“Social networks have become gigantic catacombs”
On the sidelines of All Saints Day, the eve of the Day of the Dead, the Lausanne researcher Olivier Glassey observes the fate reserved for them in the digital sphere.
On graves, like here in El Salvador, QR codes lead to photos, texts or videos of the deceased.
KEYSTONE
What is the fate of our deceased on the Web? This is the question that sociologist Olivier Glassey, a specialist in online social practices at the University of Lausanne, has pondered. Because if on Earth we cannot escape death, digital disappearance turns out to be more complicated than it seems. What if digital death already belongs only to distant days?
Does the digital world also know its deceased?
We spend our existence producing digital traces: access codes, photos, exchanges or reactions to posts. Over the years, social networks have become gigantic catacombs of data related to deceased people. Facebook accounts for millions of them every year. Researchers even had fun calculating when there would be more dead than alive. What happens, then, to the digital remains of deceased persons?
Are Internet users taking this new situation into sufficient consideration?
A shift has occurred over the past ten years, as a majority of Internet users have experienced the disappearance of an acquaintance on a social network. And we have become aware that when a loved one dies, there is a whole digital component that can hardly be ignored, whether administrative or more personal. The management of this information adds to the stress and to all the logistics, which is already trying during a death.
How to manage this digital data?
More and more testamentary dispositions now contain a digital component, defining the people who will be responsible for them. On Facebook, for example, the beneficiary has roughly three possibilities: close the account, transform it into a commemorative page, or take charge of the page of the deceased to continue to keep his memory alive. The ways of considering our digital beyond are significantly different from one individual to another and this can create disagreements within the same family.
Can the permanence of these data interfere with the grieving process?
It is sometimes possible to witness a phenomenon of digital ghosts. An algorithm or someone “likes” content related to a deceased person and gives us the impression that their account is active. This can be very unsettling for loved ones, as distancing is an essential part of the grieving process. The cemeteries had precisely this function of distancing. But with digital, our dead remain just a click away. In the same way, we observe that it is often difficult to resign oneself to erasing certain useless data such as an old telephone number without asking ourselves if this does not amount to forgetting the deceased a little.
Can we make bad choices regarding the management of this content?
The question we are forced to ask ourselves is to decide what we want to see and know about the person who has died. Do we really want to have access to all of her intimate conversations or do we want to preserve the image we have of her? When do we revisit the memory of a loved one and when do we enter a somewhat morbid form of digital voyeurism? This is why it is important to clearly express during our lifetime what our wishes are in relation to our digital traces.
What is the role of the web industry in the face of these issues?
The number of deaths on the networks poses logistical and legal problems for them, because the missing require a lot of resources. However, compared to that, social networks are quite ambivalent: closing an account requires more official documents, the transformation into a memory page is much easier. In fact, it is more advantageous for the social network that a deceased person remains in its digital ecosystem, as post-mortem message flows can still represent economic opportunities…
There would also be a whole market based on this data…
With artificial intelligence and virtual reality, we can now develop interactions with avatars that are digital ersatz. More and more companies are promising this kind of digital afterlife, where data extracted from your online life powers a chatbot or artificial intelligence. These companies propose to create a kind of digital alter ego that will outlive us. About ten years ago, a service already offered to send messages to your descendants years after your death. This raises the question of our relationship with our post-mortem destiny. These services
of digital ghosts will they finally be perceived as a gift, or an anguish for
those who will survive us?
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Digital survival – “Social networks have become gigantic catacombs”
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