Review of Karl Ohmann’s book “The Afterlife of Data” (opinion)

New terminology It’s like tech startups: a lot get launched, a few keep moving. Consider “online life,” a term coined by philosopher Luciano Floridi in early 2010. The word sounds like shorthand for “online life,” though this sort of thing is usually a product of common usage and does not require the involvement of a philosopher. .

Instead, he proposed Floridi, founding director of the Center for Digital Ethics at Yale University, as a name for “the new experience of a hyper-connected reality where it is no longer plausible to ask whether one can be online or offline.” He issued a statement on behalf of the concept in early 2013. A conference to clarify its implications was held the same year, followed by A bunch of papers In 2015.

The term had somewhat limited traction. A search in JSTOR returns fewer than 100 references, most of them fleeting, while Google News yields only a few clicks, not counting many irrelevant company or product names. And right now, spell check is doing its best to prevent me from using “onlife” at all.

But his recent disappearance may attest to the validity of Floridi’s vision. Today it would be almost impossible, and not particularly useful, to divide commerce, communications, education, or personal relationships into their online and offline components. “Online life” has, for all practical purposes, become a clumsy and unnecessary synonym for normal experience – especially since the turn of this decade, when social space and digital communications have long merged painfully to the point of becoming normal.

However, “online life” may still have its uses. It certainly proves a basic concept of Carl Ohmann’s The afterlife of data: What happens to your information when you die and why you should care about it (University of Chicago Press). The author is an assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden, although the current work belongs to the interdisciplinary field of information and communication technology (ICT).

Every person online creates vast amounts of personal information and tracking data, much of which is stored and will persist after the person who created it dies. “The body of information left behind after death is not only etymologically but also conceptually similar to a corpse,” Ohman writes. As the number of users increases, the number of “information corpses” left by the deceased also increases.

On some level, this represents just another set of technological issues, another challenge of storing and retrieving the massive influx of unimaginable data being produced as our offline and online worlds merge. The author points out that in 2023, “humanity is estimated to have produced data at a rate of 120 zettabytes (120 x 2).⁷⁰ bytes, i.e. 120 followed by twenty-one zeros) per day. But the very possibility of storing and retrieving “digital remains” (to use the author’s preferred term) raises complex and interconnected questions about data ownership, expectations about privacy, and the duties that one generation may owe to another.

Countless traditions and rituals determine the proper treatment of bodily remains. There’s nothing like its digital equivalent. What worries Osman most about this omission is his sense that established practices around bodily remains serve to express and convey a sense of dignity and individuality of the deceased. A person’s digital remains are a record of their life—for at least a generation now, an almost complete record—but we have no shared understanding of who should control access to them, or what constitutes an ethically appropriate “use” of the remains (through historians or psychologists, in business data mining, etc.).

complication More serious still is the possibility (already partially realized) of transforming digital remains into exact copies of the deceased. Example recently In the news It is the ongoing collaboration of artist Laurie Anderson with her late husband, Lou Reed, via a chatbot that uses machine learning to extract a type of likeness from a large corpus of a songwriter’s lyrics, interviews, and writings.

Watchman He quotes her as saying: “I mean, I really don’t think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t think so. But people have methods, and they can be replicated. And so are their voices now, with increasing precision. The chatbot will likely be upgraded to deliver its messages in an exact duplicate of Reid’s gravel tones.

It is possible that Anderson was aware of the possibility and chose not to pursue that option. But it illustrates Ohman’s point that digital remains are not just a by-product of digital technology but also its raw material. To Floridi’s point about the absolute entanglement between offline and online experience, Ohman adds his awareness of another complexity now emerging: new transactions between the living and the dead.

“What is at stake,” he writes, “is our very relationship to our collective past, its inhabitants, and, ultimately, to ourselves as a species.” Life goes on, and the dead inhabit it.