Describing his stance on preserving the cyberspace self — constructed of by the mass of tweets and blog posts and Facebook statuses we accumulate over a lifetime — Paul Kimball brings immortality into the fold. “We’re entering a world where we can all leave as much of a legacy as George Bush or Bill Clinton. Maybe that’s the ultimate democratization,” he told NYTimes author Rob Walker. “It gives all of us a chance at immortality.”
Walker traces the story of Mac Tonnies, a pretty regular guy who happened to update his blog nearly everyday and interact with online friends. Tonnies died unexpectedly. His blog become a shrine, a memorial, a viewing port into who Tonnies was as a person when he was living. Some of his digital friends reported seeking solace in his Twitter feed many months after he passed.
Even his parents, previously pretty unfamiliar with Tonnies blog (beyond what he chose to directly show them), told Walker that the personality crafted from these digital blocks were him. ““I can hear him when I read it,” his mother said.
Contrast this with Leslie Harpold, another person who spent time cultivating her online presence. With her unexpected death, her digital friends implored her family to keep her websites and social accounts alive. The family refused, believing that Harpold’s legacy doesn’t exist online. Instead, it “is with every person who knew her and loved her…People need to appreciate that she was a real person…[and] remember her as she was.” As she was, from this perspective, is situated in her physical interpersonal relationships and physical life rather than her online life.
This tension of where the self resides is nothing new. In the digital era, it becomes more and more clear that our self doesn’t reside squarely in one place or the other — completely online or completely embodied. Rather, we are hybrid cybernetic organisms negotiating the performance of self on multiple stages — online, offline, public, private….the complexities of stage and performance go on.
The issue with how to treat our digital remains after physical death is just another nuanced stage. How do prepare our performances of self even after we die? Many of the people Walker interview placed importance on documenting themselves, “creating a master repository of me” containing all their digital content, and achieving immortality. One software developer even proposed that institutions like governments or universities take over the preservation of individual’s digital content post-mortem.
I think this is a flimsy fantasy and indicates inflated egos and resistance of the inevitable. You are not special and you will not be remembered for hundreds of years. The “legacy” Paul Kimball is hoping for will be out of reach as soon your storage methods become as obsolete as floppy disks — which will happen fast. Your content is not you, it is only a portion of your overall performative self across those many stages. A life is not solely a collection of content. To act as if it’s cheapens human life. Beyond two generations, the likelihood is that your digital content becomes completely irrelevant. To act as if it won’t is narcissistic.
To then suggest that societal institutions are responsible for preserving highly individual expressions seems extreme. Social institutions are meant to preserve history and knowledge, making these repositories accessible for current and future generations — a place to reliably access our collective knowledge. Hyper specific details of each and every life — mainly consisting of the mundane, individual life — does not seem to fall under this purview. For all of human history, the far majority have died quietly and anonymously outside immediate social bonds. The few historical figures that do stand out often function as symbolic containers — rather than as individuals — for the values and practices of that particular society; the collective is imprinted upon them, and they become an avatar for understanding the rest of that society.
But we can’t all be the avatar. That avalanche of information is too much to process. What makes human unique is our capacity for symbolic thinking — we don’t process heaps of raw data like computers do, we instead engage with a semiological process that results in symbols — encoded as things like public figures, material objects, language — becoming containers for our most abstract human concepts. We rely on this collective symbolic framework to understand the world. Spending time fastidiously preserving all tweets or all Facebook statuses seems inconsequential given that the tides of time and human memory will do their work on even the most carefully preserved content — eventually, inevitability, the majority of it slips out of living reach.
Hi Violet,
Your post raises a great point when thinking about death in the digital age. I most agree with your statement, “Beyond two generations, the likelihood is that your digital content becomes completely irrelevant. To act as if it won’t is narcissistic.” Everyone wants to believe that they are special, but it’s simply not true and people play such a small role in the scope of everything else that is going on. As you pointed out, “For all of human history, the far majority have died quietly and anonymously outside immediate social bonds. The few historical figures that do stand out often function as symbolic containers — rather than as individuals — for the values and practices of that particular society.” When I read that, I immediately thought of YouTube’s Christina Grimmie. All of her videos now act as a shrine to memorialise her talent and legacy, but she was an exceptional person who reached millions.
zeldaxlove64 Christina Grimmie
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Nevertheless, I wanted to push back a little by making a point about the value of saving data after death. Maybe we won’t become immortalized and maybe our posthumous pages won’t be visited anymore after a few weeks – let alone a few days – but we are still special to the people around us. Saving information online, especially if one was a blogger, vlogger, or another person who shared tremendously through social media and other outlets, could be a valuable tool for close family and friends who could use it as a part of their grieving process. Having an online repository or digital media will could even give solace to someone on a personal level, despite how uncomfortable making one may sound. Hanging on to whatever figment of a deceased loved one, such as photographs or videos, is almost like collecting your grandmother’s letters.
People are narcissistic and overestimate their worth in the scope of the rest of the world. Still, to the people around us, any memory is worth preserving. Maybe
Apologies, my computer froze and I was unable to edit my comment. Here is what I was going to say:
Maybe people don’t want to think about saving their online data as a personal will, because making any sort of will can be uncomfortable. Therefore, disguising it as a way to immortalise themselves and be remembered even after death is appealing.