The Continuous Bond: World Soul 2.0
The German designer Leoni Fischer, a product design student at Weimar’s Bauhaus University, created the Necropolis project. This project was able to represent our digital existence on Facebook in a concrete, physical way. To keep the dead alive, maintaining their contact with us, Necropolis uses an algorithm to transform a person’s Facebook activity into a postmortem memorial. The individual’s data sets off a sequence of light signals, preserving the uniqueness of the individual, and of the relationship that has been severed, using tiny LED lights.
Fischer’s artistic project is a further confirmation of how social networks are able to take on the traditional symbolic communication between the hereafter and the now, communication that is perceived—by the person in front of the computer screen—as reciprocal. It’s worth noting that in international studies regarding digital death, terms like “interactive digital headstones,” “techno-spirituality” and “digital soul” are commonly used to describe the relationship being created between Facebook and death. Metaphors such as digital ghosts, technological memory boxes, and digital doppelgängers work along the same lines.
However, it is important to highlight some of the psychological, philosophical, and literary references that—in emphasizing the links between the world of the living and the world of the dead brought about by social networks—take us in the direction of experiments, ideas, and inventions that further articulate the presence of the dead in the digital environment. From a psychological point of view, the recognition of symbolic communication between the hereafter and the now generated by social networks has something in common with the continuing bonds theory. This theory was set forth, primarily by Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman, in their book Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, which challenged the established views expressed in contemporary studies on grief and mourning.1 This theory links the healthy rebuilding of the bereaved person’s life, following a painful loss, to the need to find a specific “place” for the deceased in their life as it continues. This “place” is closely associated with the memory the bereaved has of the deceased, a continuing bond that is often experienced in ways that include
Undoubtedly, social networks, and Facebook in particular, provide the tools required to implement this kind of continuing bond between the living and the dead. They meet the criteria of these three processes, as evidenced by both the narrative histories that form once an individual user dies and by Hobbs and Burke’s study of the grieving process.
From a philosophical perspective, there is a specific application within the digital realm of the concept of anima mundi or world soul (Weltseele), a term nineteenth-century German Romantic philosophy used to describe the relationship between the living and the dead and the reciprocal correspondence between the natural (Naturphilosophie) and the spirit world (Geisterwelt) within a pantheistic and vitalistic conception of reality. In fact, the anima mundi supports the interconnection of all of the world’s individual fragments (regardless of whether they are alive or dead), which make up the natural and spiritual totality of all things; each individual contributes to this world soul in a unique and distinctive way. Something similar is happening today in the infosphere where we are experiencing the shift from an individual identity to an intersubjective or interconnected one. This shift brings to light the original character of human identity, according to which all human beings are informational in themselves, part of a participatory universe, an All-One, actively embodying the dead, which is to say the presence of an absence.
In The Little Book of Life after Death (1836), Gustav Theodor Fechner argues that the meeting point between the living and the dead is memory and that the first holds the second, in the sense that “our memory of the dead is but a new consciousness, in retrospect, of the results of their known life here, yet the life on the other side will be led conformably to that in this world.”2 A bit later he adds that, in the same way that a physical blow is felt both by the giver and the receiver, when one remembers the dead it is a “shock of consciousness” experienced not only by the survivors but also by those who have died. The fact that those who are still alive don’t physically “see” or “hear” the deceased’s shock of consciousness doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.
This type of psychological and philosophical bond between the dead and the living forms the theoretical foundation of George Saunders’s recent Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel.3 The novel uses the death of the Abraham Lincoln’s beloved, eleven-year-old son Willie in 1862 as an opportunity to describe and tell the stories of the dead souls that populate the “bardo,” a Tibetan Buddhist term for the intermediate, transitional state between a life that has ended and a rebirth into a future life. The Tibetan Book of the Dead explains how the bardo is a liminal phase in which the spirits’ suffering results from the difficulty of accepting detachment from their earthly life, therefore from their loved ones. One of the fascinating aspects of Saunders’s novel is how the polyphonic or multi-voiced monologues of the spirits who inhabit the bardo—similar to the multiple posts on a Facebook newsfeed—describe contradictory perspectives of reality, therefore the many worlds, existing and recreated by each of them, based on their individual, distinctive choices and communal dialogues. These monologues are continually interwoven with accounts of Lincoln’s life and historical facts from that era. One of the most meaningful events in the novel is when Lincoln, in despair, visits the cemetery’s crypt and embraces his son’s corpse. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t see Willie’s spirit, which is outside the coffin, running to meet him, begging him to hug and caress him, not the lifeless body in the “sick-box.” This is how the spirits refer to their coffins, as they are commenting to each other while watching the meeting between the president and his son. At a certain point, Willie’s spirit goes back into the corpse in order to be closer to his father. Lincoln starts to cry as if he has sensed a change in the body he is clutching in his arms. As I mentioned, this scene in the novel is narrated through the dialogue of the other spirits of the dead, an exchange that brings to mind the kind of conversation and arguments typical of those on social networks.
The feeling of symbolically maintaining communication with those who have died by addressing them in a conversational way, as is possible on Facebook, coincides with Fechner and Saunders’s philosophical and literary descriptions. In other words, it seems as if the spirit of the deceased can somehow sense the words and actions expressed and that, if combined with the clear awareness of the definitive absence of the deceased, may help the bereaved overcome their suffering and find the motivation to rebuild their lives. This may explain, among other things, the increase in interactions on Facebook during a period of mourning.
With this in mind, I will now describe some of the methods used in the digital environment to keep communication between the living and the dead active. I will broaden the discussion regarding the link between social networks and death and highlight digital culture’s vast potential when it comes to reimagining funeral celebrations and remembering the dead.
A dismayed Franz Kafka asked himself how humans could have invented an idea as unhealthy as that of staying in contact with each other through the exchange of letters. According to him, it was no better than writing to ghosts. Not only that, the letters’ contents were then consumed by other voracious ghosts while in transit. “One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power.”4 Kafka, who is talking about paper letters, was obviously unaware that one day people would be using messaging applications like WhatsApp, which intensify the ghostliness of written communication.
