• Digital Estate Planning
• Posthumous Emails
• Online Memorials

“We wanted to provide a chart to help make finding a service easier.” said Evan Carroll. “The list of companies offering services in this space is growing at such a rapid pace. We simply needed something to tell them apart. Oh, and there’s more to come. Stay tuned.”

This connection between digital archives and headstones provides the missing link between the final physical remains of a human and a digital record of their life. It is a logical enhancement of the traditional cemetery experience and bereavement process. It also creates interesting possibilities for people researching their ancestors.

http://www.personalrosettastone.com

Expect to see more products that digitally enhance death in the coming years.

One of the unconference principles states something like “the people who come are the right people to be there.” In this case, I couldn’t agree more. We had a very diverse group: authors, researchers, technologists, funeral directors, estate planners/attorneys, and entrepreneurs. Some quick notes about the people I met…

It was a pleasure to finally meet Jeremy Toeman and his business partner Adam Burg from Legacy Locker. They’re both good guys and share a spirit of cooperation, not necessarily competition. Speaking of competition, it was good to see Nate Lustig from Entrustet again. Both Legacy Locker and Entrustet (along with DataInherit who couldn’t send a representative) were sponsors of the event.

I also met Sam Beal, founder of online-legacy.com. Sam is helping older individuals record their family stories in digital form. I was especially impressed by his telephone service that allows non-Internet users to phone in their stories. They are then preserved, like a voicemail message, for their family. The oral tradition preserved digitally—what a great idea.

Stacey Pitsillides, PhD student and creator of digitaldeath.eu, joined us from London. I’ve followed her work for some months now and I was pleased to meet her. She also shared some great videos with the group and is going to lend her design talents to the group in the future.

Some professions are slow to change, and with digital death we deal with at least two of them: funeral directors and attorneys. We had both in attendance at Digital Death Day. I was pleased to meet Nathan Dosch (www.digitalestateplanning.com) and Ryan Thogmartin (www.connectingdirectors.com) who are leading the digital charge in both of these industries. Kudos to both of them.

I also want to mention Dazza Greenwood, executive director of the eCitizen Foundation, which addresses legal and policy issues for tomorrow’s Internet systems. I’m personally excited to see a policy leader in the group and I’m sure Dazza and the Foundation will help us raise awareness and create policies for dealing with death on the Internet.

Of course, I also have to recognize Kaliya Hamlin and her team for coordinating the event. Having everyone in the same room was exactly what our community needed to move forward.

There were many others who contributed great ideas—too many to name. Thanks to everyone for the great ideas. I’ll devote a future post to the new ideas that came out of the event, but for now I’ll say that the event was an overwhelming success and I look forward to Digital Death Day 2011. (I’ve actually signed on to help coordinate the next event.) It’s an exciting time for the Digital Death community. Onward!

HCI at the End of Life
April 10th, 2010
Workshop at CHI 2010 restricted to those who submitted position papers. Primarily an academic audience.
Cost: $175 plus variable costs for CHI.

Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age
April 17th, 2010
One day seminar at the National University of Singapore. Again, a primarily academic audience.
Cost: free

Digital Death Day
May 20th, 2010
This event is a one-day un-conference co-located with the 10th Internet Identity Conference in Mountain View, CA. It’s audience seems to be primarily professional.
Cost: $75

While I have some academic pursuits, the exclusivity of the CHI workshop and the distance required to visit Singapore will keep me away. I’m seriously considering Digital Death Day. It looks to be the the most relevant and accessible to me.

Virtual Interviews: A Chat With Darwin’s Ghost
#syntheticinterview
Ralph Vituccio and John Dessler
Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center
Synthetic Interview is a unique technology that allows people to have a conversation with a character or persona as if that person were present in real-time. The goal is creating immersive experiences, allowing guests to interact with a digital character from either the past, the present or the future.

People Die, Profiles Don’t
#peopledieprofilesdont
Jesse Davis with Entrustet
Talk about companies and how they deal with users deaths. What can websites do to streamline the process of handling the deceased’s wishes for their online accounts?

eSee Technologies
#eSeetech
Ian Mitchell
Augmented Reality device that may serve life loggers and average Web users alike at eseetechnologies.com.

I also saw this article that Apple has hired Richard DeVaul of AWare Technologies who is an expert in heads up technology. Can you say iSee?

What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?
#phonehad5senses
Ted Power of Google
The phone in your pocket has the sense of sight (camera), sound (microphone), touch and location. They also have sense of light, proximity, acceleration, orientation. All these senses potentially serve to describe your experiences and enrich your digital identity.

