After your last post...

After your last post...

We are all a part of the new digital era. That implies that we are all creating a lot of data on the internet. By posting on Facebook, Twitter, by uploading videos, photos we are creating a kind of archive of our personal life. This new digital phenomenon differentiates us from the previous generations. While our parents and grandparents have old boxes full of photos, diaries and letters, we have Facebook, twitter and Google accounts. That may be a good thing, it could be a sad evolution as well. In fact, that amount of online data offers some (scary) possibilities…

Ifidie.net : what will you leave behind ?

Some services have been developed in order to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die. One of them is ifidie.net. It consists in recording a message via your webcam that will be published after you die. You have to choose three reliable friends (“trusties”) that will be in charge to report your death. After that, the message will be posted on your Facebook profile. This message could be “a favorite joke, a long kept secret, some valuable advices” according to the advert. It’s kind of creepy… isn’t it ?

Another service is called 1,000 memories and its aim is to create an online tribute to your loved ones, friends and family, with photos, videos and stories that they can post after your die. Another one, named DeadSocial, allows you to manage a calendar of several publication in different social networks after you’re gone…

What’s next ?

But it’s going further than that… With the evolution of technology and the amount of personal data available online, systems will be able to analyze your entire life based on your personal content : tweets,  photos, videos, blog posts... And when that will happen, when technology will enable to do that, it's going to be possible for our digital personas to continue to interact with the real world after our death thanks to the amount of content we are creating and technology's ability to make sense of it all…
There already some experiments. An application named My Next Tweet can everything you’ve posted via Twitter to make some predictions of what you may say next. At the moment, this service is not working very well and the results are quite funny but we can think that this kind of services is going to be improved in five, ten or twenty years as the technology improves.

According to Adam Ostrow, the editor in chief of Mashable, MIT’s labs are currently working on robot project that could be able to interact like a human being. He made the followed supposition:”What if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundred of thousand piece of content that person produces in their lifetime?”  Adam Ostrow made the assumption that it would be possible in a near future to combine all those technologies “ to beam representation of our loved ones […] interacting in a very lifelike way based on the content they created while they were alive”. Ouch. That’s really scary…

Do we want that to happen?

In my opinion those project, ideas are completely wrong. What’s the point of recording a message that will be published on your Facebook after your death when you can just do it by yourself, in a notebook, in a formal paper or whatever. What would be the reaction of your family and friends when they will see this post in their timeline? Will it ease the pain ? Absolutely not.  I think that death shouldn’t be questionable and I think that is stupid to maintain your loved ones in some artificial digital way. I think that all of those project are wrong.

Nevertheless if you are interested in the “digital death” topic you can have a look of the video below that explain what is the process and what are the possibilities to transfer, conserve or delete your personal data after you’re gone.