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Virtual Legacies
Aug. 3rd, 2012 03:53 pmThis (by solicitor Louise Restell) is a fascinating article, perhaps especially to writers, and the more I read it, the less I think there are any easy answers to most of the questions it raises.
Most writers probably don't give a thought to what might happen to their FB profile when they die, despite the fact that it may contain fascinating background information on their methods, not to mention even more fascinating spats with fellow writers. All the stuff, in fact, that once might have been available to biographers or literary critics in diaries or letters - only most of this will not be similarly available, for though FB will "memorialise" a profile by providing space for an obituary and allowing Facebook friends to leave posts on the wall for remembrance, it will delete all status updates. (I don't know what would happen to comments by the dead person on the status updates of others, and it's an interesting thought, for removing them would inevitably misrepresent the discussion in question.)
This may not matter a damn to the deceased, but it does potentially matter to literary critics, and indeed historians in general, if we're talking of users other than writers. We probably record more of our lives than ever our pre-internet ancestors did, but ironically their sepia photographs, Mass Observation Project diaries, rolls of cine film and sheaves of letters tied in ribbon may still be there when our online diaries, Flickr albums and YouTube videos have long vanished in the ether.
It may of course also matter to friends and relatives who would like to keep these memories of the departed, to read through their status updates as you would a diary. As far as I can see, they can't, unless the whole lot is backed up somewhere else, which may be a grief to them. One could, as the article suggests, leave one's passwords handy with one's will, but the surviving relatives may not be in a state to do much about it for some time, which could be too late.
The alternative scenario, of course, is when the deceased didn't want their nearest and dearest to have access to their online persona, which may not have been the same as their real-life one. Both FB and Yahoo refuse to provide relatives with the password of a dead person, and the article gives instances of relatives challenging this. Though one can understand why, I tend to agree with FB and Yahoo (for a wonder) that the dead have a right to privacy. "After all", says the article, "if you’d written it all down in a journal or letter there would be hard copies for your survivors to find". Well yes, but you might well have intended to destroy them if you'd had time, and in the case of online material you might not have thought you needed to. Not giving your relatives your password strikes me as the equivalent of encrypting a written diary; it makes your wish for privacy fairly clear.
It's also possible, if you are a writer, that you may not want to remove material altogether from the web, but just to keep it from the view of your family. I'm thinking here of some fan fiction writers who work pseudonymously, and in particular of one I knew online, though I never met her. By what I could deduce of her real-life personality from interaction on forums etc, she was a rather conventional middle-aged married lady of, indeed, quite conservative views on most things. Her writing, however, was surprisingly and graphically sexual and violent; it was nothing much out of the way in her online writing community, but if her family, after her death (which was somewhat sudden and unexpected) had been able to access her passwords and pseudonyms and discovered this other side to her, I can't imagine they would have been other than shocked, not so much by the material as by the fact that they hadn't known her as well as they thought. Some fan fiction writers indeed leave passwords and other information with friends in the community, precisely so that after they die, their writing can stay available to the community but not to their families, who never knew of it. The writing isn't always of a violent or sexual nature either; it is just a side of themselves that they wanted to share only with a particular group of people.
This may well also be the case with the poor lad mentioned in the article, who committed suicide and whose parents want access to his online accounts. I can see why they feel it would give them an insight into his state of mind, but it's an insight he may not have wished them to have. I'm mighty averse to the idea that Yahoo or FB should be forced to give out passwords in such cases or, I think, in any case, but as I said, I don't think there are many easy answers here.
I do think folk with a lot of stuff online, like photos, videos etc, should think about backing it up, unless of course their motto is "après moi, le déluge". As for social media, it's easy to say that one should remember it is a fleeting medium and that anything you really want to preserve needs to be, at the very least, in a more secure online space like a personal blog. But in practice, you can't tell which casual post will turn into a truly fascinating and illuminating debate. A great deal of interaction between writers via social media is going to be lost. You may say, so was conversation in literary salons, but in fact the best of it was often recorded later in diary or letter form. Does that happen now? Is an admiring retweet any more likely to survive than its original?