The relationship between death and grief and WhatsApp is just as complex as the relationship between death and grief and social networks. The dead haunt our WhatsApp contact lists. Their profiles, which include their photos and status posts, are mixed in with those of the still living, creating a situation where each individual, any time they scroll through their contacts list, finds themselves confronted with their deceased friends or loved ones—which is to say confronted with the incarnation of an absent presence. In the same way as a Facebook “memory” of a deceased friend provokes a sudden and unexpected reminder of death, the WhatsApp profile of a deceased friend becomes a kind of memorial shrine, offering up to us once again the photographs exchanged, the sound of that friend’s voice in the voice messages sent, and all of the chat messages written over the years. The presence of the deceased on WhatsApp has an emotionally disruptive effect: this app is only used for private conversations, or those shared with a limited number of friends. The personal dimension of the relationship makes the person who is irrevocably lost seem even closer and more present.
This situation confronts us with some difficult questions: What should we do with the WhatsApp profile of a deceased contact? Delete it or keep it? Ziccardi, posing these questions to his “friends” on Facebook, noted that the majority of them were intent on keeping the profiles of those who had died in their WhatsApp contacts list. Even though a casual poll of Facebook friends has no statistical value, he came to the conclusion that, for many people, deleting a deceased person’s profile was profoundly painful since it reiterated the physical reality of the death in the digital environment. In fact, keeping a person on one’s contact list was seen as a sign of love and respect for the deceased and also a way of seeing them again, if just for an instant, reviving memories and joyful moments experienced together. That is to say, it is a way of keeping the memory of our loved one’s tone of voice and way of expressing themselves alive over the course of time. All we have to do is listen to a few of their voice messages and reread the chats exchanged. “These elements become, in this way, an important part of our archive of memories and are integrated with that person’s Facebook profile,” observes Giovanni Ziccardi.5 There are also those who believe that keeping a deceased person’s profile on a contact list reopens wounds and risks pushing the grieving process in the wrong direction, creating distress and sadness. From that perspective, deleting a number from WhatsApp is like performing a healthy “digital cremation,” after which the bereaved can begin to restart their lives anew.
An unusual situation exists regarding the link between WhatsApp and the dead: it’s like sending a direct message to the deceased. A friend told me about the day she graduated from university seven months after her boyfriend had died. As soon as she received her official diploma, her first instinct was to pick up her smartphone and send a WhatsApp message to him and let him know her happy news. This situation is actually more common than most people realize and warrants further exploration.
First of all, sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died is nothing like making public posts on Facebook. As expressions of grief, Facebooks posts serve a useful purpose because, despite being ostensibly directed to the dearly departed, they are also read and shared with other bereaved users. On Facebook, a communal theatricality is part and parcel of the communication with the dead.
In contrast, a direct message to the deceased on WhatsApp is a private, confidential message that is literally “sent.” My friend sent her own important news directly to her boyfriend who was no longer alive. She sent it to him, to him alone and no one else. This message could only be read by the living person who wrote it and, hypothetically, by the dead person who received it. From the moment the send button is tapped, the sender may be hoping to see the double check mark to indicate that the message was delivered, followed by the moment when those two gray check marks turn blue to indicate that the message has been read. But, aside from such hope, this is a definite, intentional, symbolic gesture, seemingly irrational and in contradiction to reality: the desire to communicate her happy news—her graduation—to the person with whom she most wanted to share it.
And so WhatsApp, if used in a symbolic way, with a clear awareness of the reality of death, can become a romantic link between the departed and the one who has been left behind. It can be a way of keeping the bond alive in the mind and emotions of the living. We should not underestimate the symbolic and romantic significance of this gesture. It is a very concrete way of expressing those continuing bonds between the hereafter and the now. We have a digital body to contain the spirit of each individual, whether they are alive or dead. The fact remains that the person who sent the message will only see the one gray check mark, no confirmation of receipt will come. This could be a healthy way to come to terms with how things are now and with the fact that they will never go back to how they were before. Life goes on, so to take a moment to symbolically recover the lost intimacy with a loved one can be healthy. Obviously, what is important is that this moment is understood and performed as a symbolic action within the context of a clear and resolute awareness of death.
Direct messages to the deceased via WhatsApp also help us clearly understand the reasons behind the invention of chatbots and projects like Eter9, Eterni.me, and LifeNaut. As soon as the message is sent, it’s immediately followed by the uncontrollable desire to receive one more time, at least once, a reply. Remember Ash’s joy in “Be Right Back,” when he found out that he was going to be a father after Martha told him she was pregnant? These inventions are responding to this desire and are trying to satisfy it. They are also working from the sure knowledge that we—be it on WhatsApp or in any other interactive environment on the internet—reproduce ourselves with an immeasurable quantity of personal material, which will define our profile forever.
This awareness, beyond the experiments on digital immortality and keeping in mind the precious personal resources contained in WhatsApp chats, compels us to reflect on the meaning of our digital legacies and the consequences of those legacies in the context of the continuing bond with our deceased loved ones and the different ways of dealing with funerals.6
According to Adam Ostrow, former editor in chief of Mashable, one of the world’s most popular blogs, forty-eight hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every single minute, two hundred million Tweets are being posted to Twitter every day, and the average Facebook user is creating ninety pieces of content each month.7 This vast quantity of images, video, and written material, which accumulates and is constantly shared and often virally re-shared on social networks, is always associated with an email address, without which it’s difficult or even impossible to register on a social network.
Every email address, first and foremost, functions as a container for the private and work correspondence that each one of us has accumulated over the last several decades, starting at the birth of the internet. Consider the thousands of emails, including love letters and private arguments, as well as a substantial amount of work-related activities and data both private and publicly available. These email addresses are connected to hundreds of other accounts, each associated with a user name, a password, the terms of service, and a privacy policy. These accounts, in addition to the social networks, cloud storage services, and mobile messaging services already mentioned, are also linked to virtual locations that are further afield. There are online stores (Amazon, eBay, etc.), search engines and web portals for travel, vacations, restaurants, car rentals, tourist attractions (TripAdvisor, eDreams, Booking.com, etc.); then there are personal blogs on WordPress, music libraries and playlists (iTunes, Spotify, etc.), national and international libraries, dating sites, home banking, online supermarkets, and so on. Signing up for each one of these accounts implies the widespread and often unintended distribution of one’s personal data to hundreds of companies, agencies, and service providers. Your telephone number, your social-security number, your credit card information, various photographs, a history of the sites you’ve visited, and the cookies that advertisers have tagged you with are all circulating serenely around the internet.
