A Digital Resurrection
by Krishna Andavolu
APRIL 5, 2012 TAGS:
The Archangel Gabriel was in the habit of giving good news. "I am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings," he announced in Luke 1:19. The website DeadSoci.al wants you to meet another Gabriel. He's got wings too and something to tell you from the heavens, though his messages are likely to take a decidedly less liturgical form. He'll tweet at ya from beyond the grave.
Out of 2012's South by Southwest Digital Conference in Austin comes the launch of yet another website that enables communication after you have died. It's called DeadSoci.al and it "allows you to extend your digital legacy," and "amplify the voice and personality you have in life." That's what founder Bob Munkhouse said on NPR's "On The Media." It's an interesting claim, if not an entirely novel concept.
In 2011, two services, ifidie.org and ifidie.net, peddled a similar idea. Back in 2007, we wrote about an early iteration of the concept called InCaseofMyDeath. All of these services share similar mechanisms for determining if a user is in fact dead, namely silence. When a user stops signing in, the services contact a designated person to confirm the death and then sends messages from the deceased.
This is compelling news for those of us bothered by the idea of non-existence. But even after multiple incarnations of messages-from-the-other-side-apps, DeadSoci.al hasn’t exactly refined the concept so much as adapted it to even newer methods of 21st century communication. InCaseofMyDeath sends emails, Ifidie.net uses Facebook and DeadSoci.al incorporates Twitter and other social media outlets.
The nuts and bolts of DeadSoci.al are familiar too. First, you set up a list of messages, tweets, emails or status updates via the service. After the site confirms that you have in fact died, Deadsoci.al will deploy those messages in the order and timeframe that you set forth.
This new take on the start-up standard begs the question: What's with the desire to speak beyond the grave? The trope is centuries old. Hamlet's dad had some useful info for the Danish prince and Jacob Marley delivered some sage advice to Ebenezer Scrooge. But these messages from beyond the grave in literature tend to focus on the receiver rather than the deliverer. Alice Walker's novel The Lovely Bones is a contemporary counterexample. It is a story told entirely from the perspective of a murdered girl after she's died.
I'll take a stab at identifying the psychology of using sites like DeadSoci.al. First off, there is something delightfully macabre about conceiving of your end. Philosopher Steven Cave in his new book, Immortality, identifies something he calls the Mortality Paradox. Each one of us knows that someday we will die. But there is no way of conceiving of what it’s like to be dead.
“The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there – the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.”
DeadSoci.al gives voice to Cave’s “virtual being.” Users bring themselves into their own non-existence, finding a way to extend their lives beyond its natural closure. The exercise of imagining your own end might be fun or creepy for a small subset of people, especially if its mediated through a somewhat light-hearted web-based interface, but certainly not everyone will flock to a “being dead simulator.” But something more universal clicks in when you think about death.
A few years ago a group of psychologists from the Universities of Wisconsin and Virginia studied the way people react when they think about death. After heightening a subject’s “mortality salience” (shrink speak for getting them to think about death) these researchers found that materialistic individuals tend to adhere to the brands they already own. Their paper, The Safety of Objects, Materialism, Existential Anxiety, and Brand Connection, contended that people cling to the pillars of their personalities when they think of their own deaths.
So here’s the twist. In the parlance of social media experts, one’s social media presence is the mouthpiece of his or her personal brand. So it's not too difficult to predict that extending the messaging apparatus of your personal brand past its natural expiration (death) would help psychologically allay the fears of being gone. Specifically, that extension is of a platform that increasingly defines peoples’ "participation" in the world around them.
The roots of this line of reasoning trace back to a sub-set of social psychology called Terror Management Theory. Advanced by such thinkers as Ernest Becker (the author of The Denial of Death), TMT posits that most of human activity from building skyscrapers to Tweeting is motivated by the fear of dying. TMT doesn’t hold much sway in the academy these days, but it’s hard not to contrive an argument that DeadSoci.al, by bringing users into a realm of thinking about their ends, is a manifestation of the fear of not being alive. Being alive in this case means that you are Tweeting.
Here’s the more practical reading of the mushrooming beyond-the-grave services. The expectation of these entrepreneurs isn't exactly to change the way people conceive of their deaths or offer a way to stave off erasure. It’s to execute, design and launch a simple social concept that will get some press because it dabbles at the futuristic fringes of social media and peddles on the meta-concept that our technology will one day keep us alive forever. Even if that everlasting life is just a disembodied Twitter voice.
