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| Mourning for Princess Diana centred around the royal palaces. (Photo credit: betsythedevine) |
My first instinct, on hearing that Whitney Houston’s funeral
would be webcast live around the world was one of mild nausea. How
could that be appropriate? Something about it was so, well, cheap.
I’ve thought about it though, and I’ve changed my
mind. Hers was a very public life, and because
it reached so far I can see that it makes sense that there should be the opportunity for
those who were in some way engaged with it to share in the grief of those
closest to her. After all, we all have
the choice to watch, or not watch.
I'm reminded of the approach to mourning when Princess Diana died in 1997. Millions of people grieved
across the nation, many travelling hundreds of miles to visit memorial
sites. Back then, Internet technologies
were developing, but were certainly not the mainstream and the infrastructure of
social networks was certainly not there to facilitate this activity in the way
it is today. What would have happened
today? Well, the more recent deaths of celebrities
like Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and Michael Jackson may provide some
insight.
Whereas a funeral and obituary in a newspaper were the
standard approaches in the past, the Internet has provided us with seemingly infinite opportunities to share grief and create memorials to the dead; and it’s commonplace already, of course, with
memorial pages on Facebook replacing the laying of flowers at a graveside or
accident site, enabling those who can’t physically ‘be there’ to contribute
digitally.
What we seem to be experiencing is a transition, a developing
online culture of mourning, and this isn’t just an issue for celebrities. As our lives become increasingly
public, through the way we publish and share information online, ordinary
people like you and I need to consider our digital legacies just as much as celebrities
do.
With this cultural shift comes an important
set of questions for our society. How should
digital publications be dealt with after death? Should every tweet, wall post,
blog entry exist for all time, as a perpetual memorial? Should usernames and accounts be ‘recycled’
or returned to prevent fraudulent use? Should
we all create a ‘digital will’? How can we manage this in the future? Will the Internet become clogged up like an overfull
graveyard with dead people’s accounts?
A macabre set of questions I know, but a real issue, and one
we can’t ignore. We seem to see our
digital lives as ‘throwaway’ because we can’t see, touch, feel, or put them on
a shelf like a book; but they are just as important socially and
culturally. As our libraries struggle to
keep up with the recording and management of digital sources (how many of us
have backed up early versions of web sites we owned, and how useful would these
be to researchers in the future?), this is something I believe anyone who is
publishing on the web should at very least give a little thought to.
So, my questions for you are – what would happen to your
online legacy if you died? What would
you like to happen? Who would be able to
access your accounts? What should be
kept, where and how? I know you don’t
want to think about it, but have a care for your family – the people who
would have to deal with this issue for you – and while you’re at it, you might
want to think about those generations who, in a century or two, might be researching
their family tree.
What do you want them to find?
