Edited by lordvoldemort at 13-2-2015 10:55 PM
Facebook announced today that it is developing new functionality for your digital life after death. Housed under "Security Settings" is a "feature that lets people choose a legacy contact—a family member or friend who can manage their account when they pass away." But, if the thought of your mom posting on your behalf makes you spin in your grave  , "people can let us know if they'd prefer to have their Facebook account permanently deleted after death."
Facebook will also memorialize your account when it's been notified of your death. And if you have selected a legacy contact, that person will be able to write a post to display at the top of your timeline, respond to new friend requests, and update your profile picture and cover photo. However, legacy contacts won't have access to your private messages, so no one will find all those sex chats and have to think about your weird dead boner. This move didn't come totally out of the blue. Facebook's been inching its way toward this for some time. There was already a form you could fill out and send to the social network's admins titled "Special Request for Deceased Person's Account." But this is the first time the power to decide what happens after you die is in your hands.
Thanatology (study of death and dying) professor Heather Servaty-Seib at Purdue University has been wrestling with the issues surrounding social media and death a lot lately. "I'm teaching a death and dying course right now, and the question has come up in class," she told me. "One of my students asked, 'How will my friends know if I die? Because I communicate with them so much over Facebook and there won't be the possibility for something to be posted.'"
She added that Facebook pages of the deceased actually serve a useful purpose. "Grievers really benefit from being able to interact with the actual Facebook page of someone who died," she said. "Not a memorial page, but the actual page. It's sort of like being able to visit the grave."
Some people are concerned with "sprucing up" their profile before they die for this reason, but Servaty-Seib told me that according to her research, people "kind of liked when it didn't change, actually. You could go back to this page and it was like a virtual grave marker to what the person was like. It provides information that is part of the essence of that person, and it's positive for millennials to go back and see that essence of the person still there."
Needless to say, when Facebook does something in the social media space, everyone reacts. So it will be interesting to see how these new post-mortem options impact other social media services like Instagram, Twitter, or even Grindr. Considering we're living more and more of our life online, it's only right that we should die there too.
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Post time 13-2-2015 10:54 PM
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