Death increasingly has a new face. One that endures. One that
has a life of its own.
George Carlin died
Sunday. He was an innovator and a provocateur and at his best,
pretty damn funny. He’s also illustrative of a developing trend –
the public, multimedia epitaph. In fact, he recorded the way he
would like his obituary to be, how he would like to be remembered,
in this Associated Press interview 10 years ago.
This is a trend that really began with videotape, often used to
read wills and say goodbye to loved ones. Now there are sites like
Respectance
that memorialize people in perpetuity, that people can add to in
terms of memories, stories, pictures, video, etc. Where people who
were brought together through that person can still connect. Social
media sites. We also see this on facebook and myspace. (cont.)
These sites also serve to
retro-actively quantify people. Improvement in these types of
social forensic tools and methods coupled with our desire to answer
life’s biggest questions – Who are we? Where did we come from? What
is my ancestry? – as well as to know more about other individuals,
are driving this trend. Piece by piece, step by step we puzzle this
together, not knowing if we’ll ever find any ultimate answers but
discovering more and more about ourselves and others along the way.
Sites like Geni
are part of this equation. They allow us to find out who we
are/were related to and, as we unravel the secret records hidden in
our DNA, begin to understand how we are
all connected and that even on a planet of 6 billion people, it’s
still a small world.
As life extension, immortality and transhumanism movements and
technologies grow – as people try harder and harder to preserve
health, stave off death and garner insurance in the event that they
do die or suffer serious injury, the notion of death is
increasingly changing in our society and becoming a topic of
passionate discourse. Issues of abortion and euthanasia have
generated great controversy with regard to ethics and rights. But
powerful changes in technology are bringing new issues to the
forefront and the ethical and social reverberations of these are
only just beginning to be felt.
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Comment Thread (2 Responses)
Great piece and awesome find re: the Receptance website. Surely the next versions of such social media/wiki sites will become richer, with more data, simulations (3D images, behavior, etc), related links (sorted by increasingly better search), friend & family info, and so forth. At some point it will get downright freaky, but at the same time it will all serve some socio-evolutionary purpose, possibly the construction of expansive ancestral or historical simulations that people will be able to immersively engage with.
Those that are interested in this topic might also want to check out the Requiem reality TV show idea on this list of possible future tv shows.
Thanks Vis – should’ve remembered to add a link to Requiem.
Through the use of cheaper, more prevalent ICTs, we’re able to capture greater amounts of people’s lives – en route to lifelogging. Companies like wordspicturesstories.com help people produce biographies and ones like Receptance use the power of web 2.0 to do so. This can help people create much richer multimedia memories of loved ones.
I think we’ll also see a concerted effort to keep people’s dna and attempts to capture more personality traits as the ability to simulate humans increases in the years to come.
