=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2811/Paper13
|storemode=property
|title=Immortality and Resurrection of the Digital Self
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2811/Paper13.pdf
|volume=Vol-2811
|authors=Konstantinos Chorianopoulos
}}
==Immortality and Resurrection of the Digital Self==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2811/Paper13.pdf
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
IMMORTALITY AND RESURRECTION
OF THE DIGITAL SELF
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos
Ionian University, Greece
Abstract
We can safely predict that sometime in the future there will be more social media profiles
belonging to dead than living people. In this work, we begin by characterizing the
cultural meaning of the technological affordances that social media institutions have
already associated with profiles that belong to dead people. We analyze current practices
and we present future trends under the scope of the remediation theory, which suggests
that at least initially, new media practices are just a mimesis of existing practices. In
particular, we examine Facebook, which has already introduced several options for user
profiles that belong to dead users. Finally, we raise awareness about novel technological
and cultural issues that have been neglected or are not in the interests of social media
institutions.
Keywords: social media, culture, religion, personality, privacy, big data, machine
learning, bot
Goal and method
We can safely predict that sometime in the future there will be more social media profiles
belonging to dead than living people. In this work, we begin by characterizing the
cultural meaning of the technological affordances that social media institutions have
already associated with profiles that belong to dead people. We analyze current practices
and we present future trends under the scope of the remediation theory (Bolter and
Grusin 2000), which suggests that at least initially, new media practices are just a
mimesis of existing practices. In particular, we examine Facebook, which has already
introduced several options for user profiles that belong to dead users. Finally, we raise
awareness about novel technological and cultural issues that have been neglected or are
not in the interests of social media institutions.
Social media as heirlooms
By late 2017, Facebook had reported 2.2 billion active users (logged-in at least once
monthly). Assuming an average age of 30 years old and a mean life expectancy of 80
years, then we can predict that by 2070 the majority of them will be dead.
Copyright © 2018 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) DCAC 2018.
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
Although Facebook itself might not exist by that time, there might be other social
networks that will attract the online activities of those users, who have become
accustomed and enjoy to express themselves publicly on digital media. In contrast to
our body and the rest of our material possessions, our social media profile consists of
digital information and it is potentially eternal. Some people might present an idealized
self on their timeline (Back et al. 2010), but we can assume that the majority of them
might be more natural (Bargh and Chartrand 1999) in their chat sessions, voice
commands, and browsing habits.
In life off-line, most of the time, and with good reason, people are not concerned
with what happens to them, or to their (material or intellectual) property after death.
Some people might choose to leave a testament, which might be considered according
to national legislation and depending to the requests by relatives. Moreover, there is
usually national legislation or religious heritage that might define inheritance or burial
practices. Thus, it is possible that social media institutions might need to regulate further
the information content practices according to varying and evolving contemporary
practices. In any case, we should also consider privacy matters, as well as individual
wishes.
Who owns our social media profile after death?
The management of post death activities that regard the body and the (material or
intellectual) properties are a matter of national legislation, religion, and choices made
by the individual and by the relatives, which usually act according to contemporary
cultural practices. Currently, Facebook supports the following profile actions after a
death, which might be associated with traditional cultural practices, as follows:
Delete (Cremation)
Locked (Mummification)
Memorialization (Cemetery)
Legacy contact (Testament)
It is currently unclear what happens to our social media profiles after the death of
the legacy contact. Should our profile be inherited together with the profile of our legacy
contact to the next legacy contact and so on (e.g., just like that ring that our great-
grandmama passed down)? Alternatively, if we consider the intellectual property
legislation, then it becomes possible to transfer a social media profile to the commons
after a number of years. Even if we decide to delete our personal copies of online
interactions, some of them might be impossible to delete, such as chat and voice history,
email, and photo (Gemmell et al. 2002), which have been stored in personal storage, in
the cloud, or at other user terminals. Therefore, there is an emerging technological
opportunity that digital data might be leveraged to extend our digital self eternally, either
in archival format or even as a dynamic and evolving digital entity.
Is our social media profile going to go to paradise?
We are already familiar and we might have read the private letters of famous individuals
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
at museums and edited volumes. Most of us should agree that reading love letters that
do not concern us personally is a significant privacy breach, more so, when they concern
a living person. Nevertheless, it is culturally established that at least for the famous
among us, our cognitive heritage will be certainly archived and publicly displayed
regardless of our wishes. Notably, the applicability of this analysis is already valid even
for humans that do not own or have never created a social media account. For example, we
can find Google Scholar profiles for important individuals, who are long dead (e.g., Herbert
A. Simon died in 2001, which is long before Google introduced the Scholar service).
Although scholarly publications are just a small aspect of a life, it is straightforward to
extrapolate this contemporary practice to the rest of our technologically mediated selves.
