E-mail After Death

A con­ver­sa­tion yes­ter­day got me think­ing about what hap­pens to our online pres­ence after we die. I thought it might make a good arti­cle for the news­pa­per, or per­haps for some­thing larger; but in research­ing the idea, I found that some­one else already had that idea.

The Baltimore City Paper pub­lished “Ghosts in the Machines” in June 2004. The arti­cle fol­lows the story of Aaron Huth, a 20-year-old who died in 2003. Ruth was a musi­cian and avid Web user, and he left an immense online pres­ence to be dealt with after his death. This included clos­ing accounts, man­ag­ing social net­work­ing pro­files, and even deal­ing with the deceased e-mail.

A year later, friends and fam­ily still hadn’t been able to fin­ish the job, partly because they didn’t know how far his dig­i­tal iden­tity extended and par­tially because they just didn’t want to erase every last bit of Ruth’s life.

This makes me think about my own online pres­ence. At last count, I used four e-mail addresses actively–with prob­a­bly another 15 reg­is­tered addresses. I have Web host­ing that draws from my bank account. I have a World of Warcraft sub­scrip­tion. I have MySpace and Facebook pro­files. I have Technorati and Blogger sites. I have mem­ber­ships at more sites than I can remember.

Who would delete them if I died? Should they be deleted, or should cer­tain pages on the Web remain for­ever as trib­utes or memo­ri­als to the dead? If, as Newsweek pro­claimed last year, the Web is where we live, how will we han­dle death on the Web?

More impor­tantly, or at least prac­ti­cally, is this some­thing we need to worry about? I would argue that, increas­ingly, deal­ing with your dig­i­tal pres­ence will become a big­ger part of end-of-life plan­ning, included along with buy­ing a cof­fin or arrang­ing your own cre­ma­tion. As the first gen­er­a­tion born and raised with the Web grows older, those still tech­no­log­i­cally lit­er­ate at the end of their lives will prob­a­bly feel an oblig­a­tion to set­tle their accounts.

Will it be like no longer going to cof­fee in the morn­ings at a neigh­bor­hood shop? Will oth­ers under­stand that you’ve excused your­self in prepa­ra­tion for the end of your life?

Interesting ques­tions, brought to you by Web 2.0...

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