Digital death

"Many social media tools and services are free to use. This fact often leads users to the mistaken presumption that the associated data generated whilst utilising these tools and services is without value. Users often focus on the social and presumed ephemeral nature of communication – imagining something that happens but then has no further record or value, akin to a telephone call – while corporations behind these tools tend to focus on the media side, the lasting value of these traces which can be combined, mined and analysed for new insight and revenue generation. This paper seeks to explore this social media contradiction in two ways. Firstly, a cursory examination of Google and Facebook will demonstrate how data mining and analysis are core practices for these corporate giants, central to their functioning, development and expansion. Yet the public rhetoric of these companies is not about the exchange of personal information for services, but rather the more utopian notions of organising the world’s information, or bringing everyone together through sharing.

The second section of this paper examines some of the core ramifications of death in terms of social media, asking what happens when a user suddenly exists only as recorded media fragments, at least in digital terms. Death, at first glance, renders users (or post-users) without agency or, implicitly, value to companies which data-mine ongoing social practices. Yet the emergence of digital legacy management highlights the value of the data generated using social media, a value which persists even after death. The question of a digital estate thus illustrates the cumulative value of social media as media, even on an individual level. The ways Facebook and Google approach digital death are examined, demonstrating policies which enshrine the agency and rights of living users, but become far less coherent posthumously. Finally, along with digital legacy management, I will examine the potential for posthumous digital legacies which may, in some macabre ways, actually reanimate some aspects of a deceased user’s presence, such as the Lives On service which touts the slogan “when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting”. Cumulatively, mapping digital legacy management by large online corporations, and the affordances of more focussed services dealing with digital death, illustrates the value of data generated by social media users, and the continued importance of the data even beyond the grave."

While social media is, by definition, about connecting multiple people, many discussions about social media platforms and practices presume that accounts and profiles are managed by individual users with the agency to make fully-informed choices about their activities. When discussing children, especially younger children, their agency is at times characterised as partial, or emerging, but with the presumption that with sufficient time they will eventually reach the same (presumed) status and ability as adult users (Livingstone & Third, 2017). At the other end of life, at the moment of death, the social media traces and online presences that persist after a user has passed away also present challenges in terms of agency.  While there is an increasing push to include some sort of instructions about digital property in wills, these instructions are currently few and far between. Some platforms have deployed algorithmic solutions which have begun to address the reality of deceased users, but these are, at best, partial and largely insufficient responses. With these two figures in mind, I argue that the very young—from conception to birth and early infancy—and the recently deceased both act as liminal figures where the question of their (lack of) agency on social media highlights some of the ongoing challenges in presuming that social media traces can always be the responsibility of users with full, or even partial, agency. Rather, using a range of examples, I argue in this chapter that more encompassing ways of thinking about the relationship between social media, networked selves and identities, are needed. Drawing on work from the creative industries, I suggest that the term co-creation can be reframed to emphasise the way that social media almost always entails creating other people’s identities as much as our own. Parents and carers are the first arbiters and co-creators of a young person’s life, making a large number of important choices about what sort of private or public online presence a newly born baby will have, how that presence will develop over time, on which platforms, and under which circumstances. Parents, in effect, can choose to name their children into being online, and in doing so must navigate the parental joys of sharing whilst balancing this against the rights of the child to, amongst other things, privacy in the present and future. At the other end of life, but in functionally similar ways, the loved ones left behind by the recently deceased will often need to make decisions about which social media profiles and traces persist after that user has died, how these traces will be (re)framed, and what online spaces will persist (if any), possibly in the form of online memorials. Moreover, both ends of life are now situated in an online context where real identities and real names, which persist over time, are both expected and demanded by the policies and practices of online platforms. The use of real names on social media amplifies the impact and longevity of social media traces, whether early or late in life. In outlining the challenges inherent in framing the very young, and the recently deceased, online, I argue in this chapter that a broader sense of agency and impact is needed across all life-stages on social media.  A wider lens in terms of the way users contribute to the stories of each other on social media may well assist us all in making decisions about online material that inevitably impact the lives and legacies of other people.

