Dying Digitally (Part 1: INTRODUCTION)

Anne Agi

We all have online lives, you know – our other homes: The ones on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo etc.

Personally, I love my Facebook account as well as my twitter handle. Many of my most robust conversations and interactions have been carried out on the internet via Facebook and twitter. I have also posted some articles online and received thousands of emails. What will happen to these when I pass? Who will have access to which parts of it, and for how long? Who will conserve or maintain my website, Twitter account, Facebook page, Yahoomail account etc. Will they be lost in oblivion in this digital universe or can I Will them away to my family so my heirs can have access to them? Can my descendants benefit financially from all my online articles? Future heirlooms like family photos, home movies, and personal letters now exist mainly in digital form, and in many cases they are stored using popular services like Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, and Gmail. These digital possessions form a rich collection that chronicles our lives and connect us to each other. What will happen to these treasured digital assets and people’s online identities after they die?

Pius Adesanmi, writer, critic and Nigerian Professor of English, who passed on in 2019 wrote so many articles via his Facebook posts and Twitter handles. Hours after his death, the internet was awash with his wonderful articles being posted and reposted. Should his family decide to formally publish same, could they have access to his wall if they do not have his password?

WHAT IS DIGITAL DEATH?

As we build our lives in a virtual world, there is a growing concern about what happens to our online presence and assets after death. The term ‘digital death’ thus refers to how we manage our digital assets after death. It is used to describe the growing issue of what happens to your personas, ideas, feelings, pictures and accounts online after you die. Not many people have given serious thought to these questions. Maybe that is partly because what we do online still feels somehow new and abstract. Or maybe it is because pondering mortality is depressing. Nevertheless, people die leaving tonnes of digital stuff they have produced – billions of tweets, billions of images on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded; content from 20 million bloggers and over 500 million Facebook posts. ‘With the hoard of digital assets left behind, academics have begun to explore the subject (how does this change the way we remember and grieve?), social-media consultants have begun to talk about the legal implications and entrepreneurs are trying to build whole new businesses around digital-afterlife management’.

While they are some who agree that the sense of digital life beyond death is exciting, and actually leave a last message to be posted on social media by their friends or family and others whose accounts are now transparently run by their partners or families, for others, the fate of tweets and status updates are of no consequence. Several commentators have even declared categorically that they do not want to be left hanging in the virtual world. Others posit that preservation of digital articles is a minus to society and that it is strange to continue the online profile. In an article published in the Times of India in 2015, Pooja Dager a 37-year-old manager stated that she is not comfortable with accessing a deceased person’s account. She says she has “not even tried to venture into that territory” after her husband’s passing. “Only his bank accounts were transferred to my son’s name, that’s it. The others I try not to think about. I just let them be,” she adds. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in his book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” worries that preservation of digital files has created a scenario where “Forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy”. Some even posit that it is self-delusional egotism.

Notwithstanding these worries, as internet users age, many more people will have to confront the issues of digital death.

In their book, “Your Digital Afterlife,” American bloggers Evan Carroll and John Romano, interaction-design experts in Raleigh, N.C., who run a site called ‘TheDigitalBeyond.com’, maintain that people need to start planning for what is to be done with their email, online banking and trading, social media, photo-sharing, online billpay and blogs after death.

Barrister Anne Agi writes from Abuja. You can reach her through email: anneagi@yahoo.com