Eternal digital life on Facebook

I wonder what follows "digital life"? But, the afterlife "digital life"... answers Facebook.

The world's largest country in terms of population, because that's what Facebook would be if its accounts were citizens - and even with China blocking access - has decided to deal with the memory of its citizens after death.

Thus, it activates - initially in the US and gradually in other countries - a function that enables the account holder to authorise at any time a person from his/her "circle of friends", i.e. his/her account friends, to take over the management of the account in the event of his/her death.

The rights of the "heir" to the account will of course be limited but not insignificant as he will be able to:

• change the profile photo
• accept requests for friendship
• pinning announcements to the account timeline.

However, it will not be able to:

• to post as the account holder, since it won't be the account holder and
• to access the deceased's personal messages.
• Also, at the option of the account holder, the heir - administrator is given the opportunity to download a file that includes photos, publications and other information of the deceased.

When in 2011 Facebook introduced the timeline as the new form of profile in the promo videos it used, it presented this feature as an Orwellian-style archiving in the form of an album of a person's life. A scrapbook in which the situations experienced by the account holder are captured, embossed with his feelings and thoughts, the reactions and comments of his "friends", photographic documents and videos, from the day he was born until he himself had children and grandchildren, but ending the concept somewhere at that point in the distant future.

It seems that the ambition of Mr Zuckerberg and his company is for the Facebook databases to become a record of people's lives not only during the years they have been treading on the soil of this planet but also after they have been lying in that soil.

Facebook with this initiative, as it states, comes to give a solution to the problem and to answer the large number of requests that arose when pages of its users who were passing away were locked for the relatives of the deceased who in many cases took the secret password with them to the grave.

Although usually - and depending on the profile settings - friends could post messages on the timeline of the deceased, with Facebook marking the sad event and the new status of the account owner, with the term "remembering", however, relatives often asked Facebook to either delete the account or access the entire data.

This function remains for any facebook user who dies without having previously appointed an administrator heir, and if of course his/her relatives inform facebook.

As a prime example in this discussion, the parents of a suicidal teenager from Virginia, USA, have fought a court battle to get a state law passed that allows parents to access their child's account in the event of death.

A similar but not identical function has been introduced by Google in its own social network, google+ with the Inactive Account Manager process.

What is behind this decision

But this move also betrays something else. The belief that exists in the back of the "minds" of Facebook, that the page may have only been around for 10 years, but it is here to stay... and not only that. But, to become an integral part of the personality of the modern man. From the next door neighbour to the American president, and from the neighbourhood convenience store to the international business giants, everyone has their identity reflected on Facebook, with their URL now posing under their full name or corporate brand. And Facebook is thus attempting to become not only the central platform of digital daily life, where we are now online 24/7 via mobile devices, but also the great archive of our lives.

Facebook itself admits

"When a person passes away, their account can become a memorial of their life, friendships and experience".

Millions of people around the world 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day, greet and say goodnight to their "friends" and "followers" through their facebook accounts, express their simple and complex moments of their day, express their joy and their solution, their hopes and their anxieties, their beliefs and their expectations from others and from life, they create and dissolve personal and professional relationships, acquire new friends, partners and companions, unearth old schoolmates and young loves, outwit their loneliness or take a fresh breath from their dying social life and set sail into a world of information without limits, from the office or living room of their home, from their office or the café they frequent.

All these people are participating in digital life, which is only now taking its first steps, like the tadpole in the water that foreshadowed life on earth millions of years ago.