Taking the cue from some reflections by Walter Benjamin and Eugene Minkowski, the present paper wants to analyze the relationship between death and narration in the age of digital culture. In fact, the so-called “Digital Death” revolutionizes our bond with death, with the traditional thought of immortality and with the Geisterwelt. Once the author has defined the “Digital Death”, this paper firstly describes some current forms of digital communication (Eterni.me, Eter9) that try to get rid of death, impoverishing narrations and handed-down knowledge. Secondly, it describes other forms (Facebook and social networks in general) that, on the contrary, offer new resources through which we can enrich our memory of the dead, thus reinvigorating the role of death as an authority from which all narrated stories stem.

Keywords: Digital Death, Immortality, Narration, Social Network, End-Life

Les questions qui sont soulevées ici
sont d’ordre anthropologique, psychologique,
social ou éthique. Quelle est la signification du mourir sur le
Web (Cavallari, 2013) ? Comment investir des espaces numériques
où les traces de personnes disparues persistent tandis
que des proches endeuillés voudraient les voir disparaître à
jamais ? Les objets connectés interrogent les formes et le
fonctionnement qu’un portrait numérique du défunt ou de la
défunte pourrait avoir : fragmentaire, public, ouvert ? Les sites
Web mémoriels et mausolées virtuels favorisent-ils l’apprivoisement
de la perte par l’entremise d’une reconnaissance
sociale à travers un partage d’informations dans des lieux
numériques ou, au contraire, agissent-ils comme des espaces
de « répétition traumatique » (Missonnier, 2015) ? Comment
les pratiques numériques relatives à la mort, à la mémoire et
au deuil reconfigurent-elles les « cadres informationnels et
énonciatifs » enchevêtrés aux technologies numériques (Pène,
2011) ? Dans quelle mesure ces pratiques participent-elles
d’un « processus de désinstitutionnalisation du deuil collectif »
(Wrona, 2011) ?

In our contemporary society, people leave behind a great amount of digital assets which are not accessible to their relatives after they die. There is currently a gap between the need for access to online accounts of the deceased, as could be witnessed in several high-profile cases, and the online service providers policies and practices regarding the granting of said access.
We suspect that the above-mentioned gap is a prevalent problem, but most people have not yet experienced it and, thus, remain oblivious to its existence. In order to confirm this hypothesis, we conducted an online survey in Israel in 2013, asking people for their opinion: what should the online service providers' policies be, in regard to this issue?
The survey gathered data from 506 respondents. While a majority of the respondents indicated they would be
interested in gaining access to their relatives' e-mail accounts, social media accounts and cellular phones (80%–91% altogether), they were less eager to gain access to other digital legacy categories, such as website surfing history and Internet search history (52%–75%). The wish was also different when dealing with the digital legacies of children and spouses, as opposed to parents.
The overall amount of respondents wishing to gain access to the website surfing history and Internet search history was significantly smaller in comparison to the other digital legacy categories (53%–75% and 52%–74%, respectively). In all of the above cases, the wish to gain access to children's digital legacies was greater than the wish expressed towards spouses' legacies, which was greater still than the wish expressed towards parents' legacies.
Our results show that the majority of respondents (70.8%) believed that online service providers should give access to online legacies to first-degree relatives, unless otherwise stated by the deceased. This indicates once again the existence of a gap between existing policies and the needs and wishes of the public. We believe this gap can be bridged by a few alterations of existing policies and laws. This point is addressed in the paper, in hopes of creating a future change for the families of the deceased.

In the opening chapter of this volume, David Morgan speaks of material culture in terms of ‘objects, spaces, bodies and the practices of using them . . . images, emotions, sensations, spaces, food, dress or the material practices of putting the body to work.’ ‘To study religious material culture’, he explains, ‘is to study how people build and maintain the cultural domains that are the shape of their social lives’, treating objects as primary aspects of what religion is and how it is lived.

This chapter seeks to explore and question this understanding of the material object by applying it to the realm of mediation. First, what would it mean to think of websites, mobile phone apps or QR codes as objects, to be studied as part of material cultures? Second, how can we apply Morgan’s approach to “production” – in terms of medium, design and manufacture – to generate insights into the place of digital media in contemporary religion?

I will begin by tracing the Internet’s shift over time from the alternative reality of “cyberspace” to its contemporary status as the mundane, often invisible infrastructure of everyday life. Understanding this change in our relationship with computer-mediated communication provides an important foundation for material analysis. I will then discuss digital technology and online content as kinds of “materiality”, drawing on recent discussions in material religion and digital media studies.

