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 […]
Archive | Archival
Archive your digital identity, the afterlife
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 […]
Your Online Persona
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 […]
Stages of the Digital Afterlife
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 […]
Social reefs
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, […]
The Digital Afterlife: An Interview with John Romano
Yesterday John and I sat down to discuss some of the issues surrounding the digital afterlife. At the end of our conversation we recorded the first installment of our podcast series. I hope you enjoy the podcast. The Digital Afterlife: An Interview with John Romano