Does This Count As A Morbid Pre-Occupation?

Ever since the accident I’ve been curious what would happen to my digital life should I kick the physical bucket. I know most of the online media is over things like mydeathspace.com, but going over the most recent additions, I can’t help but notice most of the people on the list are in my age bracket — 18 to 25 — and the vast majority of them died in car accidents. And it’s frightening, yeah, and the fact that so many people have said to me, if something awful had happened, I wouldn’t have known, not for days, maybe not for weeks.

The hits on MySpace and this blog and Facebook would keep ticking. In fact, once people learn of someone’s death, hits tend to go up; people post memorials on comment sections; sometimes, I’ve read, family and friends try and break the password on the account to turn the profile into a memorial for the deceased. Don’t you think there’s something weird about fussing with the MySpace of the deceased? On the other hand, it is a little reminiscent of folks who have a hard time moving on and keep the room or belongings of the deceased in perfect order, as if waiting for them to return one day.

Yet the idea of our digital ghosts isn’t so much comforting as it is annoying. It seems like another way that the general public can pry into our most intimate moments in this new wired world. On the other hand, isn’t this our shot at some kind of immortality? I don’t think I’d like to be deleted from Facebook post-mortem. I have talked in the past about uploading my consciousness to the internet, so I can live forever in virtual space. In all seriousness, these online vestiges of lives lost are a little like uploading the whisper of a consciousness to the internet. A little like the first step toward digital immortality. I’m working on it, as you can see.