To apply a material approach to the study of digital production, I will introduce examples taken from two rather different fields: digital Bibles and online memorials. As we shall see, the materiality of digital media is not limited to the level of technologies and devices. Digital software and content also function just like material objects: they are produced, classified and circulated, and they guide, structure, constrain and make concrete our actions and relations. By paying attention to the different dimensions of the materiality of media, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which religion today is structured and provoked by material objects and their creators.

Death is a part of life, not a separation from life. To understand the phenomenon of the not-being of others constitutes the ontological understanding of my own life. Through experiencing the death of others you learn about your own possibility of death, through which you can exist in the way that you understand your own Being. Death means more than just spatial separation. Death indicates the stoppage of the time of the person who dies. The living live towards the future, but the dead stay in the past. The way that the living share the present moment with the dead is to remember them. The phenomenon of death is therefore fundamentally a reversed time movement, namely, not from the present to the future, but from the present to the past. Death is not at all a new topic for philosophy; it has been discussed ever since humanity studies first began, because we all as finite entities have to face death as a crucial part of life. However, the digital dead is a new phenomenon of this contemporary digitalized world, which traditional philosophy so far has not yet deeply analyzed. The core issue of the digital dead lies in the fact that their time appears to continue in the living way. The active accounts of social network services or avatars of the dead function differently from the physical articles left by the deceased. Physical articles reflect the memories of the past, but the digital dead appear to be existing in the present, facing the future. What is crucial for understanding my actual existence in the world stems necessarily from coexistence with others. The physical contact with tangible entities in the world constitutes the basis of my understanding of the world in which I exist. What is the ontological status of the digital dead, and what is the existential meaning of the digital dead for the living?

Il fascicolo affronta i cambiamenti che la cultura digitale e il post–umano hanno apportato alla nostra esperienza della morte e dell’immortalità. Da una parte, si sofferma sul paradosso che concerne il morto, vale a dire l’incarnazione della presenza di un assente, in riferimento alla fotografia, alla Digital Death e alla figura metaforica dello zombie. Da un’altra, invece, si concentra sulle conseguenze sociali delle teorie immortaliste del transumanesimo e delle trasformazioni del “memento mori” all’interno del conflitto attuale tra culture differenti. L’obiettivo è un’ermeneutica del morire, capace di offrire ai Death Studies un contributo rilevante per comprendere come la nostra società stia mutando.

One of the key findings of research in the field of digital death studies has been that the bereaved talk to the dead online. Visit almost any memorial page on Facebook, and you’ll see this in action (...) These kinds of cases point to ways in which the analytical boundary between religion and nonreligion is blurred in everyday life. The question is: is there anything religious about this mythology of a digitally connected heaven? And if so, how can we tell?

For twenty-five years now, digital technology has been an environment in which a room has opened up not only for the discourse on death but also for its commemoration and experience. Since the appearance on the Internet in April 1995 of the World Wide Cemetery, the first online memorial site, death has overcome the frontiers of specialized scientific analysis (both human biomedical and social), law (the notions of identity and the post-mortem properties of data in particular), administrative and bureaucratic management (concerning funeral homes and public funeral services), of its religious preoccupation (which the different faiths confront in an eschatological perspective), of its artistic transfiguration (as literature, poetry, cinema, plastic arts have shown over the centuries and still show today), of its obsessive thematization (necrophilia, profanation, etc.).
The initiative of Canadian engineer Michael Kebbee (quickly followed by others similar) starting from a strictly personal context - his own illness - opened up a space focused on two aspects which later proved to be fundamental: on the one hand, the possibility for all concerned to express the emotions related to death according to their own personal experiences and needs, thanks to a relatively simple and accessible technology; on the other hand, through this same technology, the possibility to communicate and share their own grief and mourning with a community of people in the same condition. Much has changed since then. First of all, digital technology. If we were to retrace a brief history of digital death, we would include in this expression the different forms in which attention to death could manifest itself through digital technology ...

