In the morning, many of us reach first for our digital device. We check our phones before we get out of bed. We scroll through our inbox before we have our first meal. Our Twitter feed, our Instagram feed, I do it, you do it, it’s all part of the standard morning routine today. In fact, it’s pretty hard to visualize a normal week, let alone a life, without emails, status updates, and online purchases. But have you ever thought about what happens to all of your accounts when that inevitable day comes, and you can no longer log onto them yourself anymore when you die?
Thanks to our culture’s growing enthusiasm for sharing personal information, which opens a very rare window into a forbidden dimension of life, death has now been able to enter into several conversations. It can crawl its way onto social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram more and more. But the main question is, what will this do to us? How does discussing more about death change the way we approach it both when it’s close at hand and during our everyday lives?
Death is certainly not how it’s portrayed in the movies, with last words and your life flashing before your eyes. Death is a fact of life. When someone passes away, they’re no longer physically here however their digital self continues to remain alive. According to the calculations of BlackBook Media’s Executive Editor Chris Mohney, there are more than 5 million accounts on Facebook that are inactive due to death- but that’s just Facebook. Think about a myriad of abandoned accounts on other social sites and online services present out there due to death. After someone passes away, their physical presence may not be there however their digital assets live on in the form of computer files and online data. This may not be a big deal for some but for others, the thought of leaving digital assets unattended for eternity after death is unimaginable.
The likelihood of digitally communicating with someone from beyond the grave is no longer the stuff that only exists in science fiction. The technology to create promising digital surrogates of the dead is rapidly evolving, with researchers predicting its mainstream viability within almost a decade. In the meantime, the internet presents us with new opportunities to share memories and cope with loss. It has made grieving easier by enabling certain features such as website memorials, communal grieving across social media, and even online messenger services offering support. Facebook pages can remain active or memorialized long after a person has died and allows users to post messages on their wall. Services such as Eterni.me advertise virtual immortality by gathering Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram pictures, and emails into an accessible multimedia memorial. This website will also create a digital avatar in the likeness of the deceased so people in the future could actually interact with your memories, stories and ideas, almost as if they were talking to you.
If it’s all starting to sound like a plot from Black Mirror, that’s because it is. Be Right Back, an episode of Charlie Brooker’s dark, futuristic series, focuses on grief bots which let you chat with a digital version of someone who has passed away. In this episode, a pregnant widow uses a service to collect her dead partner’s texts, emails, photos, audio recordings, and digital archives to reconstruct him first into a chatbot that is able to exchange text messages with her, and then ultimately into a realistic android. The narrative suggests that attempts to preserve our loved ones in a digital afterlife will result in painful circumstances. It also raises the question of whether a service able to turn a dead person into a chatbot would be venturing into an ethical dark dimension, interfering with our ability to process the reality of death. And guess what? This eerie vision of near future from Black Mirror is actually already present, and it’s getting smarter.
Because social media platforms govern how users are represented in systems, they also shape the contexts of creation and future access to personal information. There exist representational and access limits in these platforms because social media data rely on networked resources for contextual integrity, which raises questions about the ongoing management of personal information after a user has died. In a “digital will,” a person can specify what happens with their social media accounts in the event of death. Dead Social also allows users to name a “legacy contact” to control those accounts. It advises folks to appoint someone they trust as an online executor, and to hand over all passwords and a clear statement about how you’d like each of your accounts handled after your death. For instance: would you like your Timeline to end when you do (in which case, you better leave that online executor clear instructions to close the account)? Or, would you rather have your profile “memorialized” where Facebook speaks for an account that lives on, so friends can periodically post messages about how much they miss you? The service also allows people to compose goodbye notes, birthday messages, and other communique for release at a specified time. Gerry Beyer, a national expert in estate and trust issues, believes that all adults should get their virtual assets in order, sooner rather than later. After all, think about all the mess we’re all potentially leaving behind. From banking passwords to Ebay and LinkedIn log-in’s, without some sort of long-range plan, our digital devices are a jumble of personal and financial data our heirs wouldn’t possibly make sense of.
We are often so attached to our social media accounts because it allows us to explore aspects of our identities that we feel we cannot share with the people that we are close to in the physical world. In a way, we’re all writing our obituaries whenever we post something to social media, and your Facebook page might one day serve as a digital tombstone. Although talking to someone from beyond the grave may sound creepy, it may offer some measure of comfort to your loved ones. Think of it as a high-tech equivalent of assembling a scrapbook, or writing letters for your kids and grandchildren to open when you pass. Sometimes it’s less frightening to think of death when you know you won’t vanish wholly into the void—but remain, in a sense, in the hearts and text conversations of the people you loved the most. So the next time you log onto Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram, take a moment and think about who you’d like to leave all those pictures to. After all, you can be careful with social media posts; whether you want those digital communiques to represent you posthumously is another question.