Long Time No See

In all honesty I had intended upon abandoning this Blog.. As I was no longer being graded on it I thought it pointless. BUT, I've decided to take it up again. At least now it will be less regimented and not so black and white.
No mark scheme or grading means a little more freedom for me.. so stay posted.

Facebook: Life After Death: Continued Our Digital Footprint

In 2007 a young man died without leaving a will. Although the family were given access to his offline possessions with a death certificate, getting access to his online assets remained unresolved two years later, when the story went to press. His digital assets became inaccessible to his family, potentially leaving funds locked in his Paypal account. My knowledge and journey through the digital communications world throughout this unit made me think about the entirety and impact of a person's digital footprint: email, digital photographs, finances, social network profiles, blogs, twitter feeds and so on. And as new technologies emerge this list is only likely to grow and continue. This began my thinking of what the implications our digital assets would have in the future and what they mean to each individual person.

Richard Banks mentions in his talk about “digital heirlooms” that we are logging our lives online on an ongoing basis, and that somebody else will have to deal with all of this content once we’ve passed away. Having accumulated a very sizable digital presence, we will be leaving behind a digital footprint that is also far more considerable in size and has a much longer lifespan than the heirlooms of previous generations. But the question is: what happens to all of this when we die?

The general rule for online service providers is to protect their customers' privacy. The only way for the next of kin to access their data is for them to legally declare themselves executors of the deceased's estate. Whether or not to give access to or delete the deceased’s digital content seems to vary; providers like Facebook allow for a ‘memorial state’ profile freezing the content but allowing access to it, others like Yahoo delete the entire account. (wikidot.com, 2011)

Exley wrote a paper on how cancer patients negotiate their after-death identities. She argues that as long as the individual has an active effect on people, that person is socially alive. Exley states: “Social life is the obverse of social death and depends on the social continuation of the particular person, whether or not that person is biologically living" (Exley, 1999) If we remain active through our blogs, emails and social network profiles, then we remain active agents in others’ lives, even after our biological death. We are therefore able to leave a social impact one we are gone.

Giddens describes self-identity as 'something to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual’ (Giddens, 1991:52). Digital assets, as a means for us to log our activities, become a key part of how our identity will be preserved. But as we are also not the sole authors of our identity, our digital audience approves what we have authored online, and that is what builds our identity: ‘The wall posts left by friends on a user’s profile or page contribute as much to the individual’s identity as the information the user to display’ (Brubaker, 2010). So a memorialised Facebook profile remains our socially alive identity, as long as friends are continuing to read and post on it.  

Digital Social outlets, according to Gangadharbatler, (2008) reflect a basic human need to belong and form significant relationships.He also suggests that there a 3 basic needs which underlie social behaviour which can all be related to involvement in digital communication: ‘inclusion’ to belong in a circle of acquaintances or friends on facebook; ‘affection’ the need to be loved by others or posting a blog or video and asking for feedback and ‘control’ exerting power over others, or creating a group or forum.

The more we use digital in our daily lives, then the bigger our footprint becomes and the more it becomes part of sustaining who we are. Furthermore, since some of this activity such as blogging or Tweeting, is very public, it becomes part of how we are understood by others. This is what Giddens describes as the “Narrative of the self." (Giddens, 1999)

This narrative accumulates over time to become a biography which plays an important part in the legacy or footprint we leave behind. Exley argues in her research that cancer patients being aware of their imminent death, knowingly write the last chapter of their lives with this digital legacy (Exley, 1999).

Our digital footprint is therefore not only an important record of who we are but one that survives after our biological death. It is ironic then that we currently have very little understanding of our rights and limited control over what happens to our digital assets after we die. The first generation that have accumulated a digital identity is getting older. There are no set rules and regulations on how the digital legacy process should be managed. The only approach we are familiar with is the approach to offline assets and is not applicable to the breadth of information our digital footprint holds. It is also unclear who has actual ownership of these assets. These are the repercussions of our obsession with digital.

The majority of digital communications are still in their infancy but through studying this unit I have been able to study how much they have already impacted our lives and advertising execution but also how little we know about the future. Boud et al define reflection as ‘Those intellectual and affective activities in which individuals engage and explore their experiences in order to lead to new understanding and appreciation’ (Boud et al 1985). My blog posts have explored the social side of digital communications, the ramifications digital media has had on mobile development and how advertising has adapted to this; as this was  something I took great interest in and believed to be most relevant to now and digitals future. I feel that the underlying social reasons for why social media has become so popular is very relevant, whether it is inclusion in a Facebook group or living out a fantasy in second life.

