The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives

This book explores how social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ‘accidentally’ enable and nurture the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents qualitative data from three groups of participants: service providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors.

For the bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of ‘the fear of second loss’. Bassett argues that digital afterlives challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance.

This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors. But Bassett’s book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine for the‘intentional’ Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett’s conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the DAI.

Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who wants to live forever?

“A gripping read that challenges us to think about how we grieve and remember those who have died but leave digital remains. Bassett poses big societal, practical and ethical questions, especially around the role of digital service providers and intentional design for digital afterlives. By linking bereavement theories to the ‘data of the dead’, this book expands current thinking on how people can and may experience loss and practice memorialisation. This has implications both for online platforms and people’s everyday lives, acknowledging how entangled these have become both in life and after death.”
—Erica Borgstrom, The Open University, UK

“This is a fascinating exploration of an important and indeed urgent emerging topic. Bassett presents original, illuminating – and often poignant – interview-based research, set within a framework that helpfully distinguishes between the relevant stakeholders/participants and their different experiences of the digital dead.”

—Patrick Stokes, Deakin University, Australia

Debra J. Bassett received her PhD from the University of Warwick and is a visiting fellow at the University of Bath. Her qualitative research focuses on how, through avatar creation, blogs, vlogs and social network sites, people are creating and nurturing bonds with the dead, and how this human-computer interaction may affect how people grieve.