What's left when we leave? I'm not talking about the lingering perfume or the fond memory of someone leaving the room. Without being macabre, I'm talking about what's left after we check out from this mortal soil? In the past there were few opportunities to leave behind much more than letters, memories and pictures in cardboard boxes stored in garages and attics for the people left behind. Unless you were famous, gifted or athletically empowered the ability to leave behind a legacy in the arts, culture or on the sporting field were limited.
Not so nowadays with the web having an unlimited memory and the capacity to hold a universe of information and data beyond our comprehension. Every time you comment, blog, download, upload, befriend, like and save anything on the web, a footprint of you is left for eternity. Eternity, you finally get confirmation you'll live on forever, even if it's only in the detritus of the flotsam and jetsam of the web.
Who knows how long your email address will survive to get spam? Maybe spam is the new cockroach living long after our demise to fill up our inbox till it bursts at the seams. Maybe you should have that special out of office ready just in case, "Sorry I can't reply to your obviously important email but I'm dead, which you would know if you knew me well!" Maybe we need to figure out how to clean up our web mess before we leave? Who looks after the cleaning up when we are gone? Does anyone care? How will they access your stuff without a password?
Facebook was one of the first on the web to work on a policy for people who departed the social scene. "We first realised we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. Facebook created a "memorial state" so that once confirmed you have actually left the social scene, friends and relatives can continue to view your profile. Although they won't give you back password protected information.
So you'll hang around in fleeting comments on Facebook, maybe on a head hunters list from LinkedIn or perhaps just in fading (?) photos on Flickr as a virtual someone in a virtual world. How do your friends get closure if you constantly come up in a Google search or an email list that can't be shut down? Why won't you go away? How does the spectre of you continue to inhabit the web?
As the world spends more time on computers the breadth and width of our personal coverage increases, it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to tidy up our mess or sweep away our footprints. Maybe that's how it should be as we all finally get a chance to leave something behind or maybe we should think twice about leaving that caustic remark and that photo that just won't go away?
1 comment:
I had thought about this once - what would happen to my email addresses, my online identities and such when I die. Quite frankly, I don't think that when I am on my deathbed I'll be thinking about closing my email accounts, unsubscribing to cyber stuff etc. It seems that even if we don't accumulate material goods, we can do so with other goods that are not physical and will just 'be'. What a lot of junk we can create.
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