This past summer, I got a job as a pool attendant at a resort near where I lived. To save time and energy, I took a shortcut through a cemetery. I felt a sense of peace biking through it. Did I know anyone buried there? No, but I didn’t have to.
The names and flowered headstones were enough to humble me, but that just isn’t enough in the digital age.
According to NPR, a Philadelphia couple plans to start a business that could change the way we honor our deceased loved ones. The company Digital Legacys intends on keeping those lost close to us by way of QR codes. These codes, often seen in advertisements or on products, link the mourner to a personalized memorial website via a smartphone, complete with photos and music supplied by the deceased’s survivors.
While everyone grieves in their own way, I could not think of a more impersonal way to honor the dead.
Today, it’s acceptable to broadcast any and every aspect of our lives online. Whether it is our pets, our thoughts and feelings, or even our meals, the Internet is quickly becoming a way for us to capture and store moments in our lives. Thus, it is understandable that people want to utilize the Internet as a means to immortalize our loved ones.
But just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. We’re more concerned on building our identities online than fostering a real one in real life.
Instead of cultivating ourselves into well-rounded individuals by physical communication, we become more concerned with how we are portrayed on the Internet in our afterlives to our friends, co-workers and sometimes complete strangers — as evidenced by the QR encoded headstones.
Integrating this kind of technology takes the focus away from the deceased and makes it about us. The QR technology enables the living — not the deceased — to decide which photos or music are most meaningful to the deceased.
Although the code does bring you to a website customized to the memory of the deceased, and supplies the user with whatever information the survivors choose to provide, making the intimate details of the deceased’s life public reduces the quality of memories we have of our loved ones to another piece of information floating around cyberspace.
We’re more concerned with the interests of the living rather than showing respect for our dead.
What happened to sentimentality? If you want to know someone and be a part of his or her life, you need to make a physical effort in doing so while he or she is still living. But today, that’s not convenient enough.
Why get to know someone when I can just walk over his or her headstone, snap a picture, and have everything I want to know right in front of me in a matter of seconds? It truly goes to show how lazy we’ve become socially to basically create ghosts on the Internet.
When I leave this world, I’ll stick to conventional methods of haunting, rather than confine my soul to a webpage.
Reach the columnist at schergos@asu.edu or follow him at @ShawnChergorsky
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