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Lives On… Your social life, after you die!

By Sami Mughal

No, we are not trying to sound like Yoda. We are here to discuss the latest in innovation and freaks of technology, a service called Lives On.

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So did you guys watch last week’s Black Mirror (aired 11/02/13)? A grieving woman (of the future) ends up communicating with her husband after he has died, based on his online profile. The communication starts off with building his profile based on his public interactions on the internet. As it grows, it goes to phone calls and then, I guess, as the online entity has learnt enough about the person, it evolves into a robot of sorts, that is exactly the same person. The subject touches on how, while we put a lot of ourselves online, it can never really truly represent us, as there are certain subjects that are too intimate to discuss online. Or, as may be the case too, that we may have been building a picture that is far from reality about certain details of our life.

So what does this service called ‘_LivesOn’ do? It reads your Twitter account, and based on that, it will create a Twitter account once you die, with probably the words _livesOn added after your Twitter ID. What does this sound like to you?

Do you think this is twisted? Weird? Creepy? Exciting? Personally, I have signed up for the service. Not because I have a need to go on even after I have died, but because I want to know more about these things. The problem is that this presents us with so many ethical as well as social issues that one can’t even touch it. Definitely, since watching that show last week, we have a better picture of what would be the pros and cons.

You can sign up to the service at the following address:

http://www.liveson.org/

You can read an interesting article about it in the Guardian at the following address:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/shortcuts/2013/feb/18/death-social-media-liveson-deadsocial

And if you missed the show last week, following is a link to it:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od#3479642

What are your thoughts about the service and the show? Would you sign up for it? Do you think I was wrong to sign up for it?

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