Les questions qui sont soulevées ici sont d’ordre anthropologique, psychologique, social ou éthique. Quelle est la signification du mourir sur le Web (Cavallari, 2013) ? Comment investir des espaces numériques où les traces de personnes disparues persistent tandis que des proches endeuillés voudraient les voir disparaître à jamais ? Les objets connectés interrogent les formes et le fonctionnement qu’un portrait numérique du défunt ou de la défunte pourrait avoir : fragmentaire, public, ouvert ? Les sites Web mémoriels et mausolées virtuels favorisent-ils l’apprivoisement de la perte par l’entremise d’une reconnaissance sociale à travers un partage d’informations dans des lieux numériques ou, au contraire, agissent-ils comme des espaces de « répétition traumatique » (Missonnier, 2015) ? Comment les pratiques numériques relatives à la mort, à la mémoire et au deuil reconfigurent-elles les « cadres informationnels et énonciatifs » enchevêtrés aux technologies numériques (Pène, 2011) ? Dans quelle mesure ces pratiques participent-elles d’un « processus de désinstitutionnalisation du deuil collectif » (Wrona, 2011) ?

A quick glance at the current political, social, technological and artistic reality reveals an increasing popularity of the discourse about the future which is reconceptualized and scrutinized from both theoretical and practical approaches. As soon as it enters the theoretical field, the question of the future becomes a question of the future of philosophy, to the point that it has been said that the future of philosophy itself might be the philosophy of technology (J. C. Pitt). There is a prominent idea that the technological future will cause a revolution in interpersonal relations: the increasingly frequent interaction with AI (vocal assistants, chatbots, etc.) is generating new relationships between human beings and robots, causing problems that are still unclear, but are starting to attract the attentions of scholars and researchers.
The omnipresence of digital objects, especially within social networks, has often determined a pathological nostalgia for the past: when the past tends to overlap with the present, making itself indistinguishable from the latter, we tend to look back, and to not look in front of us. The inability to distinguish the present from the past is also connected to the modus essendi of contemporary neoliberalism, which – in the name of “there is no alternative” – forces us to spend all our energy in recovering the past: we would be not able build a new future anymore, because it appears impossible to be done a priori.
This tendency, according to which we refuse the unusual and keep alive the usual, has been described, in the context of Cultural Studies, as retromania (S. Reynolds), or as slow cancellation of the future (M. Fisher, F. Bifo Berardi). This general pessimism is also connected to the idea that we are approaching the end of the world. The economic and the environmental crisis, combined with the eternal and suffocating presence of the past, are determining the spread of apocalyptic philosophies that, starting from the cosmic pessimism of G. Anders, stress that the end of humanity is near (D. Danowski; E. Viveiros de Castro; E. Thacker; J. Bridle), or even that the end of the Earth itself is coming, to the point that the even the bringing a new life to the world is questioned from the moral standpoint (D. Benatar; T. Ligotti).
On the other hand, an optimistic view of our technological future can be also encountered. The present age, focused on the technological and digital enhancement, has produced the diffusion of transhumanist ideas, revolving around the vision of the entire humanity soon gaining access to the eternal life, sometimes in the form of the digital immortality, through which human beings are to be replaced with their digital identities (from avatars to holograms). In other words, there is a hope for death to be defeated.
From a more general point of view, future is a challenging philosophical problem, engaging discourses in the realms ranging from metaphysics and ontology to politics and ethics. After the spectrality of Derrida and virtuality of Deleuze, that have marked the discourse of the XX century, new ontologies are being formed as either a direct response to the limits of deconstruction, a continuation of non-essence based ontology or an attempt to make a significant conceptual shift in contemporary metaphysics. With the rise of different versions of speculative realism (Q. Meillassoux, G. Harman, R. Brassier, I. H. Grant) and new materialisms (K. Barad, R. Braidotti, E. Grosz, J. Benett) classical philosophical notions of virtuality, potentiality, matter, technology, human and many others are being reshaped and rearticulated not without an attempt at building bridges with other discourses such as science, feminism, science fiction, visual arts, etc. The vast array of different takes on classic philosophical problems shares a similar urge for reshaping philosophical discourse as such and very often reconceptualizing the question of the future turns out to be also an attempt at reimagining the future of philosophy itself.

The upcoming issue of Tropos will be dedicated to the concept of future, with a view to reconstruct its peculiar hermeneutics, which is, its theoretical meaning and many nuances.

The topics include but are not limited to:

- Future and technology: political, social and ethical problematics;
- Ontology of the future: classic and contemporary approaches;
- Virtuality and/or possibility in theory and/or in praxis;
- The future of philosophy as a philosophical problem.

