Your online life after death

If Facebook continues growing at its current rate - by 2130 the number of dead users will surpass the living. In fact, the number of the dead on Facebook is already growing fast. By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died, and that number has only gone up since. These days, it’s not unusual to see memorial pages on social media - but how is the digital world changing our approach to death? From algorithms that can post tweets in our style after we die to bequeathing a digital legacy - Dr Martin Gibbs from the Interaction Design Lab at the School of Computing and Information Systems, alongside Associate Professor Tamara Kohn and graduate researcher Hannah Gould, both from the School of Social and Political Sciences, are exploring the impact of digital disruption on death itself.
Episode recorded: 20 June 2018
Interviewer: Steve Grimwade
Producers: Dr Andi Horvath, Chris Hatzis and Silvi Vann-Wall
Audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis
Banner: Getty Images

If Facebook continues growing at its current rate - by 2130 the number of dead users will surpass the living. In fact, the number of the dead on Facebook is already growing fast. By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died, and that number has only gone up since. These days, it’s not unusual to see memorial pages on social media - but how is the digital world changing our approach to death? From algorithms that can post tweets in our style after we die to bequeathing a digital legacy - Dr Martin Gibbs from the Interaction Design Lab at the School of Computing and Information Systems, alongside Associate Professor Tamara Kohn and graduate researcher Hannah Gould, both from the School of Social and Political Sciences, are exploring the impact of digital disruption on death itself.

Episode recorded: 20 June 2018

Interviewer: Steve Grimwade

Producers: Dr Andi Horvath, Chris Hatzis and Silvi Vann-Wall

Audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis

Banner: Getty Images