Our embodied consciousness might remain uncertain about the happenings in
afterlife, but there is some hope about its disembodied digital reflection. In the future,
it is very likely that there will be social media profiles of dead people curated by
relatives, other interested parties, or even automatically by mining our digital remains
that are distributed all over the internet. We suggest that technological determinism
should not be the only guiding force in such matters and that cultural aspects might be
more important in shaping the respective technologies and the new mediated practices.
Therefore, we expect that religious institutions might become more active in shaping
digital media practices. Moreover, existing religions might need to evolve themselves
in order to provide suitable narratives and rituals for our digital selves.
Online resurrection
Besides social media profiles (friends, videos, photos, status updates), there is also a
growing number of text messages and interactions with media content produced by
others. Although text messages might be considered as a rather casual medium about
not so important matters, they are an important representation of the self to others. There
are already technological systems that could be trained with the text chat and voice
archives left by an individual as an input, in order to produce a bot that behaves similarly
to the individual, at least with regard to casual interactions (Newton, n.d.). The more
data available for the training, the more believable the bot might seem (or even sound
like). Moreover, new media technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and
holography, might enable additional traces of online actions, which could be enacted in
a future digital self.
In addition to verbal communication, a bot might also be enabled to produce new
interactions (views, likes, emotions, etc) on new content created by other users. In this
way, the digital remains might become the source of a generative and eternal interaction
stream long after death. We suggest that as long as living individuals are happy to interact
with others through social media (e.g., chat, like, etc) then it becomes technologically
possible that there will soon be little difference between the living and the dead, at least
with regard to our online interactions. Therefore, the more effort we invest in our online
activities the more data we create for our future digital selves. Previous works have
debated the balance among the real self, the idealized self, experimental selves (Turkle
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
2011), as well as contextualized selves (Goffman 2002). Technology will soon enable
us to consider the resurrected immortal digital self (Harari 2016).
The last judgement of our immortal self
What actually happens to our social media profile after death is arguably of small
importance to us at that time, since we will probably not be able to control or perceive
its status. Nevertheless, there are several immediate, significant, and wide implications
for ourselves and for research in various domains. As soon as we become aware that the
respective data will live forever, or even that the data could be leveraged to resurrect
an eternal digital self, we might want to reconsider how we present ourselves online. In
this way, at least for some people, the current presentation of themselves online might
be significantly affected towards the curation of an eternal digital self. Moreover,
depending on the quality of the reincarnated digital self, it might become obsolete to
invest any effort to cure cognitive symptoms of diseases, such as Alzheimers. In terms
of computing practices, when the hardware is failing we are moving the data and the
software to new hardware.
In summary, we suggest that the current practices of death online are only a shallow
mimesis of the richness and breadth of the cultural practices associated with death off-
line. One possible explanation is that digital information is very special and contrary to
human nature it is disembodied and potentially eternal, which makes it difficult to
comprehend and to control, at least in the context of death. Thus, we call for a more
careful examination of both the cultural practices and the humane wishes in the design
of technological systems that concern the digital remains of individuals after death. It is
currently unforeseen if and when the last judgement might happen, but it is quite certain
that our digital selves will be forever judged, as soon as we depart.
References
Back, Mitja D, Juliane M Stopfer, Simine Vazire, Sam Gaddis, Stefan C Schmukle,
Boris Egloff, and Samuel D Gosling. 2010. “Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual
Personality, Not Self-Idealization.” Psychological Science 21 (3): 372–74.
Bargh, John A, and Tanya L Chartrand. 1999. “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.”
American Psychologist 54 (7): 462.
Bolter, J David, and Richard A Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
mit Press.
Gemmell, Jim, Gordon Bell, Roger Lueder, Steven Drucker, and Curtis Wong. 2002.
“MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision.” In Proceedings of the Tenth Acm
International Conference on Multimedia, 235–38. ACM.
Goffman, Erving. 2002. “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1959.” Garden City, NY.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2016. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Random House.
Newton, Casey. n.d. “Speak, Memory.” https://bit.ly/2dMXJIr.
Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Life on the Screen. Simon; Schuster.