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Digital Death Day October 6th in London was a great success!
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DEATH IS A PART OF LIFE AND LIFE HAS (TO AN EXTENT) BECOME DIGITAL.
Our increasing digitality means that we will increasingly be forced to come FACE to SCREEN with the various dimensions and complexities of Digital Death.
Held in the inspiring setting of the Tropenmuseum’s exhibition Death Matters, this conference will be primarily concerned with provoking discourse around the social, cultural and practical implications of Death in the Digital world.
Thus stimulating a reconsideration of how death, mourning, memories and history are currently being augmented in our technologically mediated society.
‘We hardly know what life is how can we hope to understand death?’ -Chinese sage Confucius (fifth century BC)
IF YOU ARE A:
- Funeral Director
- Thanatologist
- Social Network Admin
- Data Systems Admin
- Product Manager
- Information Systems Researcher
- HCI Researcher
- Digital Designer
- Psychologist or Grief Counselor
- Palliative Care Specialist
- Historian
- Pre-Need Sales Person
- Funeral Celebrant
- Estate Planner
- Legacy Planner
- End of Life Planner
- Solicitors and Barristers in Intellectual Property and Estate Law
- Clergy OR
- Simply an Interested Human Being
THEN THIS IS THE CONFERENCE FOR YOU!
The format will be an open space un-conference with attendees creating the agenda and proposing sessions at the start. If you have a presentation, question, answer or particular interest you can propose a session at.
QUESTION WE HOPE WILL BE RAISED BY THE EVENT:
- What does this change mean for loved ones of the departed?
- What does it mean for professionals in end of life care and post mortem services?
- How does it change the way online tools and social networks are constructed and the service providers ‘terms and conditions’?
- What are the new forms of estate and legacy planning?
- What does this mean for governments in terms of archiving, digital heritage and the collection of public records?
- What businesses are serving this ‘new’ market and what do these businesses have to offer?
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We have had 2 Digital Death Days in 2010:
* #1 in Bay Area in May 2010 – Link
* #2 in London in October 2010 – Link
* #3 in Bay Area in May 2011 Link
I wish I could come to this as a representative of a very wired natural burial ground company but can’t make it sadly. I’d have something to say about how we use the internet as a green burial business. We run closed Facebook groups for the friends and families of our burial grounds (one group per burial ground). They are popular and people use them to post photos and talk to each other about the person they lost. We also use the groups to arrange events and discuss ideas such as ‘what do you all think of the new gate’ etc. We had a picnic at Hundy Mundy on 15th August where the families met up which was arranged, in part, virally by the younger ‘facebook’ generation telling the older ones about it and also by letter and email. We also have a page for Native Woodland and a group ‘Natural Burial in the UK’ which we use for discussion and market research. We use Survey Monkey for that too.
Our website http://www.greenburialgrounds.com , as well as being a business tool, is is a fountain of information with links to most of the websites you’d ever need on the subjects of death, coffins, bereavement, online memorials etc.
And we tweet!
unfortunately I was unable to take part in this important event
the Book of Remembrance is increasingly available on line and condolence sites can be helpful to families searching for the right words for the Book inscription Maybe now the emphasis is shifting and the digital presence is taking over …..
Hello My name is Maria and I am a media and visual anthropologist in Berlin.
My master thesis is about the Digital Death and I am really curious about the conferences and the events.
Is it possible to contact me and give me more information about them?
I would really appreciate it. My email is papaki83@hotmail.com
Thanks a lot
Maria
wish I could come to this as a representative of a very wired natural burial ground company but can’t make it sadly. I’d have something to say about how we use the internet as a green burial business. We run closed Facebook groups for the friends and families of our burial grounds (one group per burial ground). They are popular and people use them to post photos and talk to each other about the person they lost. We also use the groups to arrange events and discuss ideas such as ‘what do you all think of the new gate’ etc. We had a picnic at Hundy Mundy on 15th August where the families met up which was arranged, in part, virally by the younger ‘facebook’ generation telling the older ones about it and also by letter and email. We also have a page for Native Woodland and a group ‘Natural Burial in the UK’ which we use for discussion and market research. We use Survey Monkey for that too
Have you thought about including archivists in your catagories of interested people. They are more than historians and are doing significant work in this area. In particular with insight of what to store and how to store it for the long term.
As a senior analyst in a large Fortune 500 company, I have had occasion to purge the resources left by employees who pass away while on company business or who retire from the company. In one instance, it was important to determine what resources were to be retained as part of company records and what might need to be archived and given to the spouse. There are a number of ethical concerns for those in a corporate environment, and companies would do well to have a policy to handle the eventuality of death in the work place. Thank you for addressing a good portion of this concern in this forum.
In answer physcial death is certain and Digital Life is not , digital is alive so it can get paided as long as it is.
Something that came to mind when the Internet Consortium (I think) proposed and opened up bidding for a whole load a new top level domains, was the possibility of a .rip TLD.
Would be a suitable TLD for people to host memorial websites at.