The day after my Aunt’s passing, I discovered she’d
written me a lovely note on the front page of the
Shakespeare collection she’d given me. “I know how
important the written word is to you,” it read, “this then
is my gift to you.”
With all of my love, as always,
Aunt Jackie
Deeply moved, I opened my laptop and found my way
over to her Facebook page. I thought it would be
comforting to see pictures of her, and to read some of
her witty posts, and to imagine her speaking them in her
brassy, brazen, Baltimore screech. At the top of her
Facebook feed was a video posted by my cousin showing
two elephants playing in water. (My aunt loved
elephants. She had thousands of pieces of elephant
kitsch all over her house.) Below that were some
tributes from former students, as well as the obituary
posted by her sister-in-law.
I scrolled back up. According to Facebook, Aunt Jackie
studied English Education at Frostburg State University,
was a former English Department Head for Baltimore City
schools, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Lives? I thought.
She doesn’t live anywhere. She’s gone.
But if you happened to come across her profile on
Facebook and didn’t scroll down to the obituary, then you
wouldn’t know that.
She would still be, in some sense, alive. She would be …
here. On Facebook.
I thought back to the night my family and I stood around
Aunt Jackie, hooked to wires and machines, and watched
her pass.
How is our continuing presence in digital space
changing the way we die?
Observing that phenomenon is a strange thing. There
she is, the person you love – you’re talking to her,
squeezing her hand, thanking her for being there for you,
watching the green zigzag move slower and slower – and
then she’s not there anymore.
Another machine, meanwhile, was keeping her alive:
some distant computer server that holds her thoughts,
memories and relationships.
While it’s obvious that people don’t outlive their bodies
on digital technology, they do endure in one sense.
People’s experience of you as a seemingly living person
can and does continue online.
How is our continuing presence in digital space changing
the way we die? And what does it mean for those who
would mourn us after we are gone?
The numbers of the dead on Facebook are growing fast.
By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched,
30 million users with Facebook accounts had died. That
number has only gone up since. Some estimates claim
more than 8,000 users die each day.
At some point in time, there will be more dead Facebook
users than living ones. Facebook is a growing and
unstoppable digital graveyard.
Some estimates claim more than 8,000
Facebook users die each day
Many Facebook profiles announce their owners have
passed; they are “memorialised”. The profile is
emblazoned with the word “remembering”, and they stop
appearing in public spaces, like People You May Know or
birthday reminders.
But not all Facebook users who have passed away are
memorialised.
Kerry, one of my college dorm mates, committed suicide
a few years ago, and his wife and family and friends
regularly post updates on his page, and when they do,
Kerry’s profile populates in my Facebook feed.
Neither Kerry nor my Aunt Jackie are memorialised,
which means, for all intents and purposes, their deaths
haven’t been recognised by Facebook, or by the unwitting
users who chance upon them. Their digital identities
continue to exist.
Social media has taught us about the power of the
moment – connecting right now with people around the
globe over awards show, television programmes, football
games, social justice issues, and whatnot. But now it
may be time to consider what comes after all that: our
legacy.
It used to be that only certain prominent people were
granted legacies, either because they left written records
for their forebears, or because later inquisitive minds
undertook that task. But digital technology changes that.
Now, each of us spends hours each week – more than 12,
according to a recent survey – writing our
autobiographies.
We might think of our public social media record
as some type of digital soul
As I’ve told my mother, my grandchildren may be able to
learn about her by studying her Facebook profile.
Assuming the social network doesn’t fold, they won’t
just learn about the kinds of major life events that would
make it into my mom’s authorised biography. They’ll
learn, rather, the tiny, insignificant details of her day to
day life: memes that made her laugh, viral photos she
shared, which restaurants she and my father liked to eat
at, the lame church jokes she was too fond of. And of
course, they’ll have plenty of pictures to go with it. By
studying this information, my grandchildren will come to
know about their great grandmother.
We might think of our public social media record as
some type of digital soul: those perusing my Facebook
know my religious beliefs, my political reservations, my
love for my partner, my literary tastes. Were I to die
tomorrow, my digital soul would continue to exist.
What if you could live forever as a digital
avatar?
In the past few years, several tech companies have
extended the idea of a digital soul. Eterni.me, launched
in 2014, promises to create a digital version of “you”
that will live on after your death. Death is certain, admits
the website — but what if you could live forever as a
digital avatar, “and people in the future could actually
interact with your memories, stories and ideas, almost
as if they were talking to you?”