The internet is so obsessed with archiving that a music fan can create a personal profile on a site like setlist.fm (https://www.setlist.fm). On this website, users from around the globe are engaging in a meticulous collaborative effort to compile the setlists (documents listing all the songs a band intends to play during a given performance) of all of the concerts in the world. Each user creates a personal profile in which they keep an archive of the concerts that they have personally attended. Each concert is connected to a web page that shows its setlist. In a less specialized area, the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) has built a digital library of websites and their content so that researchers, historians, and scholars have access to an endless amount of material from which they can derive an authentic archaeology of the web. Among the various sections of the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/), which makes it possible to find websites that are no longer currently online. It’s also possible to find versions of the same website from different years in order to see how it has changed over time.
The digital environment is adept at making us think about time, which is progressively distributed in a fragmentary way on the surface of our screens, in spatial terms. This spatialization of time ensures that nothing disappears from the Internet, remaining available to posterity even when it seems to be lost. The “perfect crime” that Baudrillard talks about in terms of television is accomplished through “an unconditional realization of the world by the actualization of all data, the transformation of all our acts and all events into pure information,” so that the world will reach a “final solution” sooner than anticipated through the meticulous cloning of reality.8
Now let’s take a moment and try to grasp all of the traces left by our own online presence, taking account of all of our activities, the distribution of our data, and the general archiving mania of the Internet. Let’s try to do it, knowing that every trace, more often than not, exists in tandem with other users, in a vast digital environment of interconnected identities. Already we have found ourselves in a universe of memories and personal information, with indefinable boundaries, almost impossible to navigate. In fact, the individual user is often unaware of all of the traces they have left on various websites and all the accounts they have opened in their lifetimes. If it is unlikely that we will remember all the passwords we have ever created; certainly it is impossible to remember the terms of service and privacy policies to which we have agreed, which has permitted the sending of our personal data to third parties.
Ultimately, there is no way to plan and execute your own “digital death” despite the existence of targeted services such as Deseatme (https://www.deseat.me/) and Just Delete Me (http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/). Companies like this are working to help users delete all their accounts, one by one; however, as they are doing this work, they receive in exchange a precise digital map of that person’s digital identity and thus all of their movements online. And so we find ourselves back where we started.
Planning for the “death” of our data, digital objects, and information—to coincide with our own physical death—is even more problematic. Back in 2011 there was quite a stir when scientific journalist Derek K. Miller asked his family to publish a prepared blog post immediately following his death from cancer. In this lengthy post he said his goodbyes to his loved ones and his readers. Miller defined this post as the first part of the process of turning his active website into an archive. Unlike Miller, most people don’t give much thought to the postmortem destiny of their digital homes. Much like how many put off thinking about death off-line as well. One wonders how many impersonal funerals, or disputes about what to do with physical assets, are the result of a family’s reluctance to talk to their loved ones about how they would like to be remembered, or how they would like their possessions handled. It’s no wonder that the Swedish practice of “death cleaning” is currently so popular.
If the organization of one’s physical possessions is apt to be cursorily managed, just imagine how the digital ones fare! These digital possessions are stored online but often off-line as well, and they include everything that is in our computers, smartphones, or tablets (eReader, music, and media collections on Windows Media Player, and the list goes on). We have already partially addressed the difficulties that come up on social networks when a user has not left a digital will to regulate how to deal with the content they shared in that context. Now we can broaden the discussion further to what is commonly called digital inheritance, which touches the lives of an increasingly large number of people as we get further away from the birth of the internet. As Derrida wrote, “Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task” and “That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.”9 And the urgency of taking on this task is underlined by the evidence that the dead continue to live symbolically in the hereafter only as long as the living remember them. They disappear once the last living person who knew them during their lifetime dies.
Now that it’s clear that you need to carefully consider your digital legacy, let’s stop and take a moment to think about the most appropriate actions to take. You already know that there is no way to keep track of everything that you’ve ever produced on the internet, for the reasons already mentioned. Once you are aware of this, you can still put some limits on that lack of control, asking yourself what deserves to be saved and what should be deleted. In order to do this you need to backtrack and make an inventory of all of the accounts you’ve opened over the years, deciding which ones should remain active. This inventory could be started by searching through your emails, checking for traces of all of the other connected accounts in order to analyze them and begin the selection. Obviously, you have to follow the official procedures for deleting an account very carefully, even to the point of reading the contractual conditions you have agreed to—something hardly anyone ever does.
If you have opted for a digital cremation of your content after you die, you have to arrange things so that no one has the information necessary to access your various accounts. You need to establish in advance—wherever possible, like it is with the social networks—that your accounts will be deleted upon your death. Then, you store your digital assets on a disk or another type of physical storage device. Once you have chosen where to store these assets, you lock them by using encryption software and don’t let anyone else have your decoding keys. Given that the complete cremation of the material you have produced and saved online is not possible, you must clearly express to your relatives that, upon your death, you would at least like to have the content related to your identity de-referenced. This means that you can ask for online search engines to eliminate any links to personal content that are no longer relevant from their results pages. The most notable case related to this is the 2014 ruling regarding a Spanish citizen who used Europe’s privacy laws to request the removal of links that turned up in search results when someone Googled his name. Some of these links sent searchers back to the pages of local newspapers that tied his name to the auction notice for his home, which had been repossessed sixteen years earlier. It was being sold to cover his tax debt. He felt that this information, no longer relevant as he had paid off his debts during those sixteen years, now violated his privacy. The judges upheld his claim and ruled that an individual could ask search engines to de-index content considered irrelevant, independent of the fact that it was still available online.10
If you would like to leave your digital memories to posterity, first you need to make a record of the access information (usernames and passwords) for all of your active accounts. Then you should choose a trustworthy person in advance, charged with the task of keeping this information so that—in the event of your death—your relatives can have access to the legacy you want them to inherit. Not taking these precautions means risking a repeat of what happened when the thirteen-year-old Italian boy, Dama, died in 2015 from an osteosarcoma (a malignant type of bone tumor). His father, who didn’t have the access codes to his son’s phone, pleaded with Apple to get access to his content, so that he could keep the final words and images preserved on the phone as a memorial. Even though Dama had backed up his data, and his father was in possession of that, the very last interactions that had taken place on his mobile phone hadn’t been saved elsewhere. Like the case in Berlin where the parents petitioned Facebook to access their deceased daughter’s account, Apple prevented the father from accessing his son’s phone, using the argument that they were protecting the user’s privacy. The father claimed that Apple had, in fact, denied his right to these memories of his son.