Out of 2012's South by Southwest Digital Conference in Austin comes the launch of yet another website that enables communication after you have died. It's called DeadSoci.al and it "allows you to extend your digital legacy," and "amplify the voice and personality you have in life." That's what founder Bob Munkhouse said on NPR's "On The Media." It's an interesting claim, if not an entirely novel concept.
In 2011, two services, ifidie.org and ifidie.net, peddled a similar idea. Back in 2007, we wrote about an early iteration of the concept called InCaseofMyDeath. All of these services share similar mechanisms for determining if a user is in fact dead, namely silence. When a user stops signing in, the services contact a designated person to confirm the death and then sends messages from the deceased.
This is compelling news for those of us bothered by the idea of non-existence. But even after multiple incarnations of messages-from-the-other-side-apps, DeadSoci.al hasn’t exactly refined the concept so much as adapted it to even newer methods of 21st century communication. InCaseofMyDeath sends emails, Ifidie.net uses Facebook and DeadSoci.al incorporates Twitter and other social media outlets.
The nuts and bolts of DeadSoci.al are familiar too. First, you set up a list of messages, tweets, emails or status updates via the service. After the site confirms that you have in fact died, Deadsoci.al will deploy those messages in the order and timeframe that you set forth. This new take on the start-up standard begs the question: What's with the desire to speak beyond the grave? The trope is centuries old. Hamlet's dad had some useful info for the Danish prince and Jacob Marley delivered some sage advice to Ebenezer Scrooge. But these messages from beyond the grave in literature tend to focus on the receiver rather than the deliverer. Alice Walker's novel The Lovely Bones is a contemporary counterexample. It is a story told entirely from the perspective of a murdered girl after she's died.
I'll take a stab at identifying the psychology of using sites like DeadSoci.al. First off, there is something delightfully macabre about conceiving of your end. Philosopher Steven Cave in his new book, Immortality, identifies something he calls the Mortality Paradox. Each one of us knows that someday we will die. But there is no way of conceiving of what it’s like to be dead.
“The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there – the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.”
DeadSoci.al gives voice to Cave’s “virtual being.” Users bring themselves into their own non-existence, finding a way to extend their lives beyond its natural closure. The exercise of imagining your own end might be fun or creepy for a small subset of people, especially if its mediated through a somewhat light-hearted web-based interface, but certainly not everyone will flock to a “being dead simulator.” But something more universal clicks in when you think about death.
A few years ago a group of psychologists from the Universities of Wisconsin and Virginia studied the way people react when they think about death. After heightening a subject’s “mortality salience” (shrink speak for getting them to think about death) these researchers found that materialistic individuals tend to adhere to the brands they already own. Their paper, The Safety of Objects, Materialism, Existential Anxiety, and Brand Connection, contended that people cling to the pillars of their personalities when they think of their own deaths.
So here’s the twist. In the parlance of social media experts, one’s social media presence is the mouthpiece of his or her personal brand. So it's not too difficult to predict that extending the messaging apparatus of your personal brand past its natural expiration (death) would help psychologically allay the fears of being gone. Specifically, that extension is of a platform that increasingly defines peoples’ "participation" in the world around them.
The roots of this line of reasoning trace back to a sub-set of social psychology called Terror Management Theory. Advanced by such thinkers as Ernest Becker (the author of The Denial of Death), TMT posits that most of human activity from building skyscrapers to Tweeting is motivated by the fear of dying. TMT doesn’t hold much sway in the academy these days, but it’s hard not to contrive an argument that DeadSoci.al, by bringing users into a realm of thinking about their ends, is a manifestation of the fear of not being alive. Being alive in this case means that you are Tweeting.
Here’s the more practical reading of the mushrooming beyond-the-grave services. The expectation of these entrepreneurs isn't exactly to change the way people conceive of their deaths or offer a way to stave off erasure. It’s to execute, design and launch a simple social concept that will get some press because it dabbles at the futuristic fringes of social media and peddles on the meta-concept that our technology will one day keep us alive forever. Even if that everlasting life is just a disembodied Twitter voice.
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