EAGER HCC: The Persistence of Digital Identity

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This is a multi-method empirical study of user death in Social Networking Sites (SNS), such as Facebook and MySpace. The mass adoption of SNS includes the growing presence of individuals who are no longer alive. However, the physical death of a user does not result in the elimination of his or her account nor the profile's place inside a network of digital peers. Indeed, friends' use of a user's profile postmortem to say last goodbyes, share memories, and coordinate funereal arrangements is well known, if not frequently discussed. Through a focus on collaborative representations embodied through data across time, this exploratory research will reveal ways to broaden our current technical architectures for access, authorization, and privacy, and generate empirically grounded design principles for the Human-Centered Computing community. This research effort has the potential to open new areas of exploration and transform our thinking about SNS and other online services. This work is in its very early stages, and likely to develop into a more developed research area in the future. Focusing on death highlights three important themes for social networks and representation: embodiment, representation, and temporality. Embodiment concerns how data objects and digital representations "stand for" human bodies. It encapsulates issues of access, issues of ownership, issues of management, issues of presence, issues of personhood, and issues of participatory status, both at the technical level and at the social. Representation invokes the traditional considerations of online identity, the presentation of self, and the crafting of acceptable personas as well as consideration of the ways in which records are created with specific purposes and representations in mind. Representation relates to embodiment in that it speaks to the relationship that holds between the data object and the human body, but it incorporates too the active, purposive, strategic practices of representing with particular ends in mind. Temporality concerns the notion of "lifecycles" as it has been applied in system development - the circumstances under which digital systems come into being, are put to use, and are taken out of service. The life of a user and the life of that user?s data are frequently not the same, an issue particularly acute when considering the continuation of dead user profiles in SNS. This work will advance theoretical understandings of death in light of new technological paradigms. This project is the first research effort to focus on the technological infrastructure of SNS - and how it shapes, enables, and at times interferes with - persistence of identities after death. Issues of preparing for, experiencing, and mourning death are fundamental to the human experience. The results of this work have the potential to influence the policy decisions of services like SNS that have the potential to inflict substantial emotional trauma on users if such sensitive issues as death are mistreated as well as the technical architectures underlying identity management for a host of systems.