There are currently many services that, keeping Dama’s father’s experience in mind and taking Sartre’s words—“The unique characteristic of a dead life is that it is a life of which the Other makes himself the guardian”11—seriously, offer support to those who want to create their own digital legacy. This includes the username and password access already mentioned, but also all of the other digital objects produced over a lifetime: photographs, written texts, videos, playlists of favorite songs, and so on.
One example is eMemory (https://www.ememory.it/), an Italian website that aims to make a connection between memory and digital selection. They combine two purposes, that of determining and protecting an individual’s digital legacy with that of educating them about the ecological use of the internet. This is why eMemory looks like a digital home within which each person carves out a space, building and preserving their memories. One of the company’s central tenets is the idea that memory involves selection and that there is no freedom without memory. Their theoretical starting point is an observation of the overabundance of information and the resulting senseless accumulation of digital material that lacks any selection criteria. This accumulation of content means that the significant aspects of your personhood risk being lost because you are completely submerged in the material you have produced, shared, and then saved. With this in mind, eMemory supplies an online space—partly free and partly for a fee—where users can select and catalog their own digital legacy, with different levels of privacy. In addition, users can also save their user names and passwords to various accounts, creating a kind of digital will that will be delivered to the people specified upon the user’s death. The interesting aspect of eMemory is its quality as an archive: any content stored in it can be accompanied by written or recorded information, which offers a detailed description of the corresponding experience, strengthening the memory of the person who is no longer there.
Like eMemory, BoxTomorrow (www.boxtomorrow.com) offers a logical approach to preparing your digital will. You sign up for the service and build a kind of virtual box in which you can put your photographs and documents, along with files containing your usernames and passwords for important websites. Upon your death, your beneficiaries can open the virtual box and access the material you’ve bequeathed to them. The American website Memories (https://www.memories.com/), created by two Israeli brothers living in the United States., is meant to help you curate your memories. It offers a variety of privacy plans and also helps preserve your memories of the deceased. The French website GrantWill (https://www.grantwill.com/en/) even goes so far as to describe itself as the first social network for the dead, although the services are more or less in line with the others previously described. GrantWill provides a digital safe for storing personal, administrative, and business data. In addition, the company offers a service that will send personalized messages to friends and relatives, and communicate important, private information to those who have been chosen in advance as your digital identity managers once you have died. The website states: “Don’t be afraid, we will all die one day. Nobody lives forever. Nowadays we live faster than before, time flies. This can make things difficult for our relatives and loved ones.”
Another interesting website is Elysway (http://www.elysway.com), which calls itself the Facebook of the dead. Started in autumn of 2014 and with an interface available in five languages, Elysway offers a variety of services. First, the user creates a page that is like a Facebook page. Here, friends, relatives, and acquaintances—called “passengers”—can post videos, photos, and images of the deceased; instead of a “like,” they can post “my condolences” below the content. The deceased is called a “star” and their page features a biography and is meant to keep that individual’s memory alive. The person who creates and manages the “star page,” which is to say the profile of the deceased, is called the “star angel.” This person manages all of the information posted by passengers and other angels.
Other services focus on farewell videos. The U.S. website SafeBeyond (www.safebeyond.com) offers users the ability to produce videos to leave to their loved ones. These videos, according to the precise instructions of the person who made them, will be delivered to the intended recipients at a meaningful moment in their lives (if desired, together with passwords and other elements of a digital legacy). The presentation video for the service shows a situation where the terminally ill father of an eight-year-old girl is making a video, while the girl—unaware—is playing on the beach. In the following scenes we see his grown daughter on her wedding day as she receives her father’s video message expressing his sadness at not being there along with his assurances of how proud he is of her and that he is with her in spirit. The home page also quotes the famous words of Steve Jobs, who stresses that death is one of life’s best “inventions,” functioning as an agent of change that clears out the old and makes way for the new, despite the fact that no one really wants to die. Much like SafeBeyond, If I Die (an app mentioned in the introduction) offers, in addition to farewell videos, a contest called “If I Die First.” The message of the first user to die, out of all the users who choose to “participate” by leaving an if i die 1st message, will be “awarded” global exposure estimated at 200 million people through Facebook, Mashable, and various other media outlets.
Finally, the Italian website Memori (https://getmemori.com) is worth mentioning. Conceived by the homonymous company Memory Srl, which specializes in language recognition projects, voice interfaces, and mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) platforms, Memori is an interactive digital memory box for human memories. It’s a box where you can enter written text, images, and audiovisual recordings, each one of which is connected to a memory, an object, or a specific question. Once plugged in, this box has an interface with which users can interact. This allows you to associate certain objects with specific people. Suppose I associate this object with a close relative. A close relative just places the object on top of the Memori box and the box will recognize them, say hello, and then speak with them as if you yourself were speaking. The basic assumption of all of these projects, and there are many others, is that the power death exercises and the place it occupies in our lives, is contained in the power of memory. It is from memory that we draw the strength to enrich our life path, to grow—and to enhance our way of thinking. Above all, memory can intensify the echo of those who are no longer with us in our own lives and help us prepare our own “echo” in the lives of others when it’s our turn to leave. Today, digital culture offers memory (which is to say the spiritual flow between the hereafter and the here-and-now) the ability to give a tangible and personal voice to that echo. The digital body can become a depository for intimate bonds, the consoling voice able to vest memory with the trappings that made the relationship each one of us has had with our loved one unique, for better and for worse.