If programs like Eterni.me succeed, not only will my
grandchildren be able to study my mother’s life, if they
want they’ll be able to ask her avatar – their intelligent,
digital “great grandmother” – questions and receive
answers that my mother, before she passed away, would
have probably given them.
You could take this process even further, as several
futurists predict. Consider a robot that was
commissioned by the entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt,
called Bina 48. The robot is almost identical in
appearance to Rothblatt’s wife, and contains a database
of her speech and memories.
Rothblatt, author of Virtually Human and the CEO of
United Therapeutics, is a transhumanist whose motto is
"death is optional". Rothblatt foresees a near-future
world in which the dead can be reanimated thanks to
mind clone software that can allow avatars to think and
respond and be in an eerily similar way to those they’re
cloning.
When asked about the concept of real, Rothblatt once
said that these mind clones might end up being “truer”
versions of ourselves than we are.
So, if the end-point is that a loved one carries on living,
how does that change how we grieve?
That’s the catch of our brave new world: digital
data does not allow us to forget
One of the seminal texts on grief is Elisabeth Kubler-
Ross’s 1969 On Death and Dying, which outlines five
steps of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, acceptance. Since its publication, modern
experts have questioned and criticised its central claims,
particularly the understanding that successful mourners
let go of the departed and move on.
Today, many counsellors help mourners realise that their
loved ones continue to be with them, in some sense,
after they die. The relationship changes, but it is still
there.
Still, part of the grieving process does necessitate
moving on, and, well, forgetting in some sense. Not
forgetting that our loved ones ever existed, but forgetting
that they are in in this place with us.
That’s the catch of our brave new world: digital data
does not allow us to forget.
In his 2009 book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the
Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger argues
compellingly that central to the human condition is the
ability to forget, which allows us to "act in time,
cognizant of, but not shackled by the past". Forgetting, he
writes, lets us "live and act firmly in the present".
In The Memorius, a short story by Jorge Luis
Borges, the central character has lost the ability
to forget
Mayer-Schonberger refers to Funes, The Memorius, a
short story by Jorge Luis Borges whose central character
has lost the ability to forget after a tragic riding
accident. Funes is able to perfectly recall every book he
has ever read, and can recount in vivid detail all the days
he’s experienced.
But his talent is also a curse: his memory, he admits, "is
like a garbage heap". His name, Funes, which translates
as "ill-fated", is a clue that Borges pities his character,
who, as Donna Miller Watts writes , is "an involuntary
hoarder, a junkman of the mind". He ultimately becomes
lost in the words in his mind, unable to generalise or to
abstract, because "to think is to ignore (or forget)
differences".
To Watts, Funes’ mental state recalls “the vast amounts
of information” that have been “exposed to digital nets,”
never to be forgotten. The lesson, writes Mayer-
Schonberger, is, “Too perfect a recall … may prompt us
to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave
our past behind.”
Digital technology forces us to remember the dead. This
is their vengeance, who, as the sociologist Jean
Baudrillard warns, haunt us in their absence.
In Facebook, my Aunt Jackie exists in this
medium just as I do. In a way, there is no
moving on without her
In the past, remembering the dead had a physical
element to it. You had to go somewhere to honour them:
a graveyard, a church, a memorial. Or you had to take
out a box of photographs or an album or an obituary
clipping. You had to take some time from the present to
think about your past, your history, your time with that
person.
In Facebook, all places are present, all times are now. My
Aunt Jackie exists in this medium just as I do. In a way,
there is no moving on without her. There’s no moving on
without any of the millions of dead Facebook users.
One of the eeriest stories I’ve ever heard was told to me
by a circus clown named Dooby. Just before he went on
stage for a performance, he listened to a voicemail from
his dying grandfather telling him he loved him and that
they’d talk later. The timing worked out such that by the
time Dooby heard the voicemail, his grandfather was
already dead.
A clown listening to a dead man’s voice – that’s
perhaps the only way I know how to describe the feeling
of coming across my Aunt Jackie’s Facebook profile.
She’s in this space just as I am, but I know that she’s
also dead.
There’s a word we have for feeling as if something bad is
going to happen: premonition, from a word that means
“warning.” Stumbling across a dead Facebook user is not
unlike that feeling, but with one important difference: we
remember that something bad was at one time about to
happen. We might call this re-monition , the reminder
that we’ve already been warned.
As of yet, there’s no good solution to the problem of
dead data, of digital ghosts. The only hope is that the
internet’s memory will at some point begin to fade.
"The truth," writes Borges, "is that we all live by leaving
behind."
No comments:
Post a Comment