So one thing led to another yesterday and I got to thinking about all the stuff we leave behind on the internet. And what happens to it when somebody dies.
People have always left artifacts of themselves behind. Photographs, letters, tombstones. Even the stuff of everyday life tells a bit about the person who collected or used it. But in the past, once we died, that stuff started to scatter. Our apartments and houses are filled up with new people, our affects are passed down to our survivors, our jobs are taken by somebody new. A wife may have kept her husband’s love letters for a while, but after she passed on the chances that they’d be preserved, let alone remembered for what they were, was minimal.
But now everything is contained and connected. This journal will outlast me, assuming Livejournal itself stays in business. Even then, projects like the internet archive will keep it available, somewhere. And this journal will always stay together. Pieces won’t be lost, or damaged in a fire, or thrown out. Even after I die someone would still be able to find it all. They’ll be able to follow the links out, and find the journals of my friends, and family. And maybe someone will follow links in, and discover me and my life decades after I’m gone.
Even weirder is the period just after a person dies. The family and friends and coworkers of the deceased know right away, but sometimes the news doesn’t travel as fast to the people we know tangentially. And so you end up with “friends” leaving messages to dead people on places like MySpace, often unaware that the person they’re talking to is gone. Or sometimes they are aware, but they continue on anyways. A couple of articles I’ve read recently have commented on that very phenomenon.
Anyways, it’s kind of weird sometimes. It’s not exactly immortality, actually. An afterlife, maybe.