Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media

Meese, James; Nansen, Bjørn; Kohn, Tamara; Arnold, Michael; Gibbs, Martin

doi:10.1080/13576275.2015.1083724

Cited by 60 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The partial picture of a person present on digital platforms, even for a prolific social media user, are, at best, incomplete, fragmented and unrepresentative of the gamut of a person's life. While social media has facilitated many new spaces and practices of mourning and commemoration (Leaver, 2013;Leaver & Highfield, 2018;Meese et al, 2015;Nansen, Arnold, Gibbs, Kohn, & Meese, 2016;Arnold, Gibbs, Kohn, Meese & Nansen, 2018), the current limits of posthumous performance and residues are driven by the energy and effort of mourners and their uses of digital platforms. Social media, to date, provides spaces to remember and reminisce, not reanimate, the dead.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to everyday traces, the service asks users to document their most important memories and stories so they can be accessed after the user dies. Eterni.me's original promotional material explained that with their algorithm, these memories could be re-animated to the point, like 'Be Right Back', where users could 'Skype chat' with the dead (Meese, Nansen, Kohn, Arnold, & Gibbs, 2015). Initial press stories in Wired and elsewhere focused on this aspect, describing the service as 'creepy' (Clark, 2014;Starr, 2014).…”

Section: Eternimementioning

confidence: 99%

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Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

Leaver¹

2019

Preprint

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Technology enabling resurrection and reanimation of the dead has long been a theme in popular culture, and in science fiction (SF) in particular. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), generally considered the beginning of SF as a genre (Freedman, 2000), tells the tale of a scientist who harnesses technology and electricity to reanimate an entity stitched together from the remains of the recent dead. However, it is telling that Victor Frankenstein is now generally considered a metaphor for the arrogance of scientists who fail to consider the harmful potential of their work. While rarely as dramatic as stories of resurrection, Tony Walter (Walter, 2015) has convincingly argued that for thousands of years every communication technology, from etching in stone and cave paintings onward, has been used to communicate with the dead in some fashion. It comes as no surprise, then, that technology start-ups and entrepreneurs are attempting to harness digital technologies, social media, and networked communication not just to speak to the dead but also to use their digital residues to seemingly offer both resurrection and immortality.This chapter examines the promotional discourse deployed by three of these futuristic start-up companies – LivesOn (LivesOn, 2013), Eterni.me (“Eterni.me - Virtual Immortality,” 2016) and Humai (Humai, 2016) – and compares these with several notable SF texts which explore the underlying presumptions and broader cultural and social ramifications of these companies succeeding in achieving digital resurrection. The episode ‘Be Right Back’ of the dystopian television series Black Mirror (Harris, 2013) imagines a world where someone could be reconstituted from the detailed record of their lives left behind across various social media accounts, but with clear echoes of Frankenstein. The series returns to these themes in a more endearing fashion in the upbeat ‘San Junipero’ (Harris, 2016) which features a digital afterlife fashioned after the nineteen eighties. Australian hard SF author and computer scientist Greg Egan also explores this terrain in great detail; his short story ‘Learning to be Me’ (Egan, 1995) and novel Permutation City (Egan, 1994) reveal many of the philosophical presumptions and potential outcomes of a digitised afterlife (Leaver, 2004). In comparing these technology companies and SF texts, this chapter operates on two levels: the first, being to ask what presumptions are being made about contemporary personhood, culture and death; and secondly, mapping what future issues might the success of these start-ups actually provoke.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Eternimementioning

confidence: 99%

Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

Leaver¹

2019

Preprint

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“…It is ethical (Floridian), insofar as it makes this information in itself a moral patient. While other researchers (Karppi 2013;Meese et al 2015) have also noted the interests in keeping the dead within the networked economies of social media, their arguments have not illuminated fully the ethical dimensions of the matter, nor the mechanisms behind them. While the lens of discourse used by Meese et al (and to some extent Karppi) has provided important insights into the commercialisation of death online, it does not fully explain its political economy.…”

Section: Conceptualising the Digital Afterlifementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Comprehensive and systematic categorizations of the firms operating within the industry are thus rare, even if tutorials on the variety of services exist (Meese et al 2015). As far as academic literature goes, the only systematic attempt to categorise different digital afterlife services is a short conference paper written by de Oliveira et al (2015).…”

Section: Organising Services Within the Daimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to describe the basic interests of the DAI we use the concepts of living and dead labour (Marx 2015, 163), [also used by Chung (2015) in a study of visualisation of the (un)dead in digital cinema]. Furthermore, the critical angle of this study requires an ethical dimension to be included in the analysis, which has largely been missing in previous research on the politics of the online dead (Aceti 2015;Meese et al 2015;Karppi 2013). To extend our economic analysis into the realm of ethics, we therefore employ Marx's concept of the inorganic body and the theory of its alienation, as outlined by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844 (1844/2000).…”

Section: Outlining a Critical Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry

Öhman

Floridi

2017

Minds & Machines

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Online technologies enable vast amounts of data to outlive their producers online, thereby giving rise to a new, digital form of afterlife presence. Although researchers have begun investigating the nature of such presence, academic literature has until now failed to acknowledge the role of commercial interests in shaping it. The goal of this paper is to analyse what those interests are and what ethical consequences they may have. This goal is pursued in three steps. First, we introduce the concept of the Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI), and define it as an object of study. Second, we identify the politico-economic interests of the DAI. For this purpose, we develop an analytical approach based on an informational interpretation of Marxian economics. Third, we explain the practical manifestations of the interests using four real life cases. The findings expose the incentives of the DAI to alter what is referred to as the ''informational bodies'' of the dead, which in turn is to be seen as a violation of the principle of human dignity. To prevent such consequences, we argue that the ethical conventions that guide trade with remains of organic bodies may serve as a good model for future regulation of DAI.

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Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

Dinneen,

Krtalić,

Davoudi

et al. 2023

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Death is an inevitable part of life and highly relevant to information management: its approach often requires preparation, and its occurrence often demands a response. Many works in information science have acknowledged so much, and yet death is rarely a focused topic, appearing instead sporadically and disconnected across research. As a result there is no introduction to, overview of, or synthesis across studies on death and information. We therefore conducted an extensive literature search and reviewed nearly 300 scholarly publications at the intersection of death and information (and data) management. Covering seven topics in total, we review two groups of work directly engaging information management in relation to death (digital possessions, inheritance, and legacy; information behavior, needs, and practices around death), three engaging death and technology that require information and its management (death and the Internet, thanatosensitive design and technology‐augmented death practices, and the digital afterlife and digital immortality), and two reflecting the ethical and legal dimensions unique to death and information. We then integrate the collective findings to summarize the landscape of death‐related information research, outline remaining challenges for individuals, families, institutions, and society, and identify promising directions for future information science research.

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Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media

Cited by 60 publications

References 22 publications

Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry

Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

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