In this post I finally get to start applying the model I have built up over the last few months. (I’m going to put it up as a series of pages this week. I’ll let you know when that’s done.)
Since cldwrld is a world, what about life expectancy? How long do I live on cldwrld? The answer is … potentially forever.
What happens when a Digital Inhabitant dies? How significant is that? Let’s take a concrete example to see exactly what this is going to mean globally.
Facebook has a self-reported 266 million “active” (log-on at least once a month) users.
From the CDC, (and taking the latest numbers I could find) approximately 346 thousand Americans in the age group 15-54 died in 2006, out of a population of 298 million (US Census). This is 0.116%. (For the record, total deaths were about 2.4 million.)
Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Research recently (08/14/09 – two weeks ago) gave a presentation called Active Facebook Users by Country & Region.
The presentation shows that 92% of US users fall into the age group 13-59. US users total 37% of total Facebook users which means there are roughly 98m US users in that age goup.
The temptation is to multiply the 2006 percentage by the 2009 number and to multiply the same number against the total number of users in North America/Europe/Asia and South America (who account for about 87% of Facebook users worldwide) to get some large numbers.
But I am not going to do it, because I don’t know enough about statistics to say that’s valid. Let’s just say the numbers suggest that there will be a lot of Facebook accounts becoming inactive every year because people die.
Never mind all the blogs at blogger, wordpress.com, hosted blogs, accounts at MySpace and flickr and so on.
Some have started to work on the challenge. LegacyLocker (which launched in April of this year) now provides a service to store “important online information, and allows beneficiaries to retrieve content in the event of a user’s death or incapacitation, similar to an online safety deposit box.” That’s a start going forward but what about all those accounts for which this is already happened and what about those who don’t use such a service?
But even with access what do we do with them all? Delete them – okay. But what if we want to leave them as a memorial? Will that mean anything? Will the platforms on which they are built let us? Where are the legal, social and spiritual frameworks to deal with a digital afterlife? Making the question a little more focused, where are the legal, social and spiritual frameworks to deal with a continuous presence on cldwrld after a Digital Inhabitant dies?
The challenge posed by these inactive accounts will only grow. As you can imagine most of the deaths come in the 55 and up age group. As the 20-54 cohort ages and the cldwrld population expands more accounts are going to become inactive.
Just don’t delete my stuff, okay? I’d like to live forever, even if only on cldwrld.
