Lawrence Darani died in London on March 18th. He liked philosophy, family trees, and making fun of the Tories. He passed away of a lung disease. He was 62.
“I’ve had the opportunity now to leave messages for my loved ones,” he says, on the homepage of a website called DeadSocial, “And that’s what the purpose of this video is. Because none of us know when the time is going to come, so it is important that we leave our messages before we go. Because it could all get lost.”
Social media has changed everything about the way we live our lives and how we see the world. For over a billion users around the globe, it’s the first thing we check in the morning, groggily wiping the sleep from our eyes as we grope to silence an alarm. More often than it should be it’s the last thing we see at night, staving off a good night’s sleep in the cold glow of the screen. And then there's everything in between.
All day, every day, it’s a never ending cycle of tweeting, posting, liking, sharing, upvoting, favouriting, and checking-in.
But what about the people checking out? There are an awful lot of them, after all. Out of the 1.3bn Facebook users, for instance, 8000 of them die every day. Their accounts are still there, of course, lives collected in digital files. Just no more liking, no more sharing, no more checking in. Not even an occasional poke. Ancestry.com, the world’s largest genealogical site, predicts the number of ghost profiles will reach 45m this year. That’s just slightly less than the population of Spain.
And nobody is quite sure what to do with them all.
The end is just the beginning
One man with an idea is James Norris, a 31-year-old tech entrepreneur from London. He created DeadSocial two years ago, allowing users to compose messages ahead of their death, to be posted across Facebook and Twitter from beyond the grave. Free to use, all you need to do is register and nominate a digital executor, someone you can trust to confirm you’ve passed on and set your messages in motion. Whether wishing your wife a happy birthday or reminding your son to turn off the immersion, the content is up to you – the only limit is your imagination, and the time you have left to write your posts.
Having lost a number of close family members while growing up, Norris says he was always interested in death and fascinated by aspects of it. He got the idea for DeadSocial a few years ago, after watching an advert composed of clips of Bob Monkhouse, recut into a skit about his own demise from prostate cancer.
“It’s a hugely moving ad,” Norris says over the phone from his office, “As Bob appears to pass down a message from beyond by way of a YouTube video. I thought if ABob Monkhouse is able to pass down words of wisdom, why can’t we all?”
With all the recent talk of the right to be forgotten online, our choice to be remembered might seem a bit needy. Norris accepts that some people might find the idea behind DeadSocial off-putting. “The one certainty in life is death, and despite this, our society doesn’t really discuss it like they do other things. Maybe it’s the final taboo. Most people in the UK and Ireland haven’t even written a will, or passed on information about their funeral wishes,” he says. “Our service can therefore seem a little obscure for those who are not active online or on social media channels.”
But for those who pour capital into those channels, DeadSocial is one to watch. It’s already won numerous start-up funding awards and appeared at several top tech conferences, including Dublin’s very own Web Summit. It’s also adding new members every day, though Norris remains tight-lipped on how many accounts are actually posting messages, like Lawrence Darani’s.
Global stardom
And DeadSocial is attracting competition. An Israeli start-up called If I Die allows users to record one video message to be released across all social media platforms after death.
Although a single digital epitaph might seem more wholesome, it’s also more cutthroat. As part of a publicity appeal, the creators have launched If I Die 1st. Now the first lucky registered user to bite the bucket will have his or her message broadcast to 20m people on the popular website Mashable. It’s being described as a “once in a deathtime chance” for global notoriety. Over 240,000 people have already recorded their swan song to claim the prize. And the site’s homepage rather morbidly predicts the winning video will go, for want of a better word, live in two months, 16 days and five hours, counting down to the end of someone’s life just below the jazzy jingle.
While many of us may feel uneasy about the concept of competitive dying or our newsfeeds resembling a Cecelia Ahern weepie, our academics are a lot less sceptical. Dr Eugenia Siapera, of DCU’s School of Communications, is an expert in social media studies, and compares DeadSocial’s role to the beginning of a new understanding of death. According to her, we may have even conquered our mortality with social media. Retweeting is the new reincarnation.
“It’s not only our social life that has migrated to social media, but our afterlife as well,” Dr Siapera says. “The persistence of online data beyond and after death presents a way in which ordinary people can capture immortality, communicate it in an almost direct manner with their descendants, and preserve their memory for posterity.”
As she explains, some of us are using the Internet and social media every day to express every action and personal feeling – all time-stamped and geo-located for good measure. That means we are creating and updating an incredibly detailed archive of ourselves. In text, audio and audio-visual files, we each preserve the autobiographical fragments of the lives we lead, or the ones we want our friends to at least think we do, far beyond the capabilities of our physical memories.
“And we are also making them available to an ever growing audience,” Dr Siapera adds, “Made up of known and unknown people, with the spontaneous narrative tracks of our very existence stored potentially forever on a hard drive.” Perhaps paradise is up in the cloud, after all?
"We build apps to do the same"
If that all sounds just a bit too transcendental, too “I tweet, therefore I am,” bear in mind that we wouldn’t be the first civilisation on the planet to want to be remembered. As Dr Siapera says: “The Egyptians built the pyramids to preserve the bodies and the memories of their beloved. We build apps to do the same.”
Being remembered is exactly what Lawrence Darani had in mind when he recorded his videos for DeadSocial. When you play his message, he looks you square in the eye as you watch him. He speaks calmly, with an ease an comfort that draws you in.
“So I’m taking this responsibility for my future generations,” he says. “Just to let them know who I am, what type of character I was. What my beliefs were. And what my contribution was to the world.”
His message is not something you quickly forget.
