I am wondering what is happening to the concept of death in the age of the Internet. We know that we are finite beings. Death, we say, is a fact of life. To deal with this fact, or in other words, to deal with our knowledge of our finitude, we are told, we aspire to leave traces in this world so that our afterlife continues. Every major religion and belief systems has something to say about the afterlife. As we understand our finitude, we are drawn to leave traces of ourselves such as doing good (or evil) deeds, create (or destroy) works of art and science, or produce and raise children.

To leave these traces is a reflection of that understanding of finitude. By giving meaning to life, which remains forever mysterious, we deal with that mystery and leaving traces of ourselves is a way of doing that. To put it in another (perhaps in a lighter) way, we not only constantly engage in ‘reputation management’, as consulting spinners might put it, in this life but also after our own death.

One might object to this idea of being human as either ethnocentric (i.e., Western) or an ideology of the creative classes. For millennia many humans came and went without a trace, one might say. But that doesn’t negate that their understanding of their finitude has always driven humans. The ways and means of leaving traces are unequal but always present. In fact, social historians have been working hard to recover the traces of those ordinary men and women who did not have the means or ways to preserve or maintain traces of their lives. The Internet provides new ways and means of leaving traces. I don’t know how many millions of people are on it. But quite a few are leaving traces via various ways and by now well-known means. There are rapidly increasing traces of lives on the Internet. From wedding and travel pictures, diaries and video clips to announcements and just about anything else you can imagine traces of lives are being recorded. People move from site to site, avatar to avatar, identity to identity and keep expanding their traces in texts, audio and video.

Without prejudice to the quality or meaning of such traces it is good to remember that the ways of leaving traces about oneself was for long limited to mostly educated or wealthier (sometimes both) classes.

But the Internet may change all that. I am curious about the traces that we leave on the Internet because it is fairly new and because the generation that participated in its creation and formation is relatively young and is yet to experience finitude. As such the number of dead people on the Internet is small and so to are the traces that can be investigated.

Once in a while when an exceptional or unusual death occurs many journalists and others turn to these traces to assemble together some meaning about the life that has just disappeared. It is not even correct to say that it has disappeared. The person may be deceased but life on the Internet remains through its traces. All those texts, videos, images, and audio begin to take on new meaning now that their creator has deceased. Beyond assembling together a meaning from these traces I am wondering how will this experience affect our concept of death? The posthumous fame or infamy that awaits us on the basis of traces we have left is a curious thing. I wonder if the newly emerging sites such as Internet memorial walls and Internet cemeteries are early responses to assemble our own traces to be made available upon our death—a kind of Internet autobiography?

About the author

Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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The advent of the so called ‘Web 2.0’ and the explosion in social networking that the web sites and ‘mash ups of technology’ that underpin it have enabled has led to a resurgence of interest in electronic or digital democracy. This is the belief that first emerged in the United States in the 1970s that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to renew democracy. It was argued then, as now, that the interactivity of these new technologies – by which contemporary advocates of digital democracy mean the internet – will deliver new forms of political practice and participation, thereby reinvigorating and reinventing public debate and political accountability.

As with technological development generally much of the literature and debate on the internet and democracy has always been highly technologically determinist and optimistic: it treats technological development as historically inevitable (hence my use of ‘will’ not ‘can’, above), politically neutral, and fully accepts that any drawbacks and risks are outweighed by the benefits. For digital democracy specifically this translates into development, research and policy that is heavily biased towards the input side of democracy. That is, on technologies and their application and operation and not on what impact these have (if any) on outputs such as policy and decision making.

Allied to this entrenched determinism is a long standing tradition that can be traced back to the libertarian beliefs of the early pioneers of the internet: it is an inherently democratic medium. Its decentralised and devolved nature, and the weak forms of control to which it was subject for many years, certainly aided this view, thereby creating a utopian image of the internet as a separate socio technical system. Today we can witness this in much of the discussion of, and activity in, ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life, Habbo Hotel, and so on. However, the takeover of social networking sites and rapidly growing colonisation of virtual worlds by multi-national enterprises, allied with the widespread surveillance of cyberspace by government agencies must make even those who subscribe to the separate social system thesis question their position.

The potential for digital democracy has suffered the same fate, I believe. As the power and influence of governments and organisations committed to advancing consumerist forms of managed democracy has grown so the potential of the internet to act as a liberation technology has rapidly decreased. Instead we are witnessing the consolidation of a trend that was observable by 2000, when, working with colleagues from Denmark and Holland, we concluded our review of electronic democracy in Western Europe by reporting that:

“The scenario that emerges then, is of a “two-tier democracy”: a “big” democracy, concerned with policy and decision-making at a national and international level…And a “small” democracy where “ordinary” citizens try to make a difference in terms of the quality of everyday life. (Hoff, Horrocks and Tops 2000:187)

Since then the gulf between big and small democracy has grown as more and more people have become disengaged from the terrestrial world via their on-line personas, increasingly losing touch with, and interest in, real world politics and decision making and what they can do to influence and control these. To me, therefore, the main democratic problem of today seems to be how (or if) these two types of democracy can be reconnected.

Further reading

Democratic Governance and New Technology, edited by Ivan Horrocks, Jens Hoff, Pieter Tops, published by Routledge

About the author

Ivan Horrocks is a lecturer and member of the Technology Management Group at The Open University. He has written many publications about the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and government and politics.

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