Let My Digital Presence Be My Memorial
What happens to your social media accounts when you die? A while back I googled this question and found some interesting answers. On Facebook and Instagram, whoever requests it will have to give Facebook some proof that you or someone died, such as a death certificate. Photos and posts you shared will stay visible, but no one can log into the account anymore. Now I also found that you can nominate someone as a legacy contact. This is someone who will look after your memorialized account. What other social media platforms do with the accounts of the deceased varies. On Twitter, the only option I found, in this case, is to deactivate the account. Gmail will also close the account upon an immediate family request. Some may even provide content such as posts, pictures, etc from the account under certain circumstances. Not sure if YouTube does it as I read the site looks to remove videos any chance they get if that account is no longer active. Who could blame them? YouTube gets 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. According to ABC, Facebook sees 8,000 of its members die a day. So it looks like the world’s largest social media platform will also be the largest e-grave.
We’re told to be careful what we post online because it will be there forever — even when you die. This is especially true when seeking employment. The things you do online can have dire consequences on your career and life. Just ask the people who get their old tweets resurfaced on Twitter. Not a good look at all.
Now I treat my online presence like a brand, but what I have planned for my digital presence when I’m gone and how I want to think about it, is for it to be a complete digital memorial. A memorial is something, usually, an object or location, that serves as a focus of a memory of someone deceased or an event that took place. Now depending on what you have about you on the internet, you probably don’t want your internet presence to serve as your memorial. I see the internet as a tool to learn, connect, and share ideas. I think it’d be cool to leave something behind for someone to come across the things I built, written, and shared. Now, will companies last forever? Of course not. My Facebook and Instagram accounts will only last as long as the platforms stay up and running. The same can be said for other companies like Medium, but some of these companies are just too big to fail. Imagine life without Google and its products.
There’s one thing I don’t want to be and that’s to be considered a social media influencer. If I do end up gaining a following on the web that’s not what I would call myself. Not everything needs to be shared on social media or the internet in general. Some people get carried away and share all aspects of their life, which can be cool sometimes. I’d like to think of the internet as an open-source book. Free to create and distribute. Using popular platforms like YouTube, Github, Instagram, and others are for sure ways to go about doing that. Even creating a blog or publishing a book online.
The Beauty of The Internet
The best time to be alive is now. Technology is improving insanely fast and it’s hard to keep up. We see new technologies emerging in AR/VR, IoT, crypto and blockchain, artificial intelligence, and so much more. These areas of technology are creating more opportunities and reshaping our lives in ways we only thought were possible in sci-fi movies, in the hope that someday they would make their way into our lives.
There are three things I love about the internet:
- The amount of information I have access to.
- Connecting to everyone and anyone.
- Exploring new ideas and sharing them.
The internet is great for these reasons right here. It’s giving you access to the knowledge and experience of everyone from around the world. Past and present. YouTube and Google are free schoolings for broke people. Seriously, a whole CS (computer science) education is free online. So many resources to learn and if you can’t find what you’re looking for you’re probably not looking hard enough. During times like these with COVID-19 (Corona Virus), everything is moving online and being done at home. Students are taking online classes, people working remotely from home, and people are finding ways to connect with services like ZOOM. This event has drastically impacted how we interact with each other virtually and will forever change how we go about our daily lives. It’s things like this that make me so invested in fields like virtual reality and augmented reality that I believe is the next big platform after mobile phones. Finding ways to connect people with tech is one reason I pursued software engineering.
Plug Into The Web
People share and publish a lot of their work online. From their music, videography, photography, art, open-source projects, books, and more. All I wanted to be growing up is an inventor, but what I wanted more than anything else is being able to have people use what I’ve built. Coding allows me to develop software and distribute it to anyone and everyone. It’s a lot easier than building a physical product and shipping it or placing it in stores. With everyone having a smartphone and a computer in their home, all it takes is lines of code to reach millions. The world is your audience and the internet is its biggest platform. In the future, I’m hoping to share more than just software and many of the other ideas I have.
“You were inspired by the world so allow the world to be inspired by you.” — JCole
It’s hard to prioritize when everything is a priority. I have a lot of ideas from building businesses, writing, art, and creating coding projects like mobile and web apps. There’s a lot on my mind. Some ideas I scrap and others I got to put aside and save for later. Procrastination will save the world from some of my terrible ideas.
I’ll be around as long as the internet
Think of what you put online as a time capsule. Something to leave behind for the next generations to discover.
“The only thing that can kill me is death, that’s the only thing that can ever stop me, is death, and even then my music will live forever.” — Tupac Shakur
Now I have no plans on writing an autobiography any time soon or at least not yet. Probably will never get to it, but anything you wanna know about Mohameth Seck, if not from a book, family, or friends, can most likely be found on the web. So let my digital presence serve as a remembrance of the best and worst moments I ever had. Let it host all the ideas I had and inspire others to create. Let my great, great, great-grandkids look back at the times, before the self-driving cars, social media take over (technically happening now), 5G network, robots, and before we finally colonized Mars, and see that their great-grandpa Mohameth was way before his time. Seeing how things were like in the past because everything is more documented than ever before. Along with how the world took a year off to slow down during the Coronavirus pandemic. I want it to document the beautiful places I got to explore and the awesome people I got a chance to meet and collaborate with. Finally, when it’s all said and done and I contributed my fair share to the world I’ll be able to go up to someone and say “Google me!”
I didn’t know the way I’ve been living this whole time was called being quarantined 🤷🏾♂️. During this time of social distancing, I’ve been locked away in my room just coding. Sometimes I get bored and start writing, but you should follow me on Twitter in case I do something interesting. Other platforms too, but you should just google me instead of me listing them here. 😉
My last post
Just studying to be a software engineer.
