Cyberspace When You're Dead

Rob Walkers of the New York Times ponders on what happens to our digital legacy (facebook accounts, online photos, twitter updates, blog posts, websites, etc.) after we kick the bucket, and some attempts (both on a personal as well as professional level) to manage such information.

Here's a quote from his article, "Cyberspace When You're Dead":

For me, at least, pondering the digital afterlife made me rethink digital life. We’re encouraged to record and express everything, all the time. In real time, we can record and distribute the most important moments of our existence, and some of the least. For the generations growing up in the Web era, this mode of being is more or less taken for granted. But the tools we use privilege the moment, not the long term; they also tend to make everything feel roughly equal in importance and offer us little incentive to comb back through our digital scribblings and sort out what might have lasting meaning from what probably doesn’t. The results are pretty much the opposite of a scrapbook carefully edited to serve as a memory object but could end up serving that function by default.

It is a somewhat long but definitely thought-provoking essay.

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