• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 12, 2015

All praise Facebook, the dispenser of all good things, who giveth us life -- yea, even after death. At least online.

That’s right: your online persona can now live forever, or at least until the sun goes supernova, thanks to a new Facebook policy that allows users to designate a “legacy contact” who will maintain their profile after they have passed from this mortal realm.

To start the process the user chooses a legacy contact under their profile settings, who then receives a message from Facebook asking whether they wish to accept this responsibility. Once the user has passed on, friends or families can inform Facebook, which will confirm that the user is deceased; when it has confirmed this information, it will add the tagline “Remembering” above their profile name and inform the legacy contact.

The legacy contact can make one final post on the deceased user’s behalf, and can also update the main profile photo, archive the user’s previous Facebook posts and photos, and even respond to new friend requests (obviously belated). However, they will not be able to log in as the deceased user or see any of their private communications.

This represents a policy shift for Facebook, which previously “memorialized” accounts by basically locking them down so they could be viewed, but not altered in any way. The new policy allows the legacy contact to make changes that may be necessary to make the profile more appropriate as a memorial; after all, you might not want that photo of you and Mickey Mouse at Disneyland to be everyone’s main visual remembrance of you (or maybe you do, no judgments here). Users can still choose the locked-down option, or simply opt to have the profile deleted after they have passed on.

As I’ve noted in previous posts on this subject, keeping the social media profiles of people who have passed on certainly has some interesting implications. In the near term, it would useful for communicating information about funerals and wakes, as well as later commemorations. As time goes on, there will inevitably be more and more memorial pages interspersed among those of the living, forming a kind of virtual cemetery interwoven with our present-day lives; this scenario reminds me of the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, where the dead serve as a chorus in the background of the living.

Eventually the profiles might become more like historical documents, creating a sort of continuous social archive of people’s connections. Indeed, assuming Facebook is still around, at a certain point in the more distant future there will be whole communities of memorial pages, connected mostly to each other (raising the question of what happens to a memorial page when the legacy contact themselves passes on, but that’s a question for another day). Or it may become common practice to be “friends” with the profiles of your deceased ancestors, even those you’ve never met, lending the whole thing a kind of Confucian sensibility. For famous people the profile pages may serve as the virtual equivalent of commemorative monuments, where admirers come to pay their respects and meet like-minded individuals for years to come.