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Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook?

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Abstract

Of the many ways in which identity is constructed and performed online, few are as strongly ‘anchored’ to existing offline relationships as in online social networks like Facebook and Myspace. These networks utilise profiles that extend our practical, psychological and even corporeal identity in ways that give them considerable phenomenal presence in the lives of spatially distant people. This raises interesting questions about the persistence of identity when these online profiles survive the deaths of the users behind them, via the practice of ‘memorialising’ social network profile pages. I situate these practices within a phenomenology of grief that accounts for the ways in which the dead can persist as moral patients, and show how online survival in this case illuminates an important difference between persons and selves within contemporary philosophy of personal identity. Ultimately, the online persistence of the dead helps bring into view a deep ontological contradiction implicit in our dealings with death: the dead both live on as objects of duty and yet completely cease to exist.

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Notes

  1. My use of ‘phenomenality’ here owes a debt to Jeremy Allen's (2011) discussion of our treatment of the dead.

  2. For an invaluable conspectus of the debate over posthumous harms and associated issues, see Fischer (1993)

  3. Though see, e.g. Swinburne (1986)

  4. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this point.

  5. One question that confronts survivors is whether the deceased would want their profile to be memorialised or not. Anecdotally, it appears that these sorts of issues are increasingly being worked into estate planning, so that the survivors have specific instructions as to how the deceased wanted their ‘digital legacy’ managed after their death.

  6. Of course in another sense, the richly phenomenal memory of a loved one makes that person's loss seem all the more poignant and painful. Preserving the other in memory is, paradoxically, part of understanding the true depth of what has been lost.

  7. Cf. Strawson (2009), Schechtman (2007), Johnston (2010). I discuss this split in Stokes (2008, 2010).

  8. The Bob Hope example was raised in discussion during a postgraduate seminar I gave at the University of Melbourne in 2003; I'm embarrassed to say I can't recall who raised it, but I remain grateful for it nonetheless.

  9. This paper has been made possible by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship funded by the European Commission. I am grateful to attendees at the ‘Personal Identity After the Information Revolution’ workshop at the University of Hertfordshire for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Philosophy Group, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL10 9AB, UK

    Patrick Stokes

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Stokes, P. Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook?. Philos. Technol. 25, 363–379 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0050-7

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