Google Digital Afterlife Service

           In April, 2013, Google released a new tool called Inactive Account Manager to help people decide what happen to their digital assets on the Internet after they die. The following video provides more information about this new service.

       

           We consider the digital afterlife  service as a production of cyber capitalism (Barker, p. 374). Barker points out:

          “The commodification of cyberspace as the leading edge of the global information economy reinforces the reduction of human values to matters of price. There is very little that is not bought and sold on the Internet, including human life (afterlife) " (p. 388).

           It is possible that in the future Google will make new policies to make profit from this kind of service. What’s more, because Google possesses the technologies and the resources in the database, it has the final say in what happens to people’s digital information. This new service creates the illusion that people are using the Internet freely and in total control of their digital data but actually they are “being channelled into the limited options chosen by powerful commercial interests.”(Barker, p. 374)

            The digital afterlife service also reflects the striated characteristic of the Internet. Cultural spaces are defined in terms of smooth or striated (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The Internet used to be considered as a smooth and open social space, which was not subject to control by any centralized power (Barker, 2012) .

          The introduction of this service and the legal issues related to that shows that the Internet is a striated space bounded by rules made by big players such as Google , as well as legal regulations.

           The  service  also demonstrates the postmodern characteristic of the Internet in terms of fragmentation of identities, or what Donna Haraway calls “fractured identities”. The identities we perform on the Internet can be considered as cyborg identities: a new embodiment of social and personal identities made possible by technology. In this sense, using this digital afterlife service can be considered as postmodern and posthumanist performance of fractured identities and a quest for digital immortality. 

            For a body made of organisms, death is this simple process of dispersing back into the earth. But this notion seems to be troubled when we think about our cyborg online identities. The Google Inactive Account service represents the increasing concerns: do we really have control over how we will be remembered on the Internet? Do we have the right to be forgotten?

             Perhaps Donna Haraway’s  comments on cyborgs can give us some implications on how to understand our digital legacies : “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony , intimacy and perversity. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden, it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” ( A Cyborg Manifesto).

 Reference:

Barker,C. (2012) Cultural  studies: Theory and practice.London : Sage.

Deleuze,G & Guattari, F.(1987)  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U niversity Minnesota Press

Haraway, D. (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,  in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.