Just recently I was interviewed by a Journalist for the Journal Samvirke, who wanted to know “what happen with peoples website when they pass away”. He basically wanted to know about the central legal stuff, which is safe to say: not my ballpark. But I’m of that opponion that traditional law is not the best way around this. To have regulatives or institutionalized power deleting or editing on-line content would create a misfit to the open structures of the networked media. It has to be, and will be, enforced by the common practices of users. And thus, I suggested that we could perhaps use attribution laws like Creative Commons, to create a sort of a post-creative license or by law, that described what should happen with the content of a website, when the user is not arond any more. But I haven’t thought that through, it seems problematic indeed, alone from the practical side.

As we went along the lines of the initial question, we started to talk about if people would begin to describe their thoughts on death or anticipate their death on personal websites, and we agreed, and I as researcher blueprinted, that it is likely to happen, as people increasingly cover their life (highs and lows) through blogs, photosharing etc. And we have only seen the start of related incidents on websites that offer the service for mourning over or remembering lost ones like mindet.dk. Also several people suffering from deadly diseases have used on-line media to share their inner thoughts and worries, faced with the certainty that they would leave this world with in a shorten of time.

Though there are not yet many of these explicitly extreme examples, there is a certain emblematic picture emerging here. As the web develops to be an ever more common place for sharing, personal day-to-day experiences in textual and pictorial form, we’ll have gigantic amounts of data. Think about what is generated today, fast forward that just some 10-20 years from now, the amounts of data will be gigantic. Moreover imaging some 100 years time down the line when the children born today with a personal weblog, edited by mon and dad covering their existence from 9 months before entering the world, getting a camera/video phone when they are five and what not in terabytes, Ghz of storage and media power, personal communication devices and publications formats. When they begin to leave this world, the web, or what sort of communication network, will be swarming with immense amounts of personal traces of this persons life - and most likely it would be completely natural. Sci-fi indeed. Possibility? Very likely!
Perhaps they will have Google like bots that can compile images, text, via facial recognition, tags, metadata etc. and compile a shrine of our entire on-line life world. Trackback that!

But from another perspective - and I think that I’m going to get all Virillio-like now, Paul Virillio has argued that with every invention there is an accident attached. Thus with the invention of the airplane we consequently get the airplane crash. In his book Cybermonde, Virillio claim that it is unclear what accidents would come to follow from the invention of cybernetic or information technology. He points out that our perception and our orientation in the world time/space wise are affected deeply. and following this the potential loss of the other, bodily intimacy lost. All in all, a tad pessimistic compared to what we find happening with the use of technology. People are actually connecting and extending their traditional forms and formats for communication in meaningfull ways. But Virillio also, more to the point, critically suggests that these technologies allow us not to forget, which is perhaps a very real accident – at least it’ll be rather problematic from a number philosphical depature points.

This raises some questions that I find equally important, than the legal side. What kind of content do we want to have cached? How much of our past should be accessible to the rest of the world? and how? for how long? How do we make sure that we are able to forget? with or despite technology? Do we want our technologies to help us forget? can we make forgetability?

If our data were more organic they could slowly decompose and fade away over time - would we then start using technology in another way? If I take a look a my picture folders, there are certainly images that I would save for ever after, but for the most part I’d say they are just there and could very well disappear, like many of the real photos that has disappeared through my life. It’s called moving around. So we will not have “loss of data” but simply an ecology that we know from our real world. And perhaps also Archaeologists would have jobs to do when the soil of the earth is covered. Digital world archaeology - an expanding business.

“Fading Data” - think about the idea of ExML Existence MarkUp Language, a code layer, that could be put into or onto images or text, describing for how long his digital content would live and how and when it should die. Imagine, pictures from your student party days in your online photosharing folder turning slowly into sepia or fading away suggesting that the picture was about to expire. and that you have moved on to a new phase of your life. You might of course not encode your pictures saved on a local disc, but the public image of you with a bow tie, butt naked and bottle of Bolz blue in the hand, would slowly fade away in the public sphere as time goes by, and wouldn’t come up when your potential boss does a quick search to gather a little information before hiring you..!
I have no idea how this could be done, I suspect it to be possible - and probably some great geek already wrote the code? And forgot about it.

NOTE: This post will self-destruct in five years time!

Attribution law 0.1 dead commons.
After I am gone you may use this as you wish. It’ll probably be rather insignificant anyway!