I see Dead People

You do too. They are all around us, reminding us constantly of their life and death.

What happens to your online self when you die? “More than a year after his death, Aaron Huth continues to haunt those who knew him. His profile on the behemoth six-degrees-of-separation Web site Friendster.com still lets people know that in May of 2003 he was listening to bands like the Birthday Party and the Postal Service and reading Nietzsche. His likes and interests were frozen for posterity on May 26, 2003, the last time he logged into the site.” Read the rest of this article over at citypaper.com.

I have always been intrigued at what happens when you die. Offline, we may never know but online, your ‘life’ never ends. There is simply no way for sites like myspace or facebook to differentiate between dead users and inactive users. Your online profile will be frozen in time for as long as the internet exists and will remind everyone of what you were doing during your life. Of course people may forget you and stop visiting your profile but a la google, someone in the future may search for something and end up in your profile. How is he supposed to know you’re dead? The internet may be filling up with dead people, and we have no way of knowing whether they’re alive or dead.

“Voices. That’s what people are, in the hypertextual world. A multiplicity of disembodied voices. In that view, there is no concrete difference between the words of the living and the words of the deceased. The real lives of the speakers are only things that occur in the background of the wired world.” Read the rest from this in a very thoughtful article on this topic.

Image Courtesy of VintageRos.