Ultimately, it should be pointed out that almost all of the services mentioned guarantee that they will create a copy of the material shared, so that a copy can be saved on your own computer or printed, and therefore “physically” saved. This option is strongly recommended because digital memory is extremely fragile. Your digital legacy risks being utterly lost as soon as the format, or hardware on which it is stored, becomes obsolete.
A few years ago Google’s vice president, Vinto Cerf, caused a sensation during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when he claimed it was quite probable that the document formats we currently use would become obsolete, and consequently unreadable. Not being aware of this and therefore not looking for concrete solutions means running the risk of producing a genuine “digital desert,” in which future historians will be unable to find documents from our era. Not to put too fine a point on it, he pointed out that in the 1980s we were saving our documents on floppy disks and killing video game aliens with Quickfire II joysticks—items that have become museum pieces in the arc of a few decades. Just think back to the first emails. The content that was generated in early versions of Microsoft Outlook is gone for good, because at the time we were not aware of the necessity of saving the content we produced.
Considering these issues, the paradox of digital archives becomes even more evident. While we are digitizing our assets, thinking that it’s the best way to preserve them over time, we have not considered that an analogue copy of our material—for example, a printed photograph—could last longer than a digital one.
Abby Smith Rumsey, in her book When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, emphasizes the unimaginable fragility of the digital storage devices to which we are entrusting our memories.12 Today, our cultural memory is integrated with a system of complex technologies that are constantly being redefined and implemented. And this means that any change to the system threatens to make our saved content illegible. A paper book can last for hundreds of years; it’s enough to make sure that it is kept in the right environment and there are eyes available to read it. In contrast, PDF files depend on codes and data that can quickly become obsolete, running the risk of never being read again.
In turn, Luciano Floridi believes that our digital memory is as volatile as our oral culture, if not more so. “Memory is not just a question of storage and efficient management; it is also a matter of careful curation of significant differences, and hence of the stable sedimentation of the past as an ordered series of changes, two historical processes that are now seriously at risk.”13 There are millions of abandoned pages on the Internet; because they are constantly being updated, websites are not saving any remnants of their past. Wayback Machine aside, the saving of a document means erasing the preceding versions. As the years go by, hard disks and other digital supports risk deteriorating, as do CDs and DVDs when compared with the longevity of vinyl. Floridi thinks that, because of continuous technological evolutions, big data will age and die, resulting in the loss of an impressive amount of material that has been digitally archived. In highlighting this apocalyptic scenario, he takes us back to where we started: our awareness of how fragile digital memory is must have an impact on our subjective ability to select from the immense amount of digital material produced and encourage us to develop a fuller sense of responsibility for the way we construct and maintain our selected memories. Whatever action we chose to take, we must carefully consider digital culture’s perpetual, contradictory oscillations between the data that risks remaining on the web for all eternity (whether we like it or not) and the data that is in danger of being lost forever.
In my view, this also involves a focused consideration of our own mortality, and of the certainty that we are not meant to live forever. This is why all of the memories that we produce, if they are not organized and curated, will disappear into the general flow of the world wide web and create more suffering for those who loved us and who have survived us. Digital inheritance ultimately opens up a series of controversial legal scenarios in terms of the right to be forgotten and personal privacy. In the end, the archival environment, considering how many traces we leave online, is also a thanatological one. If I have to plan out how to deal with my memories and recollections so that they will not end up completely lost or anarchically dispersed around the internet, I must also consider that my life will not go on forever and that all I have produced will last beyond my physical death, continuing to impact the world of the living.
In his book Visioni digitali: Video, web e nuove tecnologie (Digital Visions: Video, Web and New Technologies), Simone Arcagni describes the characteristics of today’s technological innovations and the revolution that has taken place in terms of how we view images. He points out multiple times how the Web 3.0 is a “‘pervasive’ system that brings together objects, people, and machines into one, vast, and continually expanding universe of communication, which can be accessed through the screens on a variety of devices.”14 He also highlights the integration between these increasingly powerful interfaces and an audiovisual experience that encompasses both thought and communication.
The pervasive nature of a system that makes objects, people and machines indistinguishable from one another (within the context of a worldview in which online and off-line mirror each other) is also bringing fundamental changes to our funeral rites. The disruptive presence of death in the digital environment, where it is integrated with the various life experiences and the immense amount of memorabilia created by each individual user, has had an effect on the kind of innovations that are beginning to mark an evolutionary change in cemeteries. In particular, the progressive digitalization of these locations goes hand in hand with the commemoration of the dead on social networks and, in some ways, represents a meaningful connection with projects like MyDeathSpace. There is an increasingly direct link between how we think about cemeteries and the pervasiveness of communication and storytelling in the world around us (especially on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). This connection has provoked a radical rethinking of headstones and the type of memory we associate with them. In other words, digital culture stands between “retrospective memory,” which keeps the dead present for the living as a way of recognizing their importance to the group and reaffirming the unity and image of its broader culture, and “prospective memory,” which is based on the specific ways in which the deceased is unforgettable (fame, achievements, etc.).15 This creates an unprecedented integration of these two types of memory in new funeral practices.
When we go to the cemetery, we wander through a forest of headstones and other grave markers. On these markers we find the birth and death dates of the deceased, perhaps accompanied by a brief epitaph and a succinct description of their achievements if that person has played a meaningful role in society. This brings to mind two characters from the Italian film Bianco, Rosso e Verdone (1981), Mimmo and his grandmother. The two of them are in a cemetery looking for the headstone of someone whose name they cannot remember—“… a headstone with a last name like Soriso, Rise, Risata (Smile, Laughed, Laughing), like Me vie’ da ride (It makes me laugh)?”16—and it is this forgetfulness that leads them to begin looking at other headstones and wondering about those buried there. Today, these kinds of questions are beginning to find answers in businesses that aim to use digital culture to enhance the level of biographical information available on an individual’s tombstone.
