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luke.at.large
luke.at.large
What happens online, when we die?
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Many people now live in a world where a lot of their social connections take place online. With the advent in Facebook, the web is now a hub for our real social lives. Most people appreciate the tools that platforms such as Facebook & MySpace provide to facilitate a richer life in the real world.

I personally use Facebook daily, for various reasons. From a simple status update to inform friends of something on my mind to writing on a contact's wall or sending personal messages rather than using email. If I travel I will most often post photos I take to Facebook and it's a great way to remember when people's birthdays are coming up (TakingITGlobal also does this!). The longer you use a website like Facebook, the more intertwined our personal lives get with this online social universe.

Tonight I was reading a tech blog only to realise when I came to the latest post that the author had actually died. This struck me somewhat and planted a thought in my head: What happens to our online identity when we die? Face it, we're all heading to the same destination (death), regardless of what you believe happens afterwards. When death strikes a regular Facebook (or other social networking site) user, how will our contacts know and what should happen to everything we have published online?

I guess to an extent, the answers to these questions are individual to each of us. Perhaps there should be a mechanism for close (and nominated) relatives/friends to inform all of the websites of which the deceased was a member. Or perhaps it's up to us to 'leave the keys' to all of our online spaces to a designated person for he/she to inform should we pass away.

This is something which will evolve with the development of the way we use the internet in our personal lives. For now though, maybe I should stop being so morbid...

July 10, 2008 | 9:52 PM Comments  1 comments

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laurakenyon LauraK
July 11, 2008 | 10:26 AM

Interesting post - it made me think of the Facebook pages I've seen set up when people have died. It's nice for people to be able to leave condolences who might otherwise not have a way to comfort family/friends of the deceased, but some of the pages I've seen have bordered on being in bad taste. It also can create a weird situation where anyone can set up a page and make the mourning process completely public - whether or not it would have been the wishes of family or the deceased themselves.
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