After sharing ideas and feedback in our breakout groups I feel pretty confident that the direction I’d like to go in for my thesis will involve exploring post-mortem digital legacies, using future technologies to protect curate the legacies and remnants of our digital selves.

Concepts/Questions:

  • In a time where we spend such a large amount of time online, curating and creating digital avatars and personas that inevitably outlive us, how do we reconcile our inability to curate and control these legacies beyond our lifespan.
  • Growing up I learned about my great grandparents from photographs and from word of mouth stories that inevitably got embellished with a narrative controlled by their decedents, their ‘living legacies’. Though we like to say that a photograph is worth a thousand words from the perspective of a professional photographer I find that they rarely are. Without my parents and grandparents providing context most of these photos fail to disclose a complete picture of the subjects. On the other hand, our social media profiles and the digital paper trail that we leave behind do say a lot about who we are, or at least who we want to appear as. Often times our social media profiles are a curation or amalgamation of the person we want to be or appear as to others. What happens when these purposefully deceptive or optimistically inaccurate portrayals of us are the only things left behind? Who gets to control the narrative and are there ways we can utilize emerging or existing technologies to better safeguard our digital selves in light of our demise?

Potential Technology Stacks:

  • Blockchain and NFT
  • Cryptography
  • Web3

Potential Ideas:

  • NFT or Blockchain ensured will or deed, a saleable or transferable cache of login and security information entrusted to whoever owns the NFT.
  • Websites / social media created with the express purpose of detailing your life/providing context about your life for your decedents.

Next steps definitely would involve learning more about technologies like blockchain and NFT’s. Doing research on how legacies have traditionally been passed down or kept and how that has or hasn’t changed with the advent of new technologies, how it’s evolved and adapted over the years.