Your online life after death
From algorithms that post tweets for us after we die to bequeathing a digital legacy to our families – death is being disrupted by technology
Published 4 July 2018
If Facebook continues growing at its current rate – by 2130 the number of dead users will surpass the living.
In fact, the number of the dead on Facebook is already growing fast. By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died, and that number has only gone up since.
These days, it’s not unusual to see memorial pages on social media – but how is the digital world changing our approach to death?
From algorithms that can post tweets in our style after we die to bequeathing a digital legacy – Dr Martin Gibbs from the Interaction Design Lab at the School of Computing and Information Systems, alongside Dr Tamara Kohn and graduate researcher Hannah Gould, both from the School of Social and Political Sciences, are exploring the impact of digital disruption on death itself.
Episode recorded: 20 June 2018
Producers: Dr Andi Horvath, Chris Hatzis and Silvi Vann-Wall Audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis
Banner: Getty Images
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