Adam Ostrow asks, "What happens to our online personality after we die? Could it...live on?" Should it live on? What should happen to our social media accounts and blogs after we die? Should our families get to be in charge of our internet identities?"
"For some time now, it (Facebook) has offered an option to request that a profile be switched to “memorial” mode when an individual dies," says Ostrow. The "memorial" mode that Facebook offers is a setting that freezes the page. I believe that this is the best option, because people will know what you were like long after you are dead. Historians won't have physical documents anymore, because everything is online. They will soon get information from the Internet and from websites like Facebook. If you simply erase a whole page, no one will know what life was like for you. It is just making it harder for future historians to get information about your life.
"I spoke to a half dozen people Mac Tonnies met online and in some cases never encountered in the physical world. Each expressed a genuine sense of loss; a few sounded grief-stricken even more than a year later." If you have an online presence, or maybe you have a blog that you update every week and only a thousand people have ever read it. And maybe 75% of those people love your blog, and can't live without it, or it just brightens their day. And then you die, and 750 people, that you don't even know, just lost a sort of friend. That's basically what happened to Mac Tonnies. But what if someone deleted all of those blog posts? Then what? Only around 750 or so people in the world will remember your blog, ever. Luckily, Mac's parents didn't delete his blog that touched the hearts of many readers.