Deadlines
Submission deadline: February 28, 2020
Results of blind reviews: March 31, 2020
Publication date: June 2020

Submission Guidelines
Papers should be submitted to:
- Daina Habdankaitė: d.habdankaite@gmail.com
- Davide Sisto: da.sisto@gmail.com

- Papers should be in English, French, or Italian.
- Papers should be prepared for blind review (double)
- Each submission should consist of two separate documents containing the following:

1) The full paper including:
- Title
- The full paper should not exceed 50,000 characters in total.
- An abstract of no more than 200 words - also including an English title
- 5 keywords
See style sheet below for more detailed information

2) A separate cover letter including the following information:
- The title of the paper
- Your name, affiliation and contact information.
- A biographical presentation of 50-60 words.

General information
Publisher Website: http://www.aracneeditrice.it/aracne…/index.php/riviste.html…
Journal Website: http://troposonline.wordpress.com
Journal Email Address: tropos.filosofia@unito.it
Indexed in: Philosopher’s Index, Philosophy Research Index, Catalogo Italiano dei Periodici (ACNP)

Questions are welcome and should be directed at the editors of the current issue:
- Daina Habdankaitė: d.habdankaite@gmail.com
- Davide Sisto: da.sisto@gmail.com

Style Sheet

For the pre-publication preparation, please read carefully the following instructions.
1) Essays should not exceed 50,000 characters in length and should include:
- your name and affiliation;
- an abstract of no more than 200 words with an English title;
- 5 keywords of the essay;
- a biographical presentation of 50-60 words.
2) The number of footnotes should be kept to a minimum and appear at the end of each page. Reference marks come after punctuation.
3) The bibliographical references should directly appear in the text. Punctuation comes before quotation marks (“ ”) and apices (‘ ’). The reference to a book or an article should appear in brackets: (Derrida 1967: 103)
4) At the end of the article, an alphabetically-ordered list of the references should appear:
- Reference to a book (and to its translation):
Derrida, J., 1967, De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit; Italian translation by R. Balzarotti, F. Bonicalzi, G. Contri, G. Dalmasso, A.C. Loaldi, Della grammatologia, Milano, Jaca Book, 1998.
- Reference to a book, including the year of its first edition, if it is the case:
Heidegger, M., 1971, Sein und Zeit [1927], edited by W. von Hermann, Frankfurt a.M., Klostermann.
- Reference to an edited book:
Caciagli, M., Spreafico, A. (eds.), 1973, Un sistema politico alla prova, Bologna, II Mulino.
- Reference to an article:
Kellner, M.M., 1975, Democracy, “Journal of Politics,” 37, n. 4, pp. 35-64.

4) For further informations, please refer to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (2003).

We live in the information age. Our lives are increasingly digitised. The quotidian has been transformed by innovations in networking, computing and the adoption of new technologies. Yet, we not only live and work in a digital environment, we also die and mourn online. The digital world presents opportunities to investigate new forms of community and material evidence. As we continue to build and use technologies, archaeologists will begin to study the born-digital content of the deceased. Our online activities reveal practices, experiences and engagement with death and new embodiments of funerary practice and agency. The born-digital content of the
deceased and digital funerary practices can create digital mnemonic landscapes. New ways of investigating digital death and the dead in these landscapes now enables a “funerary archaeology of the digital”. Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence capabilities on big data from the billions of interactions between humans and digital
devices: conversations, emotions, voices, images, activities, means that concepts such as posthumanism and transhumanism are no longer confined to sci-fi. The potential to “predict” human actions and digitally “reincarnate” the dead provokes a profound theoretical discussion about how archaeologists will curate and manage personal information in the present and future. As more personal data are shared online concerns are raised over rights, privacy, security, ownership and their long-term implications. These concerns extend beyond the living, to the dead. This paper explores the ethics of a digital public archaeology of the dead in the age of innovation and digital abandonment, while reflecting on the future of our content as a mnemonic space. Archaeologists must consider the theoretical basis of our approach to the investigation of these spaces, to the commercialisation and privatisation of data by corporations, as well as the obsolescence and fragility of digital data.
Ulguim, P. F. 2018. Digital Remains Made Public: Death Online, Digital Mnemonic Landscapes and Their Implications for Archaeologists. Paper presented at 24th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists: Reflecting futures, 5-8 September 2018, Barcelona.

