By Heather Hamilton, contributing writer
With the popularization of social media comes a question of digital life after death. What exactly happens to our online presence once we’re gone? It’s a question that humans have been grappling with for sometime in various ways, which means that digital networks are thinking about it, too.
Gone are the days of saving voicemails from deceased loved ones — instead, we’re facing a multitude of content designed to live on when we do not.
In 2013, Google launched a feature called Inactive Account Manager, which allows users to dictate what happens to your Gmail messages and data from other Google services should your account become inactive. You can either delete your data or have it passed along to a trusted contact, giving Google users a little more control in the digital afterlife.
Prior to 2015, Facebook allowed surviving contacts to either memorialize a profile, which meant that it was frozen and removed from public searches and notifications, to be viewed only by the user’s friend list or deleted. In 2015, the social media network allowed the designation of a legacy contact, which would allow that person to access parts of your profile — pin a post to your timeline, respond to friend requests, update cover and profile photos, and archive your posts and pictures.
Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, and Instagram are just a few others who have developed plans for your digital afterlife too.
But that was, in technology time, a lifetime ago.
A service called Eternime asks on the front page of their website, “Who wants to live forever?” And, while they can’t exactly promise eternal youth, the service, which launches next year and has already signed 37,000 people, creates an avatar based on everything you’ve posted to social media, pictures on your phone, etc. The avatar interacts with your loved ones and, according to founder Marius Ursache, “will be able to offer anything from basic biographical data to being an engaging conversational partner.”
The crassly named DeadSocial.org provides resources regarding what a user could do for all social media networks. They also help you create a digital farewell should the worst happen, posting online messages after your death.
Eter9, which is currently in beta, uses artificial intelligence to learn the ins and outs of your behavior, then creates what the website calls a counterpart. The counterpart continues to interact with your friends after you’ve passed, commenting, posting photos, etc., based on what it’s learned from you in life.
More advanced still are things like the 2045 movement, the brainchild of Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, which hopes to achieve immortality by transferring an individual’s personality into something other than a human body, a scenario in which a digital afterlife isn’t so much an after life so much as an immortal one. They’ve divided their plan into four avatars, available at progressively later dates. The first, albeit highly unlikely, is set to be available by 2020 and aims to give the brain control of a remote robot via a brain-computer interface. This, of course, requires that the brain be living — not so for avatars B, C, and D.
Of course, you can always plan your funeral through any one of a variety of online funeral brokerages if that doesn’t work out.
Sources: Google, Time, CNET, Eternime, BBC, DeadSocial.org, Eter9, 2045
Image Source: Pixabay
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