I don't know if this is necessarily the proper place for this, but we have the ultimate Digital Humanities items in use right now. Facebook. What happens 100 years from now and all of us are dead? Will everything we posted to our pages be archived? Will WE be archived? Will the famous have their Facebooks printed and bound in book form? How is Facebook an adequate measure of the digitized human?
And, how will they know we are dead? What if they go by the fact that we haven't logged in for a long time? What if they accidentally archive someone in the dead file when they are in fact living. What a strange idea...it's like being buried alive.
Comments
Jeff Drouin
Thu, 01/26/2012 - 00:25
Permalink
... or living dead. I know at
... or living dead. I know at least a couple people who have died, yet their Facebook accounts remain active. They tend to function as continual memorials.
I don't know that Facebook will be castrated -- the industry term for removing the advertisements and other paratexts from magazines before binding them in libraries -- but it might get preserved in some virtualized form. Check out this article on platform studies, which pertains mostly to video games but has ramifications for the archiving of digital media of any stripe. The Library of Congress is already archiving all Twitter posts.
http://www.playthepast.org/?p=1857
Emma Sloan
Tue, 01/31/2012 - 00:31
Permalink
I think you can petition to
I think you can petition to facebook to delete a deceased family member's page, but otherwise they don't delete it. I just looked up their official policy.... here is the link