La morte non esiste più. Allo stesso tempo, però, viviamo costantemente circondanti dai morti. Relegata lontano dalla nostra quotidianità, medicalizzata, espunta dalle nostre vite, l'esperienza del morire vive oggi una situazione paradossale, quando le immagini e le parole dei cari estinti tornano e irrompono all'improvviso dagli schermi dei nostri telefoni. Moriamo, ma continuiamo a esistere nella presenza ineliminabile della nostra passata vita online. Social network, chat, siti web costituiscono insieme, ad oggi, il più grande cimitero del mondo. Il territorio esplorato dalla fantascienza, dalla fiction e, recentemente, da una delle serie più perturbanti che mette al centro della sua riflessione il rapporto tra uomo e tecnologia, Black Mirror, sembra superato dalle nuove intelligenze artificiali. Sono già disponibili bot con cui dialogare e capaci di interpretare i nostri stati d'animo per poi sostituirsi a noi quando saremo trapassati, e continuare a parlare con i nostri cari; il profilo Facebook che consultiamo compulsivamente più volte al giorno, quando mancheremo, diventerà una vera e propria lapide virtuale, e i nostri amici potranno continuare a farci gli auguri ogni anno nell'aldilà. E ancora, il web è diventata la più grande piazza pubblica per celebrare il ricordo o condividere anche l'esperienza privata del lutto. Insieme piangiamo i nostri cari, insieme ricordiamo i nostri beniamini. Insieme, in un futuro prossimo, vivremo una seconda vita nella realtà virtuale. Davide Sisto, giovane filosofo che da lungo tempo ha consacrato i suoi studi alla relazione tra morte e cultura digitale, per la prima volta mette insieme un discorso interpretativo che ha al centro il rapporto nuovo della nostra società con la morte indotto dall'avanzamento tecnologico. La morte si fa social è il miglior esempio di umanesimo capace di confrontarsi con l'era digitale. L'uomo ha sempre pensato la morte. Oggi più che mai, il digitale offre un'opportunità per ripensare la morte in una prospettiva rivoluzionata.

Marco Bracconi (Repubblica, 26 agosto 2018): http://ricerca.repubblica.it/…/per-sempre-connessi-con-lald…

Lo speciale di "Mind. Mente & cervello" (settembre 2018): http://www.lescienze.it/…/il_numero_di_mind_di_settembre-4…/

Francesco Paolo De Ceglia (Il Tascabile, 30 agosto 2018): http://www.iltascabile.com/societa/morte-social/

This article outlines the emergence of digital estate planning, a new way of managing post-mortem data, considering its cultural history and political stakes. I argue that Web 2.0 logics of interaction and inclusivity, and the subsequent valorization of social data, have led to a new form of accumulation. Unlike estate planners, who are legal professionals paid to manage the finances of wealthy clientele, digital estate planners are start-up company founders who handle the digital possessions of the masses. Because digital estate planning companies are not lucrative, often providing free services, they tend to quickly fold and vanish. Communicative traces do not contain intrinsic monetary worth in isolation. They are, however, speculatively valuable in aggregate, becoming potential networked heirlooms. They provide legible personality profiles of individuals to advertisers, government agencies, and companies such as Facebook and Google. Communicative traces also contain value in their capacity to produce and maintain social networks and affective bonds. Despite the failures of digital estate planning as an enterprise, networked heirlooms point to the dual financial and affective value of personal data under late capitalism.

This essay wants to summarize the main features of the so-called Digital Death. It aims at highlighting the most important changes now in progress regarding the end of life, immortality, our grieving process and memory. The essay will therefore describe the so-called “digital ghosts”, underline the way in which social networks can be seen as graveyards, show the changes brought about by technology in our relationship with sickness, analyze high-tech inventions related to funeral rites. The aim is providing the reader with a general outline of how digital technologies have gained a role in the relationship between life and death.

How digital technology—from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones—is changing our relationship to death.

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.

Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people's last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person's account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

This paper analyzes the concept of Digital Death as related to post-humanism. In the first part, the article highlights the features of the dialectic between life and death and how said dialectic is changed by the spread of digital culture. In the second part, it dwells on some digital devices aimed at dissociating electronic identity from biological existence, so as to reach a form of immortality. In opposition to these devices, we find social networks, with their intersubjective nature that, as it updates the philosophical concept of Geisterwelt, brings death back at the core of life. In the third and last part, the paper compares digital devices and social networks, underlining the difference between those who want to remove death from life and those who want to preserve the educational role of death in our life.