The first solution, which brings together funeral practices with digital culture, involves applying a QR code to a headstone. QR is short for Quick Response code; this two-dimensional barcode is made up of black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background in such a way that it is personalized and exclusively dedicated to a deceased individual. It can be used to store memories (songs, stories, anecdotes, photographs, etc.) that are usually meant to be viewed on a smartphone. These can be bonded to the stone with an adhesive that will withstand all kinds of weather. Each QR code is linked to the Facebook profile of the deceased or, more commonly, to a web page where friends and family create that person’s personal biography, adding their own memories, anecdotes, and images. By using the QR reader on a tablet or smartphone, the linked information (the biography of the deceased) can then be read. Sometimes access is public while in other cases access is available only to authorized users.
In the United States and Great Britain, this practice is widespread. The first QR codes on headstones were tried out in Philadelphia and Seattle. In the latter city, the company Living Headstones has kept a step ahead of the competition, offering to combine traditional stone markers with new, innovative technologies, in a way that does not involve any extra costs. The only exception is an eighty-dollar fee if family members would like to update an existing headstone. The Chester Pearce cemeteries in the English town of Poole, and those of Roskilde in Denmark, are among the first in Europe to have tried this new technology.
When it comes to QR codes on headstones, one of the most comprehensive services is offered by Cloud Memorials (http://www.cloudmemorials.ph/login). This site invites those who knew the deceased to create a Cloud Biography on the website. This personal biography of the deceased can be continually augmented by the addition of personal testimonials, photographs, and anecdotes provided by those close to them. Once the Cloud Biography has been established, the QR code will be placed on the tombstone of the deceased so that their biography can be read by those visiting the cemetery. Cloud Memorials also allows users to search the biographies for people they know. Access is public and the names of the deceased are in alphabetical order. The effect is similar to that of MyDeathSpace: a virtual cemetery, full of stories about special moments. For example, on the page of a young woman who died when she was only twenty years old, we see a photo of her, a description of her brief life and her personality, along with information about her activities at school and work. She has twenty-one followers, many of whom have posted a photograph that included her. Every caption is an opportunity to describe what is happening in the photo. So we see her in the swimming pool, at the disco, at the local museum, and with her friends at a party. One contact, sharing a special photo, points out that he had forgotten that he had the photograph;this is followed by an exclamation of laughter (“Hahaha!”) and the sad comment that this was probably the last time they had hung out together. Clearly when he found it, he felt the desire to share it with the young woman’s loved ones. All of this information can be viewed either directly on the Cloud Memorials website or, by scanning the QR code on a headstone in the cemetery.
In Italy, this phenomenon is starting to catch on. In Cinisello Balsamo, a suburb of Milan, the first official digital gravestone will soon be installed. This involves the application of a QR code on the marble headstone in the local cemetery. In a town in the Italian province of Treviso, a woman chose to place a QR code on the tombstone of her boyfriend on her own initiative. This code links cemetery visitors to his personal blog where, among other things, he talks about the cancer that lead to his death.
It’s very likely that, in the coming years, applying QR codes to gravestones will become common practice worldwide, making cemeteries a true resource for biographical information about the dead. The main downside is maintenance: that means constantly checking to make sure that the website linked to the code is functional, that the cemeteries have active data and Wi-Fi connections, and that the systems do not become obsolete as digital and computer technologies evolve. At any rate, it’s enough to keep combining innovation with tradition, so that gravestones will be able to furnish the necessary information about the deceased even in the absence of digital services. It’s also important to back up the biographical material in a format that is guaranteed to last. After all, it has always been possible for the memory of the deceased to fall by the wayside, even with traditional ways of marking their burial location. In many parts of the world, bodies are subject to exhumation or removal because the contract with the cemetery was not “in perpetuity.” If there is no one to represent the interests of the family or of the deceased, the remains are removed to a communal ossuary and risk meeting the same fate as websites that are no longer maintained and cease to function.
The Japanese cemetery of Ruriden (http://www.ruriden.jp), associated with the Kōkoku-ji temple in central Tokyo, has gone well beyond the concept of QR codes on tombstones. This cemetery, actually a columbarium, contains more than two thousand glass Buddha statuettes, all illuminated by LED lights that change color and pattern according to the season and the weather. The statuettes are placed inside a transparent glass display, a floor-to-ceiling grid made up of glass boxes, each of which represents a deceased individual, from a nine-month-old child to a hundred-year-old woman. Ruriden works like this: the deceased is cremated and their ashes are then kept in a locker behind the wall. Each deceased person is assigned a specific statue; which is then linked to a smart card containing all of their basic personal information. A relative or visitor uses the smart card to access the cemetery and to illuminate the Buddha statue that corresponds to their loved one, distinguishing it from the others. This incredibly futuristic cemetery, from the structure to the interior lights, was commissioned by Kōkoku-ji’s head priest in order to offer a reasonably priced solution to people who were single, childless, or just couldn’t afford a family tomb (which can cost up to forty-thousand euros). The much more reasonable costs at Ruriden include that of the Buddha statuette and a modest annual fee for maintenance and storage of an individual’s ashes for thirty-three years. The statuettes are symbolically thought of as companions in a high-tech afterlife, giving people who die without family the sense that they will be surrounded by others like them and therefore not “alone.” Another one of Japan’s high-tech cemeteries, Rurikoin Temple, also has screens that display commemorative digital photo albums of the deceased. Clearly Japan is at the forefront of digital funeral practices—indeed some rites are already being performed by robot priests—and this presages a near future in which holographic representations of the dead can be used, accompanied by prerecorded dialogue that will give the impression of being able to speak with the dead whenever we visit them at the cemetery.
