"The Impact of Digital Afterlives on Remembering the Deceased"
Originally Published 2 years ago — by Nature.com
Sociologist Timothy Recuber's book "The Digital Departed" explores how the dying and the dead exert agency over their online presence, examining digital texts from terminally ill bloggers to online suicide notes. Recuber also delves into the use of hashtags as a form of collective online remembrance and interviews individuals involved in transhumanism, discussing the potential for advanced technologies to enable digital records of the human mind to be uploaded to the Internet. He raises ethical concerns about mind uploading, cautioning against narratives that promote technological progress as necessarily good and highlighting the inequalities mirrored in people's online lives.