What if the end was nigh?
The question in the previous part touched a very delicate matter, but no worries I had a plan to do so and just intended to start the discussion. That was just an introduction to what I really wanted to discuss. Okay, maybe some of you have already got close to what I meant :) but let me continue.
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| The Nintendo Generation (look up in the Urban Dictionary) |
The younger generations (and I hope that we can be regarded as the members of those;)) have been in constant touch with the electronics since the early age. We grew up with computers and I could even venture to say that most us were somehow brought up by them. I bet you all played Nintendo one day or at least the PlayStation... it's not a shame. After the silly games came another silly thing which is the Internet.
It's so silly, silly, silly :) that the Network, computers, Internet services are so deeply embedded in our daily routine that we all live nowadays our own digital lives. What you have got on your computer, on your e-mail or social networking account is a digital transcript of your life.
We have personal web sites, facebook accounts, we're using instant messengers. Our e-mail accounts have gigabytes of e-mails. The Picassa accounts we're using store thousands of our very personal photos... The example of the e-mail account is pretty good. Most of us tend to use the same e-mail address over a couple of years, which means that we probably have an archive of our correspondence with our friends, colleagues from school and later from work. Every thing that concerns us today is DIGITAL.Even the money became digital as most of the banks prefer the e-banking as cheaper and more convenient for its' clients. Our every transaction is carried out digitally...
What would happen with our digital legacy after we finally die? You may think that it's a very new issue, but the dotcom corporations already have its' own procedures for the situations, when their users pass away.
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| Facebook's "Report a deceased person's profile" |
Facebook for example allows any user to report that specific profile belongs to a dead person. After reporting such an event the status of the account can be set to “in memoriam”. Polish NK.pl has no consistent policy in those terms and every single case of the user that passes away is being considered individually.
The most interesting is the problem of inheriting the digital property... Not every company gives the access to the dead users accounts to their family members. Google for example gives such possibility - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hlrm=EN&answer=14300
It seems that the Grim Reaper found out what the Internet is... Don't you think that the way we say good-bye to our beloved ones and the whole mourning should be redefined in the 21st century? Or maybe you find it inappropriate to introduce the real death into the digital world?...
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