The idea of digitizing funerals and the Japanese goal of making holograms of the deceased have inspired the Hereafter Institute that, in concert with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), has worked extensively with technological practices in the broad sense as well as specifically with futuristic funerals and cemeteries. The work done by this American institution is extremely high-tech, to the point where it seems out of place to those who are attached to a traditional concept of funeral rites. For example, if up until now it has been common practice for some people to wear a locket or a pendant with a small photograph of their deceased loved one, Hereafter offers an alternative “locket” that, instead of a still photo, displays videos of the deceased. Such an invention is perfectly in line with ongoing changes in how we communicate. The result—preserving the memory of the dead—is the same as that of a traditional locket; the only change is in the technology used to represent the deceased. Hereafter also offers those who are grieving photo reconstructions and a 3D video in a virtual room, which has the name of the deceased written on the door. Once they have donned the virtual reality goggles and entered the room, the user finds an artificial reproduction of the deceased, waiting to interact. The managers of the Hereafter Institute argue that as time passes, people will become increasingly interested in replacing traditional gravesites with digital memorials. The goal is to take control of the present, reestablishing the rituals and norms of mourning and dealing with the trauma of loss.
It’s clear that the posthumous interaction offered to relatives of the deceased by the Hereafter Institute’s project is similar to that created by chatbots, Counterparts and holograms. However, unlike the artificial dialogue with chatbots and holograms—which can take place anywhere that a mobile device will go—this type of interaction is limited to the place where the remains of a loved one are buried. So even if virtual communication can still upset the delicate emotional balance of those who have suffered a loss, the specific location has a clear symbolic link to the separate worlds of the living and the dead. Visitors to a gravesite usually “talk” to the deceased; Hereafter offers the possibility of receiving a consolatory response.
There is also a more informal concept of the cemetery available for mobile devices—with applications like RipCemetery and iRIP—that an individual can use to create a family cemetery on their own smartphone, customizing it with a variety of graphics. Friends and family members can share their memories, adding posts, photographs, and virtual flowers to the gravestone. By creating a kind of virtual cemetery for mobile devices, RipCemetery offers the following options: it allows every user to see who else has visited the family gravestone, to share files in digital format, and to save time for those who might find it difficult to physically visit the cemetery. In explaining the underlying idea, the founders emphasize the fact that our lives are increasingly experienced online and the demands on our time have also increased. They also note that visiting a cemetery to work through emotions is something that is mostly done by the elderly in our society. Grief and mourning is something that typically happens at home, and we are already used to finding refuge behind the screen of a computer, tablet, or smartphone as a way of coping with our grief.
Intuitively, the concept of a family cemetery on a digital device leads easily to the idea of livestreaming funerals. All you need to do before the funeral is set up a digital video system that supports streaming video in a part of the chapel (or other location) that is high enough to capture the most important aspects of the event. The funeral can then be livestreamed online, and displayed on PC, tablet, or smartphone screens.
The livestreamed funeral, which can be attended by the close friends and family members of the deceased—supplied with the appropriate access codes in advance—was conceived as a useful innovation to cope with a world in which a substantial number of people are emigrating from one place to another. Not everyone has the time, financial resources, or flexibility in their work schedule to physically attend the funeral of a loved one when it is being held in another part of the world. If they can watch the funeral at home, on their own computer, it’s better than not attending it at all and exacerbating the pain they are going through. Generally speaking, once the livestreaming of the ceremony is over, there is no way to watch it again; after all, we’re not talking about a football match or a concert. However, in many countries there are services that will make a video of the event and provide clients with a permanent copy. One of the first companies to offer livestreaming of funerals in Europe was the Ireland-based Funerals Live (http://funeralslive.ie), which was founded following the widespread emigration of Irish citizens due to the economic crisis. Having this service available means that Irish people who are far from home do not have to spend all of their savings on plane tickets to return to Ireland for the funeral of a close friend or family member.
In China, during the Qingming Festival (a traditional Chinese festival similar to the Christian All Saints’ Day), people usually visit the cemetery to commemorate the dead and clean their graves. During this event, the Yuhuatai Martyrs’ Cemetery in Nanjing City now makes it possible for those who cannot attend for work reasons to do so online, using one of China’s most popular social media platforms, WeChat. For a fee, cemetery workers will perform the traditional rites for the dearly departed and livestream the event to the absent relative. The relative just has to register online and make the payment in order to receive their personal password to watch the ritual being carried out on their behalf. Not surprisingly, this has generated quite a bit of controversy and criticism in China.
The ongoing discussion about whether or not it is appropriate to livestream funerals arouses strong emotions. Some welcome the positive aspects, especially in terms of reducing costs but also because it allows those friends and family members who cannot travel to participate in an important family ritual, albeit indirectly. Others focus on the negative aspects because they feel that being physically present at the funeral is crucial to the grieving process. The actual corpse is proof positive that an individual has died, tangible evidence that they have left the community of the living and are forever consigned to another place. For this reason, many feel that experiencing this ritual online defeats its purpose, as it no longer serves the function of offering physical proof of death, and may create psychological problems for those who have suffered the loss. Watching a funeral onscreen could easily distance people from an authentic experience of the death of their loved one. These are valid considerations, even if those who are taking advantage of streaming services probably would not have been able to attend a funeral at all if they were required to be physically present at a church or cemetery. Furthermore, in Western countries—where funerals are often marked by the prevalence of a gloomy and sorrowful atmosphere—there are those who prefer not to take part, choosing to deal with the pain of separation privately. This is another instance in which the option of a livestreamed funeral could represent a reasonable compromise between the need to be present during the funeral and the desire to grieve in private.
The livestreaming of funerals is probably one of the most innovative ideas around today. It brings the rediscovery of death as part of everyday life to the fore, emphasizing its communicative and theatrical qualities. This practice is linked, in some ways, to the popular trend of taking selfies at funerals, either alone or with the body of the deceased at an open casket service.
