Till death do us part? Perhaps this phrase no longer applies. The age of digital afterlife has arrived, where even dying does not end our online presence. So here is how our life continues, without us, on the Internet and social networks.
Digital afterlife what is it?
Digital Afterlife is a term, increasingly used, to describe everything related to our digital identity after death. All of our accounts, social networks but also e-mail, contain our data that at the time of our death remain there paradoxically stuck in a virtual limbo between life and death. In the past, upon a person's death the legally recognized trustee could search for paper records of bank accounts, stocks, bills to be paid. The situation today is very different; many have chosen to go paperless, digitizing, instead, all our data. In some cases it may happen that this data has been encrypted by the deceased, so made unreadable, in others that service providers do not allow access upon authorization. Thus much of our living baggage is ruinously lost. Sometime in 2013, the IT company McAfee released a survey suggesting that people evaluate their digital assets, that is, those created, sent, received or stored digitally. It turned out from the survey that the average respondent said that one's digital personal memories hover around the value of about $17,000.
Facebook postmortem
Increasingly, sites have added options to allow us to plan to manage our accounts when we are no longer able to do so. Among others Facebook, which has been almost forced to seek a solution to this problem considering that it is becoming a veritable online graveyard. It is even estimated that by 2098 the number of dead people on Facebook will exceed the number of living people.
Zuckemerg's crew has introduced the possibility of switching from a standard profile to a memorial one, entrusted to a legacy contact, that is, a trusted contact who can use it posthumously. Facebook's usage options remain almost the same as the classic ones; in fact, a legacy contact can write posts, respond to friend requests, and even update the profile picture and cover photo.
Revive thanks to bots
Considered one of the most successful applications of marketing automation, bots could also have other future purposes, how about giving away eternity? It is from this premise that Eugenia Kuyda, a startupper in Silicon Valley, who digitally recreated her friend Roman Mazurenko, who died back in 2015. The whole story of the project can be read here.
In short what today responds when you start a conversation with Roman is a chatbot, which is a program that mimics his way of expressing himself and his personality. In order for the bot to best reflect Roman, the algorithm prioritizes, when possible, words taken from the boy's original messages. After all, what is the wish of anyone who loses a loved one? That one can still talk to him, tell him at least one more time, "I love you." The chatbot could thus be a digital resurrection the most humanly useful mode of exploitation of the digital afterlife. All of this highlights how the ever-strong interest in the afterlife can take advantage of new innovations in technology and artificial inteligence. For now, Eugenia Kuyda's beginning project has culminated in Replika , a bot that while conversing with us absorbs our personality.
Other digital afterlife projects
While we talk about digital afterlife and the fate of one's social network profiles after death, there are already those who promise immortality on the web: Eter9. It is a platform that, thanks to artificial intelligence, analyzes our current social activity to learn about tastes and personalities, to the point of figuring out what we might post in the future, even when we are gone. No doubt another fascinating experiment in artificial intelligence.
German designer Leoni Fischer, on the other hand, has created a different digital afterlife project. Hers is a particular way of bringing the dead to life using their Facebook accounts and the pile of data in them, transforming them into something creative. In Necropolis, everyday objects become lamps, lit in a different rhythm thanks to the algorithm of the deceased person's Facebook account.
Death in the digital age
Death will always remain difficult to accept, yet the gestation of grief has been profoundly altered by the Internet and social networks, although we often do not realize it. It is now the practice when a famous person dies that social networks are the main place for people to express their grief, giving rise to a chain of memories that winds between posts and comments, effectively making a mournful event a moment of public debate. Digital afterlife opens a new frontier on how we think about death. True, social networks make us eternal, giving rise to an image of ourselves that remains crystallized in time and immortal, at least until an external factor decides to intervene.