Communications of the ACM
Computer Scientists Grapple With How to Manage the Digital Legacy of the Departed
Grief in the digital era might be eased if there were devices allowing people to engage with digital objects in the same way people interact with heirlooms.
Credit: www.perpetu.co
The current emphasis on privacy and access shows a disconnect between rules and regulations over the disposition of digital legacies and the technological advancements for generating them.
"Right now the contemporary discussion is privacy and utility," says Will Odom, with Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "It’s not about how digital materials will be represented in any meaningful way."
Odom points to the basic disparity between digital and tangible heirlooms, which makes management of the former especially problematic following the owner's passing.
Since scale has no relevance to digital material, it is an easy matter to wind up with orders of magnitude more digital items than tangible ones. Moreover, making decisions about digital legacies is complicated by the fact that they can be easily hidden from view.
Despite these difficulties, many people attempt to curate digital heirlooms, as research by Odom and colleagues found that people follow similar rituals with digital objects as they do with physical objects.
The researchers conclude that grief in the digital era might be eased if there were devices allowing people to engage with digital objects in the same way people interact with heirlooms. They have devised a trio of devices that display a deceased person’s photos, tweets, and other digital heirlooms on screens incorporated into oak veneer boxes.
From Science News
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