Digital Survival: Facebook-A Graveyard
FACEBOOK is one of the largest online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. BUT Have You Ever Think- “What Happens To Our Facebook Accounts , When We Die?”
Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age*
Facebook it seems, doesn’t just connect people;it immortalizes those connections. Whereas memories fade and keepsakes tarnish, the images, videos, and words of the deceased remain intact and accessible to all who were friends with the deceased in the postmodern ELYSIUM of facebook.
INTRODUCTION*
By the analysis, We get to know that 90% of total population of the world are using facebook and a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-Western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration.
Internet users leave vast volumes of online data behind when passing away, commonly referred to as digital remains.The phenomenon is gaining increasing traction within the academic community . Scholars of law and related areas are investigating new dilemmas arising from inheritance of digital estates and issues of posthumous online privacy . Sociologists and anthropologists are increasingly turning their gaze towards the new types of ‘para-social’ relationships , and the ‘continuing bonds’ that we shape with the online dead. And in philosophy, there has been a rising interest for the ontological and ethical status of digital remains. In short, online death has rapidly become a booming and diverse research area.
Death Chat and Connections*
People who passed away their facebook accounts have not been closed by facebook . Although , Facebook have no policy to verify whether the person is alive or not.
While research on philosophical micro- and meso-level aspects are illuminating, the global spread of the phenomenon, as well as its future development, remain uncertain. The absence of thorough empirical investigation on the macro-level makes it difficult to formulate a critical analysis of the global impact of online death from either long and/or short-term perspectives. This is problematic because there is reason to believe that online death will increase in significance as more people around the world become connected and mortality numbers rise. It is important to get the picture straight. Is social media, as occasionally claimed ,turning into a ‘digital graveyard’? If so, how is the phenomenon geographically distributed? And perhaps more importantly, what ethical and political challenges would emerge from such development? Despite the somewhat alarming nature of these questions, there have hitherto been few attempts to provide rigorous answers.
To address this lacuna and lay the groundwork for further macroscopic analysis, the current study sets out to estimate the growth of digital remains over the course of the 21st century, using the world’s largest platform — Facebook — as a case study. Facebook’s policy on deceased users has changed somewhat over the years, but the current approach is to allow next of kin to either memorialize or permanently delete the account of a confirmed deceased user .We pose two research questions:
RQ1: How will the number of Facebook profiles belonging to dead users develop over the course of the 21st century?
RQ2: What will be the geographical distribution of dead Facebook profiles?
Facebook New Policy: Memorialized accounts
You can choose to either appoint a legacy contact to look after your memorialized account or have your account permanently deleted from Facebook.
If you don’t choose to have your account permanently deleted, it will be memorialized if we become aware of your passing.
Memorialized accounts
Memorialized accounts are a place for friends and family to gather and share memories after a person has passed away. Memorialized accounts have the following key features:
- The word Remembering will be shown next to the person’s name on their profile.
- Depending on the privacy settings of the account, friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline.
- Content the person shared (example: photos, posts) stays on Facebook and is visible on Facebook to the audience it was shared with.
- Memorialized profiles don’t appear in public spaces such as in suggestions for People You May Know, ads or birthday reminders.
- No one can log into a memorialized account.
- Memorialized accounts that don’t have a legacy contact can’t be changed.
- Pages with a sole admin whose account was memorialized will be removed from Facebook if we receive a valid memorialization request.
Legacy contacts
A legacy contact is someone you choose to look after your account if it’s memorialized. We strongly suggest setting a legacy contact so your account can be managed once it’s memorialized.
A legacy contact can accept friend requests on behalf of a memorialized account, pin a tribute post to the profile and change the profile picture and cover photo. If the memorialized account has an area for tributes, a legacy contact will be able to decide who can see and who can post tributes.
Learn more about what legacy contacts can do and how to add a legacy contact to your account.
Deleting your account when you pass away
You can choose to have your account permanently deleted should you pass away. This means that when someone lets us know that you’ve passed away, all of your messages, photos, posts, comments, reactions and info will be immediately and permanently removed from Facebook.
To request that your account be deleted:
- From the top right of Facebook, click
- and select Settings.
- Click Memorialization Settings.
- Scroll down, click Request that your account be deleted after you pass away and click Delete After Death.
For friends and family**
If you’d like to create another place for people on Facebook to share memories of your loved one, we suggest creating a group.
Learn how to request the memorialization of an account or how to request the removal of a deceased person’s account from Facebook.
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