The Digital Afterlife and the Death Tech Industry
The Digital Afterlife and the Posthuman
The Digital Afterlife
The concept of a digital afterlife, the digital extension of life after physical death challenges the notion that death is final. The digital afterlife is not denying that the dead are dead but that they are still part of our lives. AI expands the possibilities of commemorating the deceased and managing the grief of those left behind, complementing or replacing formal structures of faith and belief systems. Death is integrated into online networks and mobile communication machines. The digital afterlife creates everlasting memorials in the post-mortem context of mixed religious and secular beliefs.
Saven-Baden defines the digital afterlife as an active or passive presence after death. Passive memorialization is Facebook memorial pages of the deceased. Active presence technology consists of conversational chatbots or avatars where the person communicates back to the human. The distinction between a live physical person and the dead is becoming increasingly blurred. When reality and online reality overlap it is difficult to distinguish between what is real and artificial. Sofka introduced the concept of Thanatology as a means to articulate the interplay between death and technology and examine the implications…