Posts tagged death
Your Digital Afterlife
Because, evidently, Google listens to Krissy, it now has a new plan in place should you, perhaps, not quite wake up tomorrow.
Via Google’s Data Liberation Blog:
Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.
The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings page.
You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.
For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.
FJP: Macabre, yes, but a reality that digital services need to pay attention to.
Image: Pleasant Hill Cemetery, via Wikimedia Commons.
When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.
Tagline for LivesOn, a new app launching in March, that will algorithmically post your thoughts after you’ve died.
Via the Guardian:
Launching in March is a new Twitter app called LivesOn. The service uses Twitter bots powered by algorithms that analyse your online behaviour and learn how you speak, so it can keep on scouring the internet, favouriting tweets and posting the sort of links you like, creating a personal digital afterlife…
“It divides people on a gut level, before you even get to the philosophical and ethical arguments,” says Dave Bedwood, creative partner of Lean Mean Fighting Machine, the London-based ad agency that is developing it.
“It offends some, and delights others. Imagine if people started to see it as a legitimate but small way to live on. Cryogenics costs a fortune; this is free and I’d bet it will work better than a frozen head.”
I think when I die I’ll keep my thoughts to myself. — Michael
Behind this link is the Los Angeles Times' front page, which features a graphic photo of recently-deceased U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens. The page drew strong reaction from readers. Should they have run it?
For what it’s worth: The New York Times’ new public editor, Margaret Sullivan, asked the question Wednesday after the Times ran the photo online. She decided it was worth running, but said this: “I would not want to see a similar photograph on the front page of Thursday’s print edition, where its prominence and permanence would give it a different weight.” The New York Times did not run it on its front page Thursday morning, but other papers did.
For several years now there has been an escalation of printing photos of people either in their final moments or just after death. Is the shock of the moment warranted a place as “newsworthy” or is the shock value likely to turn people further away from print media?
If you can’t find a moment’s privacy in death, what chance do you have on holiday in Provence?
Call and Response… or Symmetry as the Case May Be.
Recently, WNYC’s RadioLab ran a program that explored how “symmetry shapes our very existence—from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror.”
NYC filmmakers Everynone took note, collaborated and came back with few minute video response.
Audio. Video. Symmetry.
Pictures of people about to die, less final than images of death, capture a particularly powerful moment in the middle of a sequence of action—a child about to keel over from starvation, a woman about to be engulfed by a mudslide, a dirigible about to explode—and freeze it for repeated display and engagement. Focusing on the human anguish of people facing death, they replay this moment in news and beyond without necessarily showing visual evidence that the people in fact died. Viewers thus can and do go in many directions with an image’s interpretation—refuting death, debating its particulars, providing multiple and often erroneous contexts for its understanding.
Pictures of people about to die, less graphic than pictures of corpses and body parts, also play on different parts of a viewer’s psyche. Where images of dead bodies often push viewers away, creating a sense of distance and objectification, images of impending death do the opposite: They often draw viewers in, fostering engagement, creating empathy and subjective involvement, inviting debate.
