Digital Death and Thanatechnology: New Ways of Thinking About Data (Im)Mortality and Digital Transformation

Abstract

Digital technologies such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are changing how we live and do research, for example, the ways in which patient-reported outcomes and phenomics big data are curated and analyzed. Digital transformation is everywhere and is reshaping data (im)mortality in a wide range of sectors in medicine, engineering, journalism, and beyond. In this context, thanatechnology is a term introduced by Carla Sofka over two decades ago, referring to “any kind of technology that can be used to deal with death, dying, grief, loss, and illness.” The field of thanatechnology has become relevant in the digital age as social media is full of accounts from dead individuals, whereas digital media is often harnessed as a source of data and metadata, and in times of pandemics and normalcy. Emerging macroscale analyses forecast billions of social media user accounts from deceased persons in the current century. What happens to digital remains of persons once they cease to exist physically? Digital death, or its absence in the case of deceased individuals, becomes a challenge for both data availability and veracity, and confound research and public health services. Data (im)mortality and digital death are also relevant for research on past events of significance for public health, for example, to discern the history of pandemics and ecological threats. This article examines and calls for new ways of thinking about digital death and thanatechnology as integral dimensions of digital transformation in medicine, new media studies, and society in the 21st century.

Introduction

Digital transformation has become a popular term, and found wide acceptance in diverse sectors beyond engineering, journalism, and new media studies, including planetary health and medical research over the past decade. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated the interest for digital transformation within medicine to achieve the twin goals of remote health care and social distancing.

Today, big data and digital transformation enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) have us on the verge of new prospects and challenges in planetary health and society (Akar, 2020; Kickbusch et al., 2019; Lin and Wu, 2021). With the pandemic and digital technologies, we have also witnessed, however, an increase in digital surveillance that raised questions for corrosion of the public space and threats to civil rights and global democracy (Springer, 2020), something that has already been a concern for the past several decades (Sclove, 2020; White, 2018), and with normative deficits associated with prevailing neoliberal technology governance frames since the 1980s, in particular (Özdemir, 2021; Springer, 2016).

Digital transformation is accompanied by a shift toward a digital society, a world with pervasive ubiquitous digital connectivity, and arguably, a quantified planet, wherein animate and inanimate objects increasingly have their digital twins and digital footprints. For example, a major current initiative of the European Commission is the Destination Earth that has the objective to “develop a very high precision digital model of the Earth (a ‘digital twin’) to monitor and predict environmental change and human impact to support sustainable development.” (European Commission, 2021).

Although the Internet and wireless connectivity are still limited in many parts of the world, there is no denying that the planetary population has been increasing not only in a physical sense but also in a digital realm. We now live in both physical and virtual worlds, as citizens, institutions, and nation states, and at micro, meso, and macroscales.

Of importance, the digital age raises questions about data (im)mortality, which has direct relevance for digital transformation in systems science, and in both retrospective and prospective research. Debates on data (im)mortality have been fuelled in part by the rise of new media, social networks, and the information and communication technologies (ICTs) that serve as data and metadata.

Data (im)mortality is also being shaped by the concept of thanatechnology. Over two decades ago, Carla Sofka has introduced the term thanatechnology, referring to “any kind of technology that can be used to deal with death, dying, grief, loss, and illness” (Sofka, 1997, 2018). In 1997, Sofka described thanatechnology as “technological mechanisms such as interactive videodiscs and computer programs that are used to access information or aid in learning about thanatology topics” (e.g., the Internet and World Wide Web) (Sofka, 1997).

Onward to 2021, users are now harnessing various types of digital and social media as thanatechnologies to memorialize and sustain the memories and meanings of the lives lived by their families, friends, and others in the community. This makes digital death by the physically deceased a prolonged process, and sometimes, not possible at all, because digital footprints can