The following research is concerned with what kind of role the materiality of Internet technologies plays in post-mortem digital legacy (also called digital death), and how digital data bleeds into our mourning practices. It explores these questions by examining how Facebook and Google deal with digital death, and what kind of consequences the materiality of the network entails. Digital data funerals are proposed as an artistic strategy that surpasses post-mortem datafication, and surveillance.

Qui l'introduzione: https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/ricordati-di-me

Ecco che si avvicinano gli ultimi giorni di dicembre e puntualmente Facebook ci propone un video, colorato e un po’ pacchiano, che si intitola «Il tuo anno su Facebook». Dura circa un minuto, e vi si alternano le immagini e i post che nei dodici mesi trascorsi hanno ricevuto il maggior numero di like e commenti. Alla fine del video leggiamo: «A volte, uno sguardo al passato ci aiuta a ricordare quali sono le cose più importanti. Grazie di esserci!».
Proprio questo sguardo al passato – su cui sempre di più si concentrano i social network – offre a Davide Sisto lo spunto per riflettere su come cambia nell’era digitale il nostro rapporto con la memoria e l’oblio. Il passato non esiste realmente: è solo una storia che raccontiamo a noi stessi. Ma cosa succede quando questa storia la raccontiamo non solo a noi ma anche ai nostri follower, registrandola, insieme ad altri milioni di utenti, all’interno dei nostri profili social e sul web, rendendola consultabile per sempre? I social network stanno diventando degli enormi archivi digitali, a partire dai quali è possibile costruire
– in maniera del tutto inedita – una grande autobiografia culturale collettiva, in cui ciascuno contribuisce con parole e immagini a delineare tanto il proprio profilo biografico quanto quello degli altri, plasmando insieme la memoria personale e quella collettiva.
Con gli strumenti della filosofia – che nelle mani di Sisto non ha paura di confrontarsi con i temi più caldi e controversi della cultura digitale – Ricordati di me ci aiuta a esplorare la rivoluzione digitale in corso, che lascerà agli storici del futuro un patrimonio di tipo nuovo. L’organizzazione collettiva dei testi e del linguaggio, che si verifica quotidianamente online, infatti, incoraggia una scrittura non creativa, che per la prima volta attribuisce valore al plagio, al furto, al copia e incolla, all’appropriazione dei testi altrui, ma anche alla cooperazione generale e alla solidarietà scientifica e letteraria.

Digital technologies such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are changing how we live and do research, for example, the ways in which patient-reported outcomes and phenomics big data are curated and analyzed. Digital transformation is everywhere and is reshaping data (im)mortality in a wide range of sectors in medicine, engineering, journalism, and beyond. In this context, thanatechnology is a term introduced by Carla Sofka over two decades ago, referring to "any kind of technology that can be used to deal with death, dying, grief, loss, and illness." The field of thanatechnology has become relevant in the digital age as social media is full of accounts from dead individuals, whereas digital media is often harnessed as a source of data and metadata, and in times of pandemics and normalcy. Emerging macroscale analyses forecast billions of social media user accounts from deceased persons in the current century. What happens to digital remains of persons on...

Nell'articolo viene espressa l'urgenza di riconsiderare il tema della morte alla luce dell'evoluzione tecnologica digitale e di affrontare a livello interdisciplinare la serie di inedite questioni e di importanti interrogativi posti dalla digital death. Si prospetta, infatti, l'impossibilità di comprendere il significato sociale, culturale e religioso della morte, del lutto e dell’immortalità se queste non vengono riconsiderate nella loro relazione con l'ecosistema digitale nel quale una gran parte dell'umanità oggi vive la sua esistenza onlife.

The article expresses the urgency to reconsider the theme of death in the light of digital technological evolution and to tackle the series of unpublished and important questions posed by digital death on an interdisciplinary level. Indeed, the impossibility of understanding the social, cultural and religious significance of death, mourning and immortality is envisaged if these are not reconsidered in their relationship with the digital ecosystem in which a large part of humanity today lives its onlife existence.

Una mia riflessione su un caso particolare relativo al lutto: ha senso mandare un messaggio su WhatsApp a una persona morta? Mi è stato raccontata questa cosa qui. E allora ci ho riflettuto a lungo sopra. Ho riflettuto sulla particolare natura di WhatsApp (a differenza di una lettera, sai se il messaggio è stato ricevuto ed è stato letto), sul desiderio di compiere un simile gesto e sull'impatto emotivo e psicologico che ha tale gesto.
In fondo, WhatsApp, se utilizzato in un’ottica appunto simbolica, con la chiara coscienza della realtà della morte, può divenire un tramite romantico tra chi è rimasto e chi non c’è più. Un modo per mantenere vivo, nella propria mente e nel proprio sentire, il legame. E può anche rappresentare un modo per fare i conti con la realtà della morte, visto che hai la certezza che il messaggio non viene letto.
Un altro esempio interessante del rapporto tra cultura digitale e morte/lutto ai tempi odierni.

