It's been a year since I was at SXSW 2018, so here's another article I wrote following the conference on the topic of 'Death and Legacy in the Digital Age'.

Freddie Mercury asked the question back in 1986. SXSW had a good go at answering it.

Death. It’s a weird one. It’s such a taboo topic, an absolute conversation killer – but is also one of the most natural and inevitable milestones each individual will eventually reach (such a morbid topic, I’ve had to throw in some song lyrics to make myself feel better writing about it…).  

Rebecca Blum, Senior Strategist at Frog Design, shows us that Charlie Brooker wasn’t the first to suggest technology shaping our legacy, or the concept of death, in the digital age. 

Who dares to love forever?

We remember those we once knew in the physical form however we can. Probably most notably, this would be in a final place of rest; we visit graves, or locations that help us feel closer to that person. We may speak aloud, we may picture words, or phrases, or small memories in the area we’re standing. We’re using our human ability to remember and to keep the love we have alive. 

But - what if there were a way to relive our happier times with loved ones, over and over that weren’t simply ‘in our minds’?

‘Ryoshin Sekizai’ – a Japanese tombstone-engraving company – has released just this. For a small monthly cost (of course!), users are now able to view deceased loved ones through their phones, via augmented reality, at a virtual graveyard of their choosing. Simply look through your phone’s camera and there they are. Right in front of you. Waving, smiling, or talking perhaps.

What I find most enchanting about this is that we can set this up ourselves, as a sort of a goodbye gift to our friends and relatives. I know how it sounds, but I could picture myself recording messages for those I loved – a sort of personal goodbye – if I knew I had little time left. People write letters – what’s the difference? 

Culturally, Japan is making its mark in AR. In addition to the obvious example of Pokémon Go, there are now AR penguins to guide you around Tokyo and café’s that allow you to dine with a virtual girlfriend. So – I suppose you could ask why not reach out in to a field with much more meaning and potential to bring us closer to those we long to be with again? 

We keep this love in a photograph, we make these memories for ourselves

Whilst this may be a slightly alien concept to us in England, photography isn’t. A photograph has the ability to freeze a moment in time and preserve it forever. In 2018, we would perceive it ‘normal’ to look through photographs of a lost loved one, to reminisce and to remember. We have hundreds of them. Or if you’re anything like me, thousands… 

Mobile phones and digital cameras have removed the ‘cost’ of photography, when we consider individual frames. As an example - when I was younger, I went to Butlins (standard) with my family. I remember my brother on one of those children’s bungee jumps. With a disposable camera (my only one of the trip), I had the luxury of one or two shots at most – hoping I’d captured him both in frame and in focus. If this was me now – I would hold my finger down on my iPhone and simply select the best of a burst of 300 photos – and probably film a boomerang and a short video clip. This was only 15 years ago. In such a short space of time, the technological advances and availability of the camera / camera phone have assisted us in creating such an advanced plethora of ‘framed’ memories. 

The idea that technology has played a large part in both our lives and deaths isn’t a recent one. A typical British family in 2018 will probably have many albums (physical or digital) of images displaying family memories. This wasn’t the case in the 19thCentury. In a time where there was an increasingly high childhood and infancy mortality rate, death portraiture was a significant way to memorialize lost family members. For many of these families, their first full family portrait was also their last. Again – to us, this may sound borderline creepy, but could you really blame a parent wanting one physical image to remember their deceased child? 

As the digital age has advanced, we have used it wherever it felt right for us, in that moment in time, to help us connect and to help us remember. We look at photos and we watch old videos because we don’t want to forget those moments. 

Those exact little memories that take us somewhere else. 

We hang on to those. 

If you’re under him, you aint getting over him

Probably not quite what Dua Lipa was referring to when she penned ‘New Rules’ – but can we truly end the mourning of a loved one if we don’t allow ourselves this closure? 

We’re all aware of what death means in this life. What comes after this life is a different debate of course. In the event of the death of a loved one, there is inevitably a feeling of loss. A feeling that, in the first stages at least, is something we aren’t ready to let go of. The healing process can take time – and can leave us vulnerable. So – whilst technology can help us, can it hinder? 

I don’t know about you – but when I ask myself this question – my mind is taken to the Black Mirror episode ‘Be right back’. For those that haven’t seen it – do. Here – technology gives Martha, a grieving partner, the ability to communicate with her boyfriend from beyond the grave – or in fact a digital version of him. Of course – this is black mirror – so it went a bit further than that – but the concept of being able to talk in real time to a loved one whom is deceased is a currently more than just that. 

