24.10.2024

Digital Afterlife and the Future of Collective Memory

New article of Matthias Meitzler, Jessica Heesen, Martin Hennig & Regina Ammicht Quinn

Digital technology increasingly addresses people dealing with dying, death and grief. The range of options now extends to ai-based forms of “digital afterlife”, in which the deceased are represented digitally in the form of a chatbot or avatar. Based on large amounts of personal data, they can simulate the person’s communicative behavior, including their visual appearance, thus enabling him or her to interact with users. The applications of the so-called Digital Afterlife Industry not only offer new possibilities in the fields of grief culture, the education sector, and the entertainment industry, but also raise ethical, legal and security-related questions that have so far received little attention. At the intersection of technological innovation (especially artificial intelligence), cultures of mourning and collective memory, this article discusses the (potential) social effects of a digital afterlife and its implication in terms of memory.

The contribution in Memory Studies Review (20 24) is here https://brill.com/view/journals/mesr/aop/issue.xml available.