How We Die Now: People will be forced to consider their posthumous digital reputations. For Eran Alfonta, it began when a friend and his wife went abroad without their three small children, nearly had a car accident, and began to wonder: What if tragedy had not been averted? “When they returned, they told me: ‘Listen, if something had happened to us, our three kids would be left without any message from us, without any goodbye from us,” says Mr. Alfonta, CEO of an Israeli software development company.
“Would you help us build a website so that anyone would be able to log on and record anything we would like to leave behind?’” Mr. Alfonta created ifidie.net, an application that will upload a video clip of your final message to Facebook. Thousands of people have signed up for the service, Mr. Alfonta said.
It doesn’t stop there. Facebook and new applications like ifidie are pioneering the art of transferring the seven stages of grief into the virtual space.
It is Facebook’s standing policy to memorialize a dead user’s account. No one can log on, and no new contacts can be accepted, but friends and family can leave notes of love and sympathy. The site even allows the bereaved to send private messages to the dead, although no one can log in to check on them.
It is Facebook’s standing policy to memorialize a dead user’s account. No one can log on, and no new contacts can be accepted, but friends and family can leave notes of love and sympathy. The site even allows the bereaved to send private messages to the dead, although no one can log in to check on them.
You need to live your life as if your mother is watching
These new applications take the process further, letting users live on virtually through social media and raising the question: will technology, and social media, one day conquer death? Might Facebook and Twitter act as the virtual jar that stores the shadow of a decaying physical brain? And would that be a good or a bad thing?
Companies and individuals alike are starting to confront the opportunities, and ethics, created by these questions.
Erik Qualman, a professor of digital marketing at the Hult International School of Business in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of several books on social media and reputation, said society’s reliance on digital media will force everyone to consider their posthumous digital reputations; eventually, the data left on Facebook and Twitter will become as large a part of one’s legacy as one’s inheritance, family and great works.
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