All the Ghosts in the Machine - by Elaine Kasket
ISBN: 1472141903Date read: 2024-12-28
How strongly I recommend it: 3/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Wonderful subject: how to handle digital data after death. But focused almost entirely on Facebook and Google, and the bureaucracy in place of those big social media corps.
my notes
Continuing a connection to the dead is an entirely normal phenomenon.
Life is for the living, and the dead are in the suburbs or out in the country, behind the cemetery gates.
We put the technology in place that would enable the dead to stick around in the same places and spaces as the living.
A spectrum from Internet rejectors to enthusiasts: hermits, pragmatists, curators, always-ons, and life loggers.
Curators’ digital imprint is far more personal than that of a pragmatist, and much more carefully crafted.
You will have a posthumous virtual self that is relatively visible, vocal and nimble.
Kübler-Ross’s five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – weren’t actually even based on bereaved people. They referred to the stages she had observed dying people themselves go through. They’ve long been regarded as a comforting fiction, practically folklore. She’d never intended the model to be interpreted as linear.
Jessica’s in-life profile was different from the memorial page. On the latter, people talked about her, but on the former they talked to her, carrying on conversations that had started in life. One photo showed her with her friends, lined up on lounge chairs in some tropical location. It had been posted before she died, and there was her own comment underneath: ‘Oh my god, we look all skinny and tan!! I want to go back there!!!’ After her death, her friends simply carried on the thread of conversation, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. The comment was casual, conversational, everyday. It was almost as though she wasn’t dead at all. Reading Jessica’s own words, following her conversations with her friends, viewing her images, and seeing her in the context of her relationships was a far different experience from looking at the memorial page. ‘If the profile were deleted, it would feel like I wouldn’t be able to talk to her properly,’ she said. ‘It would be deleting the last bit of her that’s still almost real.’
‘I know u can read this, it just sux that u can’t talk back . . . thanx for lettin me talk to u again,’ says someone. ‘Part of me just feels like he sees it somehow. When I’m communicating with him on Facebook, there isn’t that immediate reminder that he’s gone. But when I see his name on his headstone in a silent cemetery or I see his room frozen in time, it’s more in-your-face.’
Physically dead, yes. Socially dead? Not just yet.
Social networking sites are simply our Digital-Being-in-the-world-with-others.
Sure, you set up the profile on your own in the first place, but from there onwards it’s co-constructed, co-authored.
After she’s gone, it doesn’t just feel like ‘this was her’. It feels like ‘this was us’.
Those left behind could compile obituaries, information about family heritage, photos and comments on a Living History™ archive website.
When digital remains cause a disruption in continuing bonds, it’s almost always about one or both of these things: access, and control.
which can interfere with a mourner’s capacity to determine for themselves the kind of continuing bonds they want, or don’t want.
Dr Edina Harbinja is one of my super-specialised law buddies.
It’s often assumed in law that only natural persons have legal personalities, and by extension only natural persons have full legal claims on privacy. Dead people aren’t usually considered to have much, if any, interest in it.
If you’re dead, you can’t maintain control of your property, because there’s no longer such a concept as ‘your’.