Rest In Bits
2010-05-22 15:15:32 (читать в оригинале)
20 May 2010 “Digital Death Day” event brought together the businesses of social networking, data management and death care. One of its organisers says: “We have reached a critical mass of personal data online.”
Billions of pages held by social networking sites, as well as blogs, online gaming sites... basically anything into which we put data... data which, in most cases, remains after we die. There are two types of value stored in your online accounts, economic and sentimental... So what should happen to it?
There's no standard practice across the industry yet. There are no norms for how digital assets are passed on to heirs.
Death was not much in the minds of social networking pioneers when they started. Most sites were originally aimed at young college students. But with hundreds of millions of users worldwide now, (Facebook alone has over 400 million) death is a daily occurrence. So what are they doing about people's digital assests?
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Dr. Elaine Kasket, a counselling psychologist, has found that a surprising number of messages are written to the deceased as if they are still present and “logging on from some internet cafe in heaven”.
“It's perhaps the best example so far of continuing bonds after death,” she says. It has been suggested that the existence of this online presence after people die, plus the accessibility of online memorials, could draw out the grieving process.
But this may not be a bad thing, says Mark Dunn, a psychotherapist. He believes most of us in the developed world do not grieve for long enough and that the internet “may allow us to learn the mechanics of grieving again.”
