Digital Legacy: what are we leaving behind

Just a year after joining twitter, Ivy Bean died. By that time she had 56 thousand followers. It was on twitter that her followers learned she was doing poorly, and then of her passing, and it was via twitter that they sent their thoughts. Her twitter account is still accessible, and acts as a digital legacy.

Gail Edmunds lived an ocean apart from her 63-year old sister, Linda, when she heard the diagnosis: an aggressive form of cancer.

“I’m her only sister, and with our mom suffering from dementia, I struggled with how I could best support her.”

The answer was a private Facebook page.

“The idea was to allow family members and close friends to write messages of support and to walk alongside her, even if it was from afar. We would tally our kilometres walked on a daily basis, with the initial goal being to cover the distance from Newfoundland (where we grew up) to Germany.”

“It is somewhat ironic that a life-ending illness was the impetus for a family to reconnect and learn about our past. But it made my sister simply joyful to see us come together on a daily basis to share our lives with each other.”

Linda’s Army lived beyond Linda, and has now walked more than 28,000 kilometres

The ghost in the machine

While these are examples of deliberate digital presence lasting beyond death, Matthew Malady found his digital mother unexpectedly, while indulging in a pastime he found relaxing: Google Street View, checking the address of a family house of his youth.

“I decided to check out a house I lived in during my late teens, and that my mother continued to live in until she passed away, unexpectedly, right around this time two years ago. I mainly wanted to see how the street and neighborhood had changed.

And then there she was, out front, walking on the path that leads from the driveway to the home’s front door. My mom. I took screenshots of my mom from every angle available on the site, saved them to my hard drive.”

For Matthew, this digital surprise was one of a long line of messages about his late Mom: he gets notifications on Mother’s Day, and her birthday.  But ironically –considering the ‘digital memory’ – this digital presence is one that may not last forever .

“I realized how fortunate I was to have made the discovery: at some point in the future, and probably quite soon, Google will update the pictures of my mom’s old street, and those images of her will disappear from the Internet. “