People across cultures and across millennia
they've always had the instinct to stay connected to the dead
and they have pulled the available technologies of the day
into service to try to get hold of the dead.
But now we're at a point where the dead live in the tech already.
It's easy to connect to the dead because they're everywhere.
Nearly everyone knows someone who had a Facebook account who passed away.
There's a friend of mine who recently took their own life
and I found out purely by reading statuses and comments on images
from several accounts on social media.
We can all identify with the experience
and it's kind of a new experience
that we haven't had before in the pre-digital era.
I got a direct message from someone saying
"Hey are you going to come to the service tonight?"
And that was really strange because
all of the interaction around their very real passing
happened purely in the digital realm.
If the dead person is leaving behind
this hugely multifaceted online footprint
it gets in the way of people doing that process.
It's like, OK here's the durable biography,
it's 2,000 pages and is really complicated.
And here's the image the person presented to the world
and here's their search history.
Somebody can go off on a detective trail
trying to work out who was this person?
And so you can open a door...
and you can go down and keep on finding stuff
and finding stuff and finding stuff.
That's the kind of not letting go that can then maybe be deleterious
and not allow people to rest
in their grief for someone.
Servers are filling up with data about dead people.
And if you keep archiving data, sooner or later,
you will have to ask yourself the question
what data should we save and what should be deleted?
When everything is online
when the majority of what we do becomes virtual
it will be maybe one of the most important questions
that people can deal with.
You should think about what we leave behind on the web
as parts of who we are.
I opted for deletion of my Google data
through an active account manager so if I'm inactive for 18 months
on any Google service including search engine
all of my data on Google will be deleted.
People maybe need to be saving in order that other people can,
digitally curate their memories,
their digital selves after they die.
Maybe that’s a future job that people could do.
I'm going to be managing what I put online with what I feel
is most important and most valuable
and in keeping it that reduced, keeping it that curated,
keeping it that edited so that for one,
it's not going to be that avalanche of things
that my descendants inherit.
Separate from any kind of thought about my own death
I'm just always aware when I'm sharing poetry,
or just pithy thoughts, that it's going to live on.