Most writers probably don't give a thought to what might happen to their FB profile when they die, despite the fact that it may contain fascinating background information on their methods, not to mention even more fascinating spats with fellow writers. All the stuff, in fact, that once might have been available to biographers or literary critics in diaries or letters - only most of this will not be similarly available, for though FB will "memorialise" a profile by providing space for an obituary and allowing Facebook friends to leave posts on the wall for remembrance, it will delete all status updates. (I don't know what would happen to comments by the dead person on the status updates of others, and it's an interesting thought, for removing them would inevitably misrepresent the discussion in question.)
This may not matter a damn to the deceased, but it does potentially matter to literary critics, and indeed historians in general, if we're talking of users other than writers. We probably record more of our lives than ever our pre-internet ancestors did, but ironically their sepia photographs, Mass Observation Project diaries, rolls of cine film and sheaves of letters tied in ribbon may still be there when our online diaries, Flickr albums and YouTube videos have long vanished in the ether.
It may of course also matter to friends and relatives who would like to keep these memories of the departed, to read through their status updates as you would a diary. As far as I can see, they can't, unless the whole lot is backed up somewhere else, which may be a grief to them. One could, as the article suggests, leave one's passwords handy with one's will, but the surviving relatives may not be in a state to do much about it for some time, which could be too late.
The alternative scenario, of course, is when the deceased didn't want their nearest and dearest to have access to their online persona, which may not have been the same as their real-life one. Both FB and Yahoo refuse to provide relatives with the password of a dead person, and the article gives instances of relatives challenging this. Though one can understand why, I tend to agree with FB and Yahoo (for a wonder) that the dead have a right to privacy. "After all", says the article, "if you’d written it all down in a journal or letter there would be hard copies for your survivors to find". Well yes, but you might well have intended to destroy them if you'd had time, and in the case of online material you might not have thought you needed to. Not giving your relatives your password strikes me as the equivalent of encrypting a written diary; it makes your wish for privacy fairly clear.
It's also possible, if you are a writer, that you may not want to remove material altogether from the web, but just to keep it from the view of your family. I'm thinking here of some fan fiction writers who work pseudonymously, and in particular of one I knew online, though I never met her. By what I could deduce of her real-life personality from interaction on forums etc, she was a rather conventional middle-aged married lady of, indeed, quite conservative views on most things. Her writing, however, was surprisingly and graphically sexual and violent; it was nothing much out of the way in her online writing community, but if her family, after her death (which was somewhat sudden and unexpected) had been able to access her passwords and pseudonyms and discovered this other side to her, I can't imagine they would have been other than shocked, not so much by the material as by the fact that they hadn't known her as well as they thought. Some fan fiction writers indeed leave passwords and other information with friends in the community, precisely so that after they die, their writing can stay available to the community but not to their families, who never knew of it. The writing isn't always of a violent or sexual nature either; it is just a side of themselves that they wanted to share only with a particular group of people.
This may well also be the case with the poor lad mentioned in the article, who committed suicide and whose parents want access to his online accounts. I can see why they feel it would give them an insight into his state of mind, but it's an insight he may not have wished them to have. I'm mighty averse to the idea that Yahoo or FB should be forced to give out passwords in such cases or, I think, in any case, but as I said, I don't think there are many easy answers here.
I do think folk with a lot of stuff online, like photos, videos etc, should think about backing it up, unless of course their motto is "après moi, le déluge". As for social media, it's easy to say that one should remember it is a fleeting medium and that anything you really want to preserve needs to be, at the very least, in a more secure online space like a personal blog. But in practice, you can't tell which casual post will turn into a truly fascinating and illuminating debate. A great deal of interaction between writers via social media is going to be lost. You may say, so was conversation in literary salons, but in fact the best of it was often recorded later in diary or letter form. Does that happen now? Is an admiring retweet any more likely to survive than its original?
