The Afterlife of Data

The Afterlife of Data
Author: Carl Öhman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2024-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226828239

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die. These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data. The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains. As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late.

Listening in the Afterlife of Data

Listening in the Afterlife of Data
Author: David Cecchetto
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 99
Release: 2021-12-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478022531

In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.

Listening in the Afterlife of Data

Listening in the Afterlife of Data
Author: David Cecchetto
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781478015291

Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of computation, wearable technologies, and digital artwork.

Afterlives of Data

Afterlives of Data
Author: Mary F.E. Ebeling
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520973828

What our health data tell American capitalism about our value—and how that controls our lives. Afterlives of Data follows the curious and multiple lives that our data live once they escape our control. Mary F. E. Ebeling's ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and the debt that we carry becomes biopolitical assets owned by healthcare providers, insurers, commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies, and platforms. By delving into the oceans of data built from everyday medical and debt traumas, Ebeling reveals how data about our lives come to affect our bodies and our life chances and to wholly define us. Investigations into secretive data collection and breaches of privacy by the likes of Cambridge Analytica have piqued concerns among many Americans about exactly what is being done with their data. From credit bureaus and consumer data brokers like Equifax and Experian to the secretive military contractor Palantir, this massive industry has little regulatory oversight for health data and works to actively obscure how it profits from our data. In this book, Ebeling traces the health data—medical information extracted from patients' bodies—that are digitized and repackaged into new data commodities that have afterlives in database lakes and oceans, algorithms, and statistical models used to score patients on their creditworthiness and riskiness. Critical and disturbing, Afterlives of Data examines how Americans' data about their health and their debt are used in the service of marketing and capitalist surveillance.

The Afterlife Experiments

The Afterlife Experiments
Author: Gary E. Schwartz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2002-03-13
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 074344258X

An esteemed scientist's personal journey from skepticism to wonder and awe provides astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death? Are love and life eternal? This exciting account presents provocative evidence that could upset everything that science has ever taught. Daring to risk his worldwide academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, along with his research partner Dr. Linda Russek, asked some of the most prominent mediums in America -- including John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson -- to become part of a series of extraordinary experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS This riveting narrative, with its electrifying transcripts, puts the reader on the scene of a breakthrough scientific achievement: contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions. In stringently monitored experiments, leading mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. The messages that came through stunned sitters and researchers alike. Here, as they unfolded in the laboratory setting, are uncanny revelations about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Dr. Schwartz was forced by the overwhelmingly positive data to abandon his skepticism, reaching some startling conclusions. Compelling from the first page to the last, The Afterlife Experiments is the amazing documentation of groundbreaking experiments you will never forget.

Online Afterlives

Online Afterlives
Author: Davide Sisto
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 026253939X

How digital technology—from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones—is changing our relationship to death. Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death. Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people's last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person's account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

Handbook to the Afterlife

Handbook to the Afterlife
Author: Pamela Rae Heath
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2011-07-05
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1583944273

Two seasoned experts with decades of experience working with channeled material describe the various stages of life after death Just as life itself has different stages of growth and development, so does the afterlife. In this useful handbook, authors Pamela Rae and Jon Klimo demonstrate how dying and rebirth are, much like life, continuous processes. Beginning with the moment of death itself, progressing through different transitional stages, and ending with the return of spirits to the physical plane, they define the purposes and pitfalls of each stage. They look at the kinds of adjustment problems that occur in each phase, and how spirits can be helped to move forward. Questions of pain and emotional state at the time of death, karma, and reincarnation are sensitively addressed. The book includes practical techniques for opening communication with those who have passed on to the other side. While of interest to anyone seeking a general overview of the subject, Handbook to the Afterlife is particularly useful for those dealing with spirits who have not moved on, such as ghosts.

The Afterlife of Objects

The Afterlife of Objects
Author: Dan Chiasson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2002-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780226103778

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of personal, familial, or national significance, The Afterlife of Objects is a kind of dreamed autobiography. With poise and skill, Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind of not just one individual but of an entire social world through a beautifully constructed poetic voice that issues from a kind of mythic childhood of our collective, tortured humanity. This sophisticated debut collection offers deceptively simple poems that evoke highly complex states of mind with a voice that has long been listening to the discordant music of contemporary life.

Digital Legacy

Digital Legacy
Author: Daniel Sieberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781736205945

Do you know what will happen to your digital "stuff" when you die?No? Rest assured, you are not alone. This increasingly important but relatively unknown subject involves what happens to all of your accounts, social media, emails, photos, and documents and how you will be remembered in your online afterlife.This book will let you take control of your online afterlife and ensure that your important digital assets are treated according to your wishes. Given that the average person spends close to seven hours per day online it's a must-read for everyone.Death: of course it's not an easy subject for any of us. Indeed, there are few subjects more difficult to discuss or imagine than death. It's like we'd rather talk about anything else than the one universal experience we all share. But it's now one that also needs to be addressed in the digital age. Digital Legacy: Take Control Of Your Online Afterlife provides both the context of how we got here but also the right guidance to move forward with your planning today. Authored by two tech executives (also former Googlers) and founders of the digital-legacy platform GoodTrust -- Daniel Sieberg and Rikard Steiber, CEO and founder of GoodTrust -- the book outlines the pitfalls, challenges and opportunities that are important for all of us to tackle.

Science and the Afterlife Experience

Science and the Afterlife Experience
Author: Chris Carter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2012-08-22
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1594774994

Reveals the evidence of life beyond death • Examines 125 years of scientific research into reincarnation, apparitions, and communication with the dead showing these phenomena are real • Reveals the existence of higher planes of consciousness where the souls of the dead can choose to advance or manifest once again on Earth • Explains how these findings have been ignored and denied because they are incompatible with materialist doctrines In this book, Chris Carter shows that evidence of life beyond death exists and has been around for millennia, predating any organized religion. Focusing on three key phenomena--reincarnation, apparitions, and communications from the dead--Carter reveals 125 years of documented scientific studies by independent researchers and the British and American Societies for Psychical Research that rule out hoaxes, fraud, and hallucinations and prove these afterlife phenomena are real. The author examines historic and modern accounts of detailed past-life memories, visits from the deceased, and communications with the dead via medium and automatic writing as well as the scientific methods used to confirm these experiences. He explains how these findings on the afterlife have been ignored and denied because they are incompatible with the prevailing doctrine of materialism. Sharing messages from the dead themselves describing the afterlife, Carter reveals how consciousness exists outside the parameters of biological evolution and emerges through the medium of the brain to use the physical world as a springboard for growth. After death, souls can advance to higher planes of consciousness or manifest once again on Earth. Carter’s rigorous argument proves--beyond any reasonable doubt--not only that consciousness survives death and continues in the afterlife, but that it precedes birth as well.