Following on from the death of her co-worker and closest friend Roman Mazurenko, Eugenia Kuyda spent months creating a digital network from messages sent to her by Roman to construct just this. She missed the advice given to her by her old friend, the conversations they had on a daily basis – so she created an AI bot to speak in the way that she knew Roman to. Roman is to the day available on the app store.

Now – I’m in two minds. Again – this is humanity using technology in a way of remembrance, just like a photograph, but when does too far become too far, and when does the person we know transform in to someone they never were? I’ll get back to this point.  

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

So. Roman Bot. You may be thinking that someone would need to take a lot of time perfecting ‘you’ and your ‘voice’ – but with the amount of technology around us – and information we share – is that truly the case? Would technology in fact know more about us than those who loved us most? 

Imagine this. 

Facebook records your conversations. 

Alexa hears your daily commands. 

Every email you send at work.

Every text.

Every whatsapp.

Every tweet. 

Every check in. 

Every google search.

Every click of the mouse.

Every video or picture you’re tagged in. 

Every movement tracked on your google account.

All stored in the cloud.

Your digital footprint is a representation of you – and if enough information from a variety of sources is gathered, a true representation perhaps. As a millennial, I can fully appreciate that there is easily enough data in the cloud for this to happen to me. 

The data is there. The technology is there. Should we use it?

Can’t buy me love, no, no, no

So – now you know that the technology is there and has been used, and you may have provided enough data yourselves to become Roman Mark II, lets consider another aspect; Marketing – whether this be intentional, or not. 

In one corner, you have vloggers. A large part of their online presence is to promote goods to entice others online. Could this mean that one day we may be selecting a new shade of blusher via the recommendation of someone who passed away before it was launched? Would this be their digital legacy? Could we class this as exploitation, or is it merely a true representation of if that individual were still around? Could we in fact create a logic that is accurate in predicting their items of choice?

In a totally different corner, you have the idea of stolen identity. This concept has been around for a while, which is why we are taught to keep our passwords and security information private, but when it comes to the digital sphere, this may not be so easy. Columnist David Carr sadly passed away in 2015 – however, his twitter handle was still very much alive. ‘@Carr2n’ was briefly taken over by a pornbot, promoting ‘role play and sex games’. Now, whilst I can’t comment for sure on the matter, a large part of me would be quite certain that Carr would not have hoped for this as his digital legacy. 

Both quite extreme ends of the spectrum I understand, but where exactly is that line between acceptable and simply disrespectful? And how can we design for the masses whilst ensuring it isn’t crossed? 

Give up the ghost, stall the haunting baby

I think the main barrier here for me, is again that feeling of loss. It’s such a human reaction to hold on. To not want to let go. To grasp at anything we can so that we don’t have to… not yet. But we have to. That’s life. We have to accept that there is an ending and that we can’t shy away from it. 

Giving someone the ability to continue his or her conversations beyond the grave at the touch of a key will surely delay the healing process that follows mourning a life. Taken far enough, it could be fair to suggest that we may in fact lose the ability to mourn all together.

Could we trick our minds in to believing that the bot we are messaging is our friend, partner, family member, just living a bit further away now. I have friendships that predominantly survive via messaging online, what would be the difference here, given technology advances?

And why stop at death? Would we go as far as to continue relationships that have ended in the physical space and re-enact them in a digital sphere? Just to hear their opinion on what happened at work that day one more time. 

Would we discover more about our loved ones through a bot? The parts of them they perhaps didn’t share with us, or kept hidden away. Would the bot recognize whom it was speaking to and which topics should be avoided? Or would the bot be a more honest version of us? It certainly is a minefield. 

I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door

Whether or not legacy bots become a thing, the way we treat death online currently just doesn’t feel meaningful. Blum noted that Yahoo still requests a physical copy of a death certificate to be submitted, alongside other documentation, to simply close an online account. Facebook’s legacy pages seem to be going in the right direction, but there are still holes. With 50,000 new users joining and 10,000 existing users passing away each day, Facebook is indeed becoming an unstoppable digital graveyard. This is a design problem for now, and one that will only become more prevalent if not nurtured correctly.

I suppose that takes us to my final question - who are we designing for? Are we designing for legacy; in respect for those we have lost, or are we really designing for ourselves; we are the ones left behind – we are the ones who arguably need this most. 

Design for death and legacy in the digital age will most probably be lacking for a while – and getting the correct mixture of ensuring privacy for the user (cue GDPR) and assisting those left behind will probably be difficult. But this is a design challenge that should be considered with respect and consideration to all involved in the process. One small action, such as the ability to nominate an individual on Facebook to be your ‘legacy contact’ could save hours of unnecessary heart break. This, truly, should be the experience we design for. 

"Death is the biggest constant. Digital is the biggest shift. How can we not think of them in conjunction?" – Rebecca Blum