. But will the service outlive you? The internet seems to reinvent itself every 5 years so who knows what it will look like in 50. Cemeteries are protected by law, but data is not. Un-plug the computer and the data is gone.

We wonder if this is the next manifestation in our search for immortality or just Cemetery 2.0? For now we’re not sure, but if  the idea of your digital identity outliving you appeals to you, then you need to start thinking about your online life a little differently because everything that you put online may be here for years, or centuries, after your death. Or it may be gone tomorrow.

For now, you need to make sure that there is someone to look after your data after you die. Prepare. Maybe even subscribe to a service. Either way, start thinking about it, because your digital identity will outlive you, one way or another.

How does the Internet see you? It’s an odd question, but some folks from the MIT Media Lab are thinking about just that. The project is Personas, a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit. From the project’s Web site:

It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

A seemingly authoritative personal profile. In case you missed it, that’s exactly the point. Some time in the future someone may want to know about you. Provided that enough of your content survives, this is the type of profile they will find. Even the best data mining technologies lack the ability to distinguish the content of several people who share the same name. The profile is thus an aggregate profile of several different people.

This is a problem. If you’re to be remembered for you you are, then your identity can’t be confused with others. This example is a reminder that you can’t rely upon the cloud to handle the sorting. It takes planning and effort on your part and that of your survivors.

When researching the various services that deal with the digital afterlife, a certain pattern started to emerge.  I call this pattern the three stages of the digital afterlife: missed, remembered, forgotten.  I’ll address each in that order, naturally.

Missed

This is the stage that occurs right after death.  You’ve left a void and your survivors need to step in and handle your final affairs.  Things like closing accounts and distributing assets.  Online services exist that allow you to share vital information that your survivors will need and send final messages to them.

Remembered

Once your affairs are in order, your survivors will remember you.  Tangible items like photographs and your headstone will help them do so.  This stage lasts from the time your affairs are in order until those who knew you have also passed.  A few online services help you or your survivors create an online memorial, but there are much fewer than those which address the first stage.

Forgotten

At this point, your identity, both online and offline has passed.  Nobody remembers you first hand and what remains of your existence is a relic of a former time.  Online content lacks context, is stored in legacy formats and hasn’t been curated in years.  As far as I’m aware, there are no services addressing this stage.  This is where the real potential exists in this industry.  Imagine being able to examine the online content of your ancestors and know who they were and what they thought.  I’m not sure how this will work, but we’re here to talk about it.

I have two friends, Paul and Richard. They only know each other through me. What happens to that social connection when I die?

Normally all the social connections created through me after I die may slowly decay. As Richard and Paul die, only the physical artifacts (the photos, letters, etc.) remain. 100 years from now, their relationship to me and each other may be more dead and forgotten than I am.

The creation of a social reef.

Richard and Paul are both “friends” of mine on Facebook. When I die, my digital social skeleton (my Facebook profile) will still connect them, as long as my profile is in place.

Digital social skeletons would create a social reef, a skeletal framework like the great coral reefs. Social reefs would be made of millions of social connections devoid of the life that created them. The questions is whether or not the new online skeletons will decay over time, or whether they will become a foundation for a larger social reef to form on top of them.

All I can imagine are digital archeologists a hundred years from now, with super user access, spelunking into the caves of deceased social networks. Running data mining scripts that extract data and illuminate the past.