Hundreds of Facebook users, bloggers, and twitterers die a day. What agency do their profiles, still present on these virtual platforms, have on the living? Do their web-based identities ease the mourning process or make it more difficult? Could the virtual be the only space where the dead and the living co-exist with similar materialities?...
The Atlantic just published a great interview of Patrick Stokes, a philosopher working out of Melbourne University about these ideas. Best quote from How Facebook Lets You Live Forever (Sort Of):
"we really have continuing moral duties to dead people even though they don't exist anymore; they exist as objects of duty. That's something Kierkegaard talks about, the fact that we have these duties to dead people, like the duty to remember them, or the duty not to slander them, and so forth. We live with this very profound ontological ambiguity with dead people: they both absolutely don't exist anymore, and yet they exist as these people that we have to love and care about."
The Atlantic just published a great interview of Patrick Stokes, a philosopher working out of Melbourne University about these ideas. Best quote from How Facebook Lets You Live Forever (Sort Of):
"we really have continuing moral duties to dead people even though they don't exist anymore; they exist as objects of duty. That's something Kierkegaard talks about, the fact that we have these duties to dead people, like the duty to remember them, or the duty not to slander them, and so forth. We live with this very profound ontological ambiguity with dead people: they both absolutely don't exist anymore, and yet they exist as these people that we have to love and care about."