References

Boud, D., Keogh, R., Walker, D., 1985. Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. USA: Nicholas publishing company.

Brubaker, J. R., & Vertesi, J. (2010). Death and the Social Network. To be presented at the CHI 2010 Workshop on HCI at the End of Life: Understanding Death, Dying, and the Digital, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Exley, C., 1999. Testaments and memories: negotiating after-death identities. Mortality, 4(3), 249-267. 

 

Gangadharbatla, H., 2008. ‘Facebook Me: Collective Self-Esteem, Need to Belong and Internet Self-Efficay as Predictors of the iGeneration’s Attitudes toward Social Networking Sites’, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Available from: http://www.jiad.org/article100 [Accessed on 15th April 2011]

Giddens, A.., 1991. Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity.

Pearson, C., 2011. 285,000+ US Facebook Users Will Die This Year. Available from: http://blog.entrustet.com/2010/03/14/285000-us-facebook-users-will-die-this-year/ [Accessed on: 12 April 2011]

Wikidot., 2011. Facebook. Available from: dealingwithdeathonline.wikidot.com. Available from: [Accessed on: 12 April 2011]

Facebook: Life After Death

I have recently come across a rather disturbing idea or mindset, debate, whatever you want to call it. Can Facebook Make Me Immortal?

I was quite shocked yet curious after discovering a story amongst my peers about a father who was unable to delete his daughter’s Facebook page. The father had continued to receive emails regarding his daughter’s Facebook account weeks after she had passed away. After contacting Facebook with regards to deleting her account he was informed that Facebook were unable to do so without the account holder’s permission, once the situation was explained Facebook proceeded to say that an account was never deleted from their archives.

Users discovered that it is nearly impossible to be removed entirely from Facebook setting off concern and controversy among the social networking community. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information from those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

After finding this out I proceeded to research the matter further and subsequently found forums on the web with people discussing that Facebook meant Life after Death. This, in my opinion is a pretty controversial subject and an odd thing to discuss on a forum and yet there are many places on the net where people a suggesting this same idea. Facebook have recently changed their rules that they will keep a persons profile after they have been informed of their death but will turn it into a memorial site where people are able to leave messages etc commemorating the deceased. So your profile can carry on after you have died but only in the loosest of terms does it make you immortal.

Faceless Friends

Since the internet first came about it has changed the way in which the world interacts and digital media has set in place new developments in social relationships.

Chat rooms have played an important role in the evolution of digital interpersonal communication. E-mail came first in 1972, then came USENET, an e-mail based newsgroup started in 1979. Newsgroups became bulletin boards and some bulletin board users wanted to interact with the group in real time instead of waiting to reply to an ongoing message thread. In the late '70s and early '80s, several small bulletin board communities incorporated chat and IM into their networks and so followed the faceless friend. With the invention of chatrooms came a shift in the social paradigm and assumption that you had to know someone to talk to them. Chatrooms allowed strangers to interract, innocently but anonnymously.

This was a huge change in the social paradigm and the idea of internet pals or faceless friends difficult to comprehend for some people. Not all chatroom communication was with strangers. MSN developed an IM service which enabled you to add your friends and reject those you didn’t know, however you could add random strangers if you wished.

With the number of chatrooms growing and the amount of people using them also increasing they started to become surrounded with bad press in regard to the dangers that the annonymity presented. Chatrooms supposedly became haunts for peadophiles and perverts and so without surprise their popularity decreased and it was something frowned upon.

Now chatrooms are virtually dead and social networking sites are now a big part of modern interraction. Facebook, Ebay, Windows Live Messenger and Google are the top 4 visited sites on the web (Neates, 2008) 3 of which are social sites with Facebook having over 500million users (Facebook. 2011).

With social networking growing and growing without anyone battering an eyelid is it really that different to chat rooms? In all fairness you can add or reject friends and identity is a big part of your social media profile but anonymity is still possible, so is interaction with strangers. They may not appear to be ‘faceless friends’ or as risky as talking to a username in a chat room but it’s quite easy to take on a fakeidentity.

The dangers of online communications are vast; hidden identities, cyber bullying, hacking into accounts etc. With online communication becoming a big part of social interaction the dangers shouldn’t be overlooked. Especially seeing as it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere…