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.
