Digital Afterlife

Digital Afterlife
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000026620

Despite the range of studies into grief and mourning in relation to the digital, research to date largely focuses on the cultural practices and meanings that are played out in and through digital environments. Digital Afterlife brings together experts from diverse fields who share an interest in Digital Afterlife and the wide-ranging issues that relate to this. The book covers a variety of matters that have been neglected in other research texts, for example: The legal, ethical, and philosophical conundrums of Digital Afterlife The ways digital media are currently being used to expand the possibilities of commemorating the dead and managing the grief of those left behind Our lives are shaped by and shape the creation of our Digital Afterlife as the digital has become a taken for granted aspect of human experience. This book will be of interest to undergraduates from computing, theology, business studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and education from all types of institutions. Secondary audiences include researchers and postgraduate researchers with an interest in the digital. At a practical level, the cost of data storage and changing data storage systems mitigate the likelihood of our digital presence existing in perpetuity. Whether we create accidental or intentional digital memories, this has psychological consequences for ourselves and for society. Essentially, the foreverness of forever is in question. Maggi Savin-Baden is Professor of Higher Education Research at the University of Worcester. She has a strong publication record of over 50 research publications and 17 books. Victoria Mason-Robbie is a Chartered Psychologist and an experienced lecturer having worked in the Higher Education sector for over 15 years. Her current research focuses on evaluating web-based avatars, pedagogical agents, and virtual humans.

Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm

Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000486400

Few religious leaders have examined the potential for the positive impact of digital media and digital immortality creation in religious contexts. It is evident that there have been recent moves away from traditional funeral services focusing on the transition of the deceased into the future world beyond, towards a rise of memorial content within funerals and commemorative events. This has heralded shifts in afterlife beliefs by replacing them, to all intents and purposes, by attitudes to this life. Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm explores the ways in which digital media and digital afterlife creation affects social and religious understandings of death and the afterlife. Features Understands the impact of digital media on those living and those working with the bereaved Explores the impact of digital memorialisation post death Examines the ways in which digital media may be changing conceptions and theologies of death For many people, digital afterlife and the spiritual realm largely remains an area that is both inchoate and confusing. This book will begin to unravel some of this bafflement.

Your Digital Afterlife

Your Digital Afterlife
Author: Evan Carroll
Publisher:
Total Pages: 217
Release: 1900
Genre:
ISBN:

Almost without realizing it, we have stopped saving our memories in photo albums, home movies, and letters, and have transitioned to almost total digital storage of such assets and information. Bank statements and credit card bills that we used to receive by mail and file away are now stored and accessed on the internet. If we don't take steps to make all this information available to our heirs, our personal legacies could be lost forever. Written by the creators of thedigitalbeyond.com, this book explains the challenges, and offers solutions to make sure survivors can have access to this valu.

Your Digital Undertaker

Your Digital Undertaker
Author: Sharon Hartung
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2019-02-22
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1999450140

If you are an adult Canadian who uses e-mail and surfs the internet, this book is for you. In a unique and humorous way, this former military officer and tech executive shares what she’s learned about the estate industry and the taboo topic of preparing for one’s own death. Preparing for death doesn’t need to be scary or foreboding. It can actually be liberating and energizing. Join Your Digital Undertaker in an exploration of death in the digital age in Canada, which lifts the lid on how the deathcare and estate industry works today, and tackles it through the project management and digital lens. This exploration includes simple diagrams, easy to understand scenarios, and user options that require only a couple of mouse clicks. You’ll learn your digital life is not isolated from your physical life, as technology is the new player at the estate planning table. Cracking the code to digital death and its afterlife requires deciphering the code for your regular and physical life. By the end of this book, you should feel armed with questions and a perspective on how to tackle your digital life in the context of your overall estate. You might even walk away inspired to get on with dealing with your will and estate plan with estate planning professionals. If you are a named executor in a will or appointed in a Power of Attorney, this book is for you as well, as it might motivate you to ask a lot more questions about your role before you get handed “digital hell in a hand basket”. For those having the challenging conversations with their parents, family members or clients, let Your Digital Undertaker ask some of the basic questions and open the door for a meaningful discussion.

AI for Death and Dying

AI for Death and Dying
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2021-08-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000435644

What is artificial intelligence (AI)? How does AI affect death matters and the digital beyond? How are death and dying handled in our digital age? AI for Dying and Death covers a broad range of literature, research and challenges around this topic. It explores ethical memorisation, digital legacies and bereavement, post death avatars and AI and the digital beyond. It also analyzes religious perspectives on AI for death and dying, and planning for death in a digital age.

The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives

The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives
Author: Debra J. Bassett
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030916847

This book explores how social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ‘accidentally’ enable and nurture the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents qualitative data from three groups of participants: service providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors. For the bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of ‘the fear of second loss’. Bassett argues that digital afterlives challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors. But Bassett’s book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine for the ‘intentional’ Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett’s conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the DAI. Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who wants to live forever?

AI for Death and Dying

AI for Death and Dying
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000435725

What is artificial intelligence (AI)? How does AI affect death matters and the digital beyond? How are death and dying handled in our digital age? AI for Dying and Death covers a broad range of literature, research and challenges around this topic. It explores ethical memorisation, digital legacies and bereavement, post death avatars and AI and the digital beyond. It also analyzes religious perspectives on AI for death and dying, and planning for death in a digital age. Maggi Savin-Baden is a Professor of Education at the University of Worcester and has researched and evaluated staff and student experiences of learning for over 20 years and gained funding in this area (Leverhulme Trust, JISC, Higher Education Academy, MoD). She has a strong publication record of over 50 research publications and 17 books which reflect her research interests on the impact of innovative learning, digital fluency, cyber-influence, pedagogical agents, qualitative research methods and problem-based learning. In her spare time, she runs, bakes, climbs and attempts triathalons.

Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture

Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture
Author: Sharon Coleclough
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2023-11-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031407326

This book responds to a growing interest in death, dying and the dead within and beyond the field of death studies. The collection defines an understanding of ‘difficult death’ and examines the differences between death, dying and the dead, as well as exploring the ethical challenges of researching death in mediated form. The collection is attendant to the ways in which difficult deaths are imbricated in power structures both before and after they become mediatised in culture. As such, the work navigates the many political and social complexities and inequalities – what might be deemed the difficulties – of death, dying and the dead. The book seeks to expand understandings of the difficulty of death in media and culture through a wide range of chapters from different contexts focused on literature, film, television, and in online environments, as well as several chapters examining news reportage of difficult deaths.

Digital Souls

Digital Souls
Author: Patrick Stokes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350139173

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities
Author: David M. Berry
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745697690

As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers challenge the way in which we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities. In a world of automation, Big Data, algorithms, Google searches, digital archives, real-time streams and social networks, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. Berry and Fagerjord provide a compelling guide, exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also offer an important critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing, but also how cultural critique can transform the digital humanities. Digital Humanities will be an essential book for students and researchers in this new field but also related areas, such as media and communications, digital media, sociology, informatics, and the humanities more broadly.