Hello, my name is Aaron Uhrmacher, and I’ve always been interested in how we remember people. Today, I specifically want to look at how our digital tools are changing the way that we remember and memorialize people as well as some of these tools that are helping us to do that better. Let’s start by taking a look at how we live.
Just a short post to announce that I’ve been selected to speak at TEDx this Friday. TEDx is a community organized TED style event, and this one is put together by the students at NYU’s Gallatin School.
My presentation is titled, “Digital Death, Online Afterlife” and here’s an overview:
Over the course of our lives, we will spend thousands of hours updating our status on social networks like Facebook, sharing observations on Twitter and our locations on Foursquare. But what happens to all of this “content” when we die? What’s becoming clear is that future generations will have access to the minutiae of our lives unlike any previous generation. So how do we prepare for our deaths from a digital perspective? Turns out there’s an entire industry cropping up devoted to it. This presentation will explore some of the ways the government, organizations and companies are asking us to consider our online afterlife.
This is a topic that I’ve been researching heavily for my thesis project, which I’ll blog more about in the next few weeks. The public is absolutely welcome to attend. More information here.