Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-247) and index.
Contents:
Introduction -- 1 Social Memorials -- 2 Networked Death -- 3 Disrupted Inheritance -- 4 Haunted Objects -- Conclusion
Summary:
Since the internets earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism. Big Tech has authority not only over peoples lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.