

Is Social Media changing our relationship with Death? - micrypt
http://puntofisso.net/techblog/2012/04/17/is-social-media-changing-our-relationship-with-death/

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rubidium
"Have you ever been at a cemetery, making a mass-visit to a dead loved one?"
People do that all the time. Some cultures have a whole "day of the dead" to
remember the deceased. The medium may be different (and the reach a bit
farther), but the relationship with death is the same.

~~~
AznHisoka
Yep, Chinese have a day devoted to this. We burn money and eat good tasting
food.

~~~
carguy1983
It's not actual money.

------
joshuap
"As we have become less worried of posting photos of our children and to
display our location to a level of accuracy that would have scared us ten
years ago, so we have started experiencing death in unexpected ways." - I know
I certainly haven't, and frankly the whole "memorializing" of someone's
Facebook page is distasteful to me. Nothing like commoditizing my dead
childhood-best-friend so that everyone can feel better. I wonder if Facebook
will show ads for funeral services in my timeline after I die?

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radu_floricica
The anime Ghost in the Shell approached this in a pretty interesting way.
Making a superficial simulation of somebody is reasonably easy. But real
people also have what GitS calls a "ghost", something similar to the concept
of soul. It's the added depth of complexity which makes a simulation or a
conversational AI radically different from a real person - or a real AI.

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puntofisso
My point was a bit different. The day of the deads is a day in which you
remember the deceased as a whole. It's not the same, to me, as remembering
that particular person, together with all your common friends, in a
celebrative way (i.e. "Happy Birthday"). \--@puntofisso

~~~
lmm
At least in my (former) church, there's a tradition of having a mass for them
on the anniversary of their death (first and tenth in particular), and
family/friends would gather and make a social occasion of it, which was often
quite a joyful affair.

~~~
puntofisso
Yes, I'm not discussing this. I'm suggesting that social media is making it a
mass, public phenomenon such that is making people be willing to make
arrangements.

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digitalsushi
I dont know much about this Tupac dude other than that he was famous and died,
and then yesterday a hologram was represented of him somewhat convincingly at
a public performance on a stage. It makes me reflect that, of my superset of
all friends, 99% of them I have not talked to in years, and they could very
well be dead. A few actually _are_ and I found out only recently. To suppose
there eventually will be a way of programming the states of our personality
into some agent, and let others interact with it, I might say this surrogate
might be enough to trick my brain that they are still alive. What if facebook
could ask you 1500 questions, and emulate the first 80% of your psyche? It
would be a weird way to remember someone, chatting with their agent like that.
Like that mastergeek at the end of Serenity, perhaps. Some limited interaction
thing. It's all damned weird to think about. I am uncomfortable with this
thought experiment so far.

~~~
digitalsushi
Or to expound on that for a moment, think of Barkley in the holodeck - what
are the ramifications of us programming our own psyches of people we know, to
have virtual instances of them that we can interact with? How weird/wrong/fine
is it to program up some girls you went to high school, but tweak them all to
be friendly? I know this is a bit of a rant from the topic of social media
familiarizing us with first-person death experiences. It just makes me stop
for a moment to contemplate what we really are inside, or what we really
_arent_.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Emulating the behavior of other people inside your mind is _normal_ ; there
are folks who have tried to use that ability as part of the definition of
human-level intelligence.

And trying to mentally simulate a world where those other people _like and
admire you_ is also normal: This is how we figure out what to do, and why.
Yeah, it verges on the crazy fantasy sometimes, but hey, if you can't dream
_in your own dreams_ where do you dream?

You can't stop doing this, any more than you can consciously stop breathing.

What makes me want to watch that Barkley episode again, now, is that I wonder
if it's really about privacy. Humans need privacy inside their own heads. They
need privacy with their counselors. They need the freedom to work things out
without other people taking their thoughts out of context. You need to be
judged by the things that you _do_ , because your editor needs a chance to
work before the raw footage gets plastered all over Google.

------
zalew
no.

