Internet Afterlife: Social Media, Avatars and the New Immortality

• In Event: 165 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Religious Change: Micro, Meso, and Macro

Abstract

PROGRAM ABSTRACT: INTERNET AFTERLIFE

There are new and hitherto unimagined forms of personal immortality available to the dead in the 21st century. These forms are available online in two different forms. First, social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace, using forms first developed on proto-social media memorial sites, offer online locales in which the dead can maintain their homepages after they die, and where the bereaved leave messages for the dead, and in which, according to testimony offered by the bereaved, the dead make their presence felt.
Second, another set of sites take their inspiration from online gaming. These sites use the idea of game avatars as a model and promise, employing exhaustive questionnaires and other personal data, to create online avatars that will look and act just like the deceased person on whom they are based. Even more radical sites offer to meld the deceased person’s DNA and models of their electrochemical brain patterns and relocate them into off-line robots (we remember Harrison Ford’s replicant in 1982’s Bladerunner.) and then, eventually, into real-world holograms, which are essentially online avatars come to three-dimensional life. Thus, game avatars based on the dead will provide a virtual but real-world form of afterlife, in which the dead person’s consciousness will be preserved after death.
Both social media memorial sites and avatar/hologram sites thus offer new versions of the afterlife by creating new spaces for such ‘life’, in one case online, in the other in offline forms of virtual reality.

Author

• Kevin O'Neill, University of Redlands