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This book explores how social networking platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp 'accidentally' enable and nurture
the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect
this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett
offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents
qualitative data from three groups of participants: service
providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors. For the
bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence
can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of
'the fear of second loss'. Bassett argues that digital afterlives
challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these
theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance. This
interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber
psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors.
But Bassett's book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine
for the 'intentional' Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their
race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of
the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and
the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett's
conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a
voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the
DAI. Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from
immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who
wants to live forever?
This book explores how social networking platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp 'accidentally' enable and nurture
the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect
this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett
offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents
qualitative data from three groups of participants: service
providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors. For the
bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence
can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of
'the fear of second loss'. Bassett argues that digital afterlives
challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these
theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance. This
interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber
psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors.
But Bassett's book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine
for the 'intentional' Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their
race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of
the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and
the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett's
conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a
voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the
DAI. Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from
immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who
wants to live forever?
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