Friending The Dead

Throughout human history we have kept the dead alive in our hearts and minds through memorials, paintings, photographs, statues, biographies, plays, films, shrines and all manner of tribute and memory. However these types of remembrance are ultimately retrospective. What if there were a way you could continue to be a member of your communities even after you've shuffled off this mortal coil?

Online memorial sites have been available for years now. Having a place for the permanence of digital memory and to visit, pay tribute and grieve regardless of geographic distance is a welcome modern development for many loved ones. However, they are created by those left behind. The explosion of social networking on the internet raises the idea of the possibility of the departed continuing to participate in a community rather than only having communities form around their departure.

The AIDS crisis inspired one man to create such a space:

Chris Bartlett, a former classics scholar who has set out to rescue the memories of those lives, specifically 4,600 gay Philadelphia men who perished of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. While the memorializing impulse is ancient, the method Mr. Bartlett came up with is as new as the latest app; he has created a social networking site for the dead....

It connects the dead to one another, to a larger community and to groups of potential new “friends” using technology that most of those it commemorates did not live to experience.

"Lost to AIDS, but Still Friended" by Guy Trebay, The New York Times

The article about gayhistory.wikispaces.com quotes Sarah Schulman, who writes and directs the Act Up Oral History Project and describes the importance of this project:

Beyond the novelty of this approach is something equally important, Ms. Schulman of the Act Up Oral History Project suggested: the opportunity to fill in blanks in a haphazard narrative. “The AIDS story has been limited to depictions of doomed individuals,” and not impassioned, ad hoc communities, she said.

And Chris Bartlett adds:

“At this point, everybody knows the value of participating in a social network that’s alive,” ... “I’m making the case that the value people offer to a social network does not disappear when they die.”

While a fascinating project to bring the stories of those lost to AIDS, it is still ultimately of, by and for the living. And those who died before the explosion of social networking would have no way to create or direct their own profiles. What if there were now a way to do just that?

A new company called MyWebWill sets out to allow you manage and maintain your social networks even after you're gone. Louise Nordstrom of the AP tells us the story of the Swedish company that delivers your pre-written messages, updates your status according to your wishes and helps facilitate your online life continuing even as your "real" life has ended.

The idea of a never-ending online life is a fascinating one which raises some questions, though, such as the ethics of creating profiles and accounts for other people and whether non-real time participation is fully realized or as static as a biography or memorial.

Would you want to continue your social networking from the great beyond? Have you made arrangements for others to access your accounts after you've gone? How do you feel about the idea of friending the dead?

Related Reading:

Minara El-Rahman at FindLaw: After Death What Happens to Your Accounts Online?

Adele McAlear of Marketing Monster and Covida Raven of SheGeeks each proposed panels for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference dealing with these questions:
Posts Mortem: Death and Digital Legacy

If you passed away today, how would your online friends find out? Should logins and passwords be in your will? Has technology changed mourning? Will your digital media stay online forever? Our lives are lived and documented online, it’s time to talk about the implications of death and digital legacy.

Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills

If you died tomorrow, would someone take care of your internet accounts? How do you tell subscribers the blogger has died? Every day people die and no one can access their email. Let's explore what can be done to manage your online identity after you pass on.

Heather Spencer at OKGazette.com: What happens to Facebook accounts after death?

Robert Scoble at Scobleizer: Protect your online life after death

But what happens to your online life? Who gets the ability to tell your friends about your funeral on Facebook? Who gets access to Flickr to download all your photos? Who owns your URLs (some URLs are worth millions, so they should be protected the same way your house is with a will, but most people haven’t thought about it).

Time.com Tools for Managing Your Online Life After Death

MoneyGrubbingLawyer: Planning for your Digital Death

For friends of the deceased, their Facebook page may be a source of comfort or a constant reminder of the loss. But how do you deal with it? Can you bring yourself to just delete your lost pal from your friends list? When is it appropriate? Who decides what happens to the account?...

And consider this- many bloggers set up articles to automatically post at a certain time in the future, allowing them to continue regular posting even while busy or on vacation. It is quite conceivable that a blog could continue to be updated and appear to be “live” even when the author isn’t. In one case, a blogger who committed suicide intentionally set his blog to continue posting after his death.

BBC News: Who owns your e-mails?

When [Lance Corporal] Justin Ellsworth was killed in Iraq, his father decided to create a memorial to his dead son using the e-mails he wrote and received while in the Middle East. But Yahoo! [refused] to release the messages. Who owns your e-mail after you die?

BlogHer CE Maria Niles lives her life online, in part, at PopConsumer