Online Afterlives: Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture

How digital technology--from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones--is changing our relationship to death.

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts--el...