'Flickr Birthdays,' From 10,852,768 Birthday Pictures on Flickr, 12.22.10
In the era before the socially documented digital age, when a person passed away, the residual evidence of their existence was usually found in journals, photo albums, dusty shoe boxes of mementos high away in some closet, and of course (most importantly) the memories of friends and loved ones. However, as we move continue to build a digital copy of ourselves, quantifying an infinite number of check-ins, status updates, blog posts, and uploaded photos, we are generating a much different post-mortem impression.
An example of a memorial page on 1000memories.com.
In a recent article, the New York Times' Rob Walker dissected the current environment of the digital afterlife -- everything from memorial sites like 1000memories.com to the unfolding of the untimely death of a suburban technophile on platforms like Blogger and Twitter. Facebook too has been having to come to terms with how they deal with 'ghosts' on their site, their term for the profiles of deceased users.
