During my time at college, our small Davidson community (there are only around 1,700 students) was twice saddened by the death of fellow undergrads: Josiah Cameron (who would have been graduating this year) in April 2006, and then Jay Chitty (a fellow classmate of Taylor and myself) in December of the same year. Like the rest of the college, I was sickened with grief — for their families, their friends, and for the sudden vanishing of such young and promising lives from the Earth. But, when my shock had finally dissipated and I had come to terms with the reality of their passing, I had a fleeting (and admittedly somewhat morbid) thought.
What happens to your online presence when your physical one is no longer? Intrigued, I visited their Facebook pages. My mind was racing. “What’s going to happen to all these wall comments that were accumulated over the years? What about the comments people left for him on his Thanksgiving photos? Who decides when it is time to close this account? What’s the procedure? Does it all just disappear?”
I’ll understand if you perceive these to be insensitive and petty questions in the face of such a tragic subject, and perhaps for the present times it is indeed a little irrelevant. But if you are paying even the smallest bit of attention to what is happening in technology, you are certainly aware of two things. First, more and more of your personal “effects” — e-mail, photos, documents, music — are being turned into 1’s and 0’s and kept online. Second, the tiny actions we take online (like leaving comments or clicking the “like” button on a Facebook news feed item) are little pieces of a larger online narrative that, in a sense, journal our lives for us. If determining the fate of this data once we’re gone is not a crucial question to address right now, it certainly will be in the next two to three years.
Take your personal e-mail, for example. E-mail has succeeded letter writing as a principal form of communication among most people of my generation. My grandmother has letters from my grandfather when he was fighting in Guam, and I wouldn’t doubt that my parents have a few keepers stashed in a shoebox somewhere. But most of the written missives that are important to me are either archived somewhere in my Gmail account, or stashed in a folder of PDF’d e-mails that I saved from my old college e-mail account.
Touching emails from friends in far away places, notes of encouragement or praise from professors, love letters sent to old girlfriends, my first e-mail back from Google telling me they wanted to interview me… if I were to die today, what would be the fate of these messages? Would they sit in my account for a year or two until it was deactivated due to inactivity, eventually deleted to make way for more messages among the living? Would someone know to go into my computer and save that PDF file? Would I have been prescient enough to stash my password somewhere for my survivors to find it, or to include instructions in a will or elsewhere detailing if (and unto whom) I wanted that data to be bequeathed?
Yesterday, 
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