In 2013 there was an online blog, Selfies at Funerals (http://selfiesatfunerals.tumblr.com/) that collected funeral selfies, mostly taken by adolescents or young adults during funerals and (primarily) posted on Instagram. Sad expressions and funeral homes typically appeared in the foreground, but then there were also snaps where people were sticking out their tongues, young girls in surprisingly skimpy dresses posing like fashion models, group photos in front of the coffin, and so on. All of this accompanied by captions that expressed sadness and pain at the loss of a grandfather, aunt, or dear friend. If you search the hashtag #funeral on Instagram, you’ll find a world of photographic wonder at your fingertips. These photos show black humor, funeral memorials, irreverence, and superficiality, all jumbled together in a bizarre mix of fiction and reality. Sometimes the hashtag is just being used as a metaphor for a particularly unfortunate moment in someone’s day (a failed exam or the end of a relationship), but sometimes it is marking an actual funeral. Many photographs also feature the corpse of the deceased stretched out in the casket, paired with comments that combine hilarity and pain. In Great Britain the issue of funeral selfies made the daily papers, which published a survey indicating that a third of mourners admitted having taken one. Many funeral parlors and funeral directors have felt it necessary to try to regulate this practice so that it’s done in a way that isn’t insensitive or offensive to the family of the deceased. In 2013 former British prime minister David Cameron caused a storm of controversy when he agreed to Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s request to snap a selfie together with former U.S. president Barack Obama, during Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.
Observing these photographs carefully, the viewer is at first understandably dismayed, guided by the idea that every selfie expresses the superficiality of those who, addicted to compulsively narcissistic self-portraiture, seem to have lost sight of the atmosphere of remembrance and silence deemed appropriate at funerals. And this idea certainly has its basis in fact. On the other hand, it’s simplistic to view the practice of taking selfies at funerals as yet another negative consequence of the prevalence of social networks.
First, it’s important to remember that preserving the image of the cadaver, even if it is generally seen as macabre and offensive in contemporary Western culture, was a widespread practice in the past and is still part of some Eastern cultures today. Just consider the Ma’nene death ritual of the Tana Toraja people on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. During this ceremony the dead are taken out of their graves, cleaned, dressed in fresh clothes, and photographed together with the family. Second, each individual has their own, specific way of relating, emotionally and psychologically, to the funeral ritual, to their deceased loved one, and to the practice of taking selfies—so it’s not appropriate to generalize.
Therefore, selfies taken during a funeral are not unlike public commemorations on Facebook. Both express the desire to participate in an online group when someone we know dies and an attempt to empathize with others. In many cases, the choice to make a self-portrait, in this specifically painful situation, can be understood as a desire to share the experience with friends and acquaintances; therefore, the focus is on the person who has suffered the loss rather than on the person who has died. In other words, there is an attempt to use the current communication system, in particular the therapeutic function of images, as a way of protecting oneself from feeling isolated when dealing with the pain brought on by the end of a loved one’s life. Snapping a selfie at a funeral, whether the expression is humorous or sad, allows the subject to ask for and receive empathy from others, to defuse the drama of a situation filled with difficult emotions for a few seconds, and to normalize death itself.
If, as Stacey Pitsillides says, death is a part of life and life has become digital, then digitizing funerals and giving them a place in our everyday digital life through an image—at the cemetery, in the mortuary, or during a funeral in church—is simply a way of recognizing that, in addition to having fun vacations, celebrating birthdays, and singing at concerts, we die. And we need to be reminded of that fact and have the fortitude to integrate this inevitable moment into the fabric of our daily lives. There is nothing wrong with the photographs you see on Instagram or on the Selfies at Funerals blog, as long as this is not used as to justify superficial behavior or conduct that is offensive to others. But it is important to remember that the risk of superficiality or offensive behavior is a normal part of the off-line world as well, and it has nothing to do with the influence of digital culture on how we live and interact with the world around us.17
1. Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1996).
2. Gustav Theodor Fechner, The Little Book of Life after Death, English translation by Mary C. Wadsworth (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1905), 40.
3. George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2017).
4. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, English translation by Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 223.
5. Giovanni Ziccardi, Il libro digitale dei morti: Memoria, lutto, eternità e oblio nell’era dei social network [The Digital Book of the Dead: Memory, Mourning, Eternity and Oblivion in the Era of the Social Network] (Turin, Italy: UTET, 2017), 126.
6. In 2019, American newspapers reported the story of Chastity Patterson, a 23-year-old girl from Newport, Arkansas. For four years, she had written messages to her dead father on WhatsApp. Her intention was to preserve her father’s memory by telling him about the events in her life. But, unbeknownst to her, his phone number had been reassigned to another user. One day Chastity received this response: “Hi sweetheart, I am not your father, but I have been getting all your messages for the past 4 years. I look forward to your morning messages and your nightly updates. My name is Brad and I lost my daughter in a car wreck [in] August 2014 and your messages have kept me alive.” Amanda Woods, “Woman Who Texted ‘Dad’ Every Day since His Death Gets a Surprise Reply,” New York Post, October 28, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/10/28/woman-who-texted-her-dad-every-day-since-his-death-gets-a-surprise-reply/.
7. See Adam Ostrom, “After Your Final Status Update,” TED talk, July 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status_update?utm_campaign=social&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_content=talk&utm_term=technology.
8. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, English translation by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), 25. On the topic of digital inheritance, the following piece of investigative reporting by Salvatore Carrozzini was posted on the website HDBlog.it on January 28, 2018: “La mia identità digitale: Nascita e morte in un viaggio di 8 anni” [My Digital Identity: An 8-Year Voyage from Birth to Death]; it can be accessed at https://www.hdblog.it/2018/01/28/dati-personali-identitadigitale-guida-privacy/.
9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, English translation by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 67–68.
10. Ziccardi, Il libro digitale dei morti, 72.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, English translation by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 692–693.
12. See Abby Smith Rumsey, When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016).
13. Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 18.
14. Simone Arcagni, Visioni digitali: Video, web e nuove tecnologie [Digital Visions: Video, Web and New Technologies] (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 2017), 28.
15. The distinction between “retrospective memory” and “prospective memory” in reference to the memorialization of the dead is offered by Jan Assmann in Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45–46.
16. “Soriso, Rise, Risata” and “Me vie’ da ride” are dialectal expressions of Roma citizens (in other words, this is Roma slang).
17. Regarding selfies during funerals, a very useful reference is James Meese et al., “Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms,” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1818–1831.