-
by Erik Sass
, Staff Writer,
December 3, 2010
The Internet has only been around, in a form accessible to the general population, about 30 years. In that time, the number of American Internet users increased from a mere two million in 1994
to an estimated 240 million in 2010, according to ComScore and Nielsen. Over the same period, over 35 million Americans died. Unsurprisingly, there has been growing overlap between the two groups
(Internet users and the deceased) and it can be stated with utmost confidence that everyone in the first group will eventually end up in the second, at some point.
Yes, we're all going
to die someday, and the simple fact of our universal, inescapable fate raises the question: What to do with the virtual affects of people after someone has died, including his or her "online presence"
in the form of, say, a Facebook profile? The state of Oklahoma is blazing a legal trail, of sorts, with new legislation governing post mortem social media management. The new state law gives the
executors or administrators of estates in Oklahoma the right to gain access to, administer or terminate the online social media accounts of the deceased.
Explaining the rationale behind the
law, its sponsor, former state Rep. Ryan Kiesel stated: "The number of people who use Facebook today is almost equal to the population of the United States. When a person dies, someone needs to have
legal access to their accounts to wrap up any unfinished business, close out the account if necessary or carry out specific instructions the deceased left in their will." Kiesel added: "Digital photo
albums and e-mails are increasingly replacing their physical counterparts, and I encourage Oklahomans to think carefully about what they want to happen to these items when they pass away."
It's good that Oklahoma is taking steps to deal with an issue which will only grow as time goes on. But it still leaves some important choices to be made by Internet users and social network sites.
Should people be able to say "leave my social profiles up" in their wills? And will social network sites respect these requests, or will they reject the legal liability (and cost) of hosting online
profiles in perpetuity?
And what if someone doesn't dictate what to do with social media profile or profiles in his or her will? Should you take the profiles down, or leave them up as
memorials? Anyway, what would it be like having dead people living on, in some form, on online social networks? Cool? Creepy? I'm picturing it being sort of like Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, where
the dead form a constant background chorus (mostly peaceful, not scary/zombie-like) to the lives of the living. But then again, that was just a play -- do we really want that all the time?
Obviously it's up to the loved ones or designated executor to decide this, but I personally think we, as a society, should consider leaving up the profiles of the deceased. After all, the real world
is filled with memorials and reminders of the dead (beginning with the coins in your pocket) so why not the Internet? I might even go one further and create an all-encompassing meta-social network for
the deceased -- a virtual cemetery or afterlife populated solely by the profiles of the dead, aggregated from across the Web.
Regardless of how we choose to organize them, the profiles of
the deceased could become valuable sources of information in the future. Descendants could add links explaining, say, family relationships for genealogical purposes, allowing children to trace their
family histories online. For "important" people, you could even turn profiles into the hubs of user-generated content about the person, maybe through a Wikipedia mash-up; in the long term, the
profiles of the dead would naturally become a source for historians, as well as virtual monuments and memorials to famous and accomplished people, where devotees could go to pay their respects and
mingle with like-minded folk.