No longer with us, his spirit/account/avatar lives on

Apologies for the morbidity of this post, but I recently read this slightly unsettling article in the New York Times, which considers the value of our online life once we kick the bucket.

The article suggests that an increasing majority of us no longer log and file physical journals, letters or photographs to pass on or for people to find stowed at the back of a cupboard. Instead, much of our life now exists online – photos, which often log a narrative, exist on Flickr; conversations with friends live on Facebook; musical opinions and preferences sit like a virtual CD rack on Last.fm or Spotify; thoughts and musings can be found in blog posts and Twitter accounts. Collectively, this stuff is becoming the record of our life and exploits.

Such patterns are resulting in research being carried out in this area (e.g. social media and marketing consultant Adele McAlear’s Death and Digital Legacy explores the relationship between death, social media and technology) and business ventures promising to manage your ‘digital assets’ (e.g. Legacy Locker and DataInherit). Since 2007, Facebook has been able to turn ‘dead profiles’ into insta-memorials, which “removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only”. Estimates, by the way, predict that anywhere between 200,000 and 375,000 – there’s even an infographic on it.

This short article fasts forward to the future and hypothesises about the point in time that the number of ‘dead profiles’ will outnumber the living profiles. Granted this is a long way off, but I suppose, cumulatively, it’s an eventual possibility. More to the point though, what happens if we outlive these networks? The current demise of MySpace shows its certainly possible – what becomes of our digital legacy then?