What happens to our digital selves when we die?

For a decade, people have been using facebook to tell friends and family about milestones in their lives, posting pictures and sharing anecdotes to create rich virtual representations. But what happens to those representations when the people who made them die?

The problem of what to do with accounts of the dead is very real, and Facebook’s own policy keeps changing. Currently, it does not offer living users any way to specify what will happen after their death. But a loved one’s survivors have three options: after supplying proof of death, they can either deactivate the page, leave it as is, or “memorialize” it. The latter choice effectively transforms a profile from personal journal to gathering place, where mourners assume the job of posting content. Depending on the user’s privacy settings, anyone can share memories on this type of page.

Kathleen Scheaffer is one user who finds these options limiting. A librarian at the Faculty of Information, Scheaffer found herself wondering about online mourning practices after losing several people close to her who were Facebook users. To investigate the question, she teamed up with Rhonda McEwen, a professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology at UTM.

Read the full story in the Summer 2014 issue of U of T Magazine...