SINOSSI DEL LIBRO
La cifra della "rivoluzione digitale" non sta semplicemente nel promuovere grandi cambiamenti, bensì nell'aprire a inedite concezioni del mondo e dell'essere umano. La sfida intellettuale e scientifica alla base di questo volume è, dunque, indagare le implicazioni delle attuali tecnologie digitali (reti telematiche, piattaforme, intelligenza artificiale, big data, Internet delle cose, realtà virtuale ecc.) adottando una prospettiva critica e globale. Ciò corrisponde a superare una visione "tecnocentrica", che troppo spesso si focalizza sul potenziale delle tecnologie sottovalutando il contesto culturale, sociale e politico, oltre che i valori e i modelli ideali degli individui e delle comunità con cui le innovazioni si devono necessariamente confrontare. I contributi all'interno di questo volume esaminano, con gli strumenti tipici delle discipline umanistiche, le diverse modalità in cui gli esseri umani possono rapportarsi al digitale, modificando se stessi e le tecnologie in un intreccio di azioni e retroazioni dinamiche e complesse.

This paper argues that expanding the scope of social media studies to examine birth and early life at one end, and death and memorialisation at the other, demonstrates that social media is never just about an individual, but also the way individuals are always already joined together as families, groups, communities and more. Mapping these ends of identity also reveals more of the nuances of everyday social media use and its impact.

While the early years of online interaction were often framed by notions of identity play, anonymity, pseudonymity and multiplicity, the last five years have seen many of these playful boundaries collapsing with online and offline identity no longer presumed to be easily separable. The dominance of Facebook as the social networking service, and their firm insistence on ‘real’ names and identities has been one of the clearest causes and indicators of this shift. However, once online and offline identity are more firmly attached to real names, an individual’s web presence becomes harder and harder to escape. Moreover, while notions like ‘Identity 2.0’ (Helmond, 2010), ‘the networked self’ (Papacharissi, 2010) and others tend to emphasise at least some degree of agency, the persistence of digital information and the permanence of names suggests it is timely to revisit the ends of identity where the agency of the named individual is less, if at all, applicable.

At one end, identity fragments can be created even before an individual is born, from Facebook updates, blogs and photos detailing attempts to get pregnant, through to ultrasounds images and the like. Early childhood too, can often be documented online by parents who embrace every recording technology possible, both capturing and often sharing online every smile, every outfit and all those initial milestones of development. While most parents consider some degree of security when posting information about children, many of these digital traces persist and can often be easily (re-)attached to the children in question later in life. This initial digital contextualisation and the power of parents and others to ‘set up’ the initial web presence of individuals before they are active participants online deserves greater attention. Victor Mayer-Schonberger (2009), for example, has proposed that information online, including social information, should come with an expiry date, after which digital identity fragments are automatically erased. While an admirable strategy, implementation of such a proposal in a widespread enough manner to be useful would be very challenging.

At the other end of identity, the question of what happens to our digital selves when we die is also increasingly important. While our corporeal forms are subject to entropy and decay, the same is not necessarily true of online identities. From blog posts and social networking profiles to photographs and more personal files, the need to ‘do something’ with digital identity fragments is increasingly pressing. In some instances the keys to digital identities (our passwords) are being left in wills as part of individuals’ estates, but far more often this question is left unasked until an individual has died. Facebook, for example, had to institute the possibility to allow family members to memorialise or delete the Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones after many people reported Facebook suggesting they ‘reconnected’ with recently deceased relatives and friends.

This paper will outline some initial ways that our ‘ends of identity’ might be conceptualised, including a brief review of current approaches, with the intention of outlining an emerging research project which examines the impact of digital identity creation which is not readily controlled by the individual whose identity is being created or transformed.

References

Helmond, A. (2010). Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software. www.annehelmond.nl , PDF: http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf.

Mayer-Schonberger, V. (2009). Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age . Princeton University Press.

Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites . Routledge.