The Design of Death (and our social cemetery)

I received a lot of emails and comments on this post: Compressed Reality/Digital Expansion so I thought I would follow it up with another discussion along the same lines. If you have not read the previous post, I would recommend starting there.

In addition to the buzz around the previous post, my cousin Michael Joseph Barrett Jr. passed away almost 2 weeks ago at the age of 40, and it got me thinking a lot about death, ceremony and customs.

With both time and change speeding up, tradition is withering just as quickly. Rich customs are being displaced in favor of our struggle for absolute efficiency, and so most of us are guilty of rapidly laying bricks to the ‘path of lost ceremony’.

Again, there are more questions:

When I die, how much of me will remain?
Will my digital debris (this post for example) expand and make friends after I die?
If you remain ‘alive’ online, will people still mourn on your behalf?
With the value of time increasing, will ceremony and ritual decrease proportionately?

On Churchill’s sound advice, I’m taking a step back on this one. You don’t have to look far to understand that Western Civilization has eroded the importance of death to the point that little remains of its rich splendor. The invention of ‘Memorial Parks’ with their manicured grounds and look-alike markers laid flat so that they can be mowed over by wide-swath lawn care systems smells of the rotten side of capitalism and the diminishing importance of what used to be.

Instead of just watching these rituals fade as they have, I’d like to propose a few ideas that could help restore the lucullan nature of death and its rituals. (Reader: lucullan was the word of the day, so I had to work it in). Let’s harness the positive aspects of our current zeitgeist and offer a more in-depth (in-death) experience of ‘re-presenting’ the deceased.

A cemetery and its tombstones have long been a symbol of longevity and lasting memory…but at what cost? If you track the nomadic relocations of New York City cemeteries during the development of Manhattan, you will understand that economics, politics and our increasingly shallow sense of post-death belonging, trumps the symbolic representation our ancestors believed in. As discussed in the previous post, our physical life is compressing, and land is at a premium. Meanwhile, digital real estate is extremely affordable as users spend more and more time sharing pixels. Social networks are a huge slice of our communication pie, and professions such as the Digital Archeologist are upon us. Logical next step…a social network that celebrates the dead. I guess you wouldn’t want to say it is for the dead…after all, this network is maintaining, continuing, and enhancing the LIFE of those who decide to ‘live’ online.

Ok, ok…social this and social that…it’s all the rage. Let’s build the website, create a great user experience and let the dialogue flow…right? I guess…but for me there is still something missing. The social networks getting most of the buzz today are digitally centric (with the exception of what a small fraction of Hollywood is doing with ARG - Alternate Reality Gaming), and in order to take the next step, a hybrid community needs to offer a cocktail of both digital and physical activities that bring people closer together. (Reader: Speaking of cocktail, I have had a few of them this evening, so I fought hard to work in the noun. It is 1:15am, our guests left over an hour ago, and here I am struggling through a few more paragraphs). So anyway…hear is a stab at what I might call the future of social networks.

Bodiless Cemetery, Digital Eternity.

This ‘social cemetery’ is a physical and digital mix of interactions. It starts like any other cemetery - a physical plot of land with nothing on it…but there is one difference - No physical bodies will ever be buried here. After death, the pixilated entity of the deceased is ‘buried’ in the social landscape. There is a choice of environments in which users can be associated. These environments could map to any number of themes, but for the sake of this journey let’s say they match the different natural conditions– forest, sand, field, rock, and water. The more people buried in a given zone, the more that particular landscape begins to evolve. In this way, death is carrying on a conversation in real-time with physical space, and the social network not only jumps beyond the dark rooms and computers, but it does so with the departed pushing a lot more than just daisies.

Like any social network online today, the individuals are in control – Go to Threadless.com to see the users design and choose which shirts are made and sold. Visit Wikipedia.org where users control the meaning of words, names and phrases. The social cemetery is no different. The land starts as generic, and it is the digitally buried (with their many stewards) that control what, where and how the landscape develops. In other words, as the number of burials increases in a given area, that landscape starts to develop and expand accordingly. The popularity of the different areas (forest, sand, field, rock and water) will shift based on the users input, leaving the cemetery in a continual flux (unlike the current, and past, representation of death that we are accustom to). Bodies will no longer slowly fill the land. Instead, the buried are now the conductors of the always evolving and living landscape.

With no bodies, this social cemetery is really just a great park! As urbanites, young and old, escape for a bit of fresh air, they are free to frolic in the park amongst the digital memories that shape it. Fragments of the digitally buried also show themselves in a manner you might be used to seeing in the digital works of Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, and Nam June Paik. The parks ‘inhabitants’ are subtly brought to life through multiple channels…such as video, image, text, smell, and sound. These ephemeral ‘memory fragments’ that sprinkle the park, enhance the visitor’s experience as they have a chance to peer into the lives in many different ways.

As you can imagine, the social cemetery goes far beyond the park as well. If you want to visit with someone personally while at home, you have lots of options. Let’s say you need a daily reminder of your cousin who recently passed away - you could opt into any number of digital or physical channels that you would like to be communicated through. For example, you could choose to have a different picture of your cousin sent to your cell phone every day, or you could have a snippet of his recorded voice left on your answering machine once a week. There is no limit as to what form representation and/or re-presentation takes on in this space. Let’s say my grandfather was a comedian. Before passing, he records 200 of his favorite jokes on video and uploads them to his ‘vault’ as part of how he would like to be remembered. If you were to visit him online after he passes away, you could simply opt into his RSS feed for the ‘Joke of the day’ or anything else you are interested in receiving from him. Instead of preparing with the proper coffin, tombstone or urn, people are able to build rich vaults of memories as a dynamic form of representation.

As well as the deceased sharing their lives with viewers, those viewing can also reciprocate by sending to a user’s vault. Maybe someone wants to go ahead and send digital flowers to a friend, or upload old images and tell stories about that person. The digital content of the social cemetery will be very much alive.

So…what can it become…

Digital readout contacts issued for visual assistance as you wonder the park.
Cross pollinate the departed’s DNA with that of the vegetation growing in the park – creating a new form of ‘extended living’.
Pre-evolve your digital self through the offered online tools.
Images of your great grandmother wrap around an ‘intelli-structure’ and accompany you on your walk.
Scan your alphanumeric chip in the tip of your finger at the gate, so memories important to you show up as you walk the park.

The possibilities are everywhere. So while I am down on societies withering view of tradition, I find great hope and excitement in the fact that there is a social ‘re-birth’ happening online that could very well turn it all around.