Death in the Digital Age? January 30, 2010

Have you ever wondered what happens with your online appearances if you die? What will happen to my blog? Or Twitter account? Will anyone tell my contacts on Facebook what happened to me? Quite strange questions. There will be a one-day seminar on ‘Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age’ at the National University of Singapore on 17 April that will cover this “interesting” issue.

How is the dash between life and death, being and oblivion reflected in the age of digital media? How can we approach the subtleties of different cultural practices and beliefs through design? What is the technological response to the ephemerality of our digital and physical existence?

How can we respond to the ever-increasing mass of digital refuse or ‘dead’ data and what are the implications of and insights provided by reflecting on the inevitable end of ‘civilisation’? What are the legal and ethical implications of ‘freedom of choice’ being supported through technology, digital desecration and the hybridisation of (the remains of) the dead with the living?

Keywords include:

• possible immortality and afterlife through digital media
• cultural issues with dying, death, afterlife and technology
• new forms of grieving and commemorating via emerging technologies
• the motivation, role and function of technological responses to mortality
• digital archiving and the preservation of self and society
• the ethics of supporting death and desecration through technology
• the hybridisation of once living, sentient beings with other biological and robotic entities.

(Via Biomedicine on Display)