My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete
#mylifetaketwo
Panel
Most of us have incidents in our past that we’d rather leave there – but that’s getting harder in a world teeming with tools and devices that capture our actions and record them forever. Do we have a ”right to delete” records and data about ourselves? Can we? Should we?

Have You Planned for Your Digital Afterlife?
Interview with Adel Mcalear
@DigitalLegacy

Without doubt, 2009 was the emerging year for the digital afterlife.  Since we started keeping track in June, the digital afterlife has appeared in blogs and the media nearly 60 times, and I’m sure we missed a few articles along the way. 2009 also brought a deluge of online services that help individuals manage their digital afterlife or memorialize their loved ones.  We didn’t keep up with the launch date for each new service, but there we learned of at least 10 new services in 2009.  With all of this buzz it’s safe to say that more and more people are thinking about the digital afterlife.

So what’s next?  In 2010 awareness of digital afterlife issues will increase and the industry will continue to grow at a rapid pace.  Trendwatching.com says that the digital afterlife is a part of an overall trend of “profile myning,” or taking control of your own profiles.  Internet users are increasingly aware of their online identity and are taking steps to control it.

With personal profiles (which are the nucleus of one’s personal brand) representing an ever-greater emotional and financial value, expect a burgeoning market for services that protect, store, and, in case of emergencies/death, arrange handing over of one’s digital estate to trusted others. – trendwatching.com

Standards
There is not yet a best practice for dealing with deceased users’ content.  Practices vary across sites and many sites do not have a standard practice in place.  We expect to see efforts form around standardization, as more attorneys and estate planners gain interest in the subject.

More content
The idea that personal computers should primarily use local storage (aka your hard drive) is becoming a thing of the past.  Flickr is great for photos and Google Docs is starting to perform as well as desktop-based software.  The recent Chrome OS more or less solidifies the fact that the browser is the new operating system.  This trend means more content in the cloud that will require afterlife planning.

Competition
The digital afterlife industry is still very young and there’s no clear leader.  Right now, services can roughly be divided into three categories,  estate planning, posthumous messaging or online memorials. We suspect that like any emerging industry, the competition will heat up and these services will work to differentiate from others.

Increased digital component in funerals
Hong Kong recently turned to online memorials to help deal with the shortage of burial plots.  Funeral homes across the US are using DVD slide shows or other multimedia during services.  With some places replacing graves with online memorials and technology making its way into the funeral home, we expect more to come on this front.  Too bad Eternal Space didn’t hold on longer.

In summary 2010 will be another emerging year, but will be full of exciting developments for the industry.  We’ll be here at The Digital Beyond to keep you informed.

Photo credit to Atomische on Flickr.

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.

We also have a checklist to help you plan for your digital afterlife.

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Lately I’ve been consumed with research in pursuit of my masters degree and in that I’m hoping to expand the existing body of academic research to include issues surrounding the digital afterlife. It goes without saying that an understanding of online identity is critical to the study of a digital afterlife.

We’ve discussed several times the value of the past, that desire to know more about those who came before you.  And we’ve postulated that the digital age presents an opportunity for individuals to be known by future generations through their online postings.  Preservation issues aside, this raises the question of identity.  Is an online persona an accurate reflection of and individual?  For our purposes, lets assume that an online persona is the summation of one’s online content, including relationships to others and their content.

danah boyd‘s 2002 thesis from MIT discusses a model of identity that separates the internal and social identities.  To use the analogy provided by Erving Goffman, an individual presents their internal identity as if they were a performer on a stage.  They are influenced by a desire to be perceived in the best possible way depending upon the audience or environment.  There is a difference between the internal and the external or social identity.  The external one is a projection of the internal.  Yet this is only a portion of one’s online identity.

Online, we can examine the reflections that others make to one’s online postings.  These reflections take the form of comments, links and replies. These play an almost equal part in interpreting identity.  They can tell us if others agree with the projections that an individual makes, we can also make inferences about identity based upon the identities of those with whom they interact.

Gary Marchionini, one of my professors, provided the information science community with a new notion of information, the  proflection of self online.  The term, proflection, combines both the projections of an individual and the reflection that others make upon it.

All of this said, let’s go back to our core question.  Are online personas an accurate reflection of an individual’s identity?  There’s no real cut-and-dry answer, but the online persona is an interesting set of data that shows how an individual wants to be perceived and the reflections made by their social network.

Academics aside, what do you think?  Does your Facebook profile, blog and other profiles present an accurate view of who you are and what you believe?

Photo credit: Internet- Good or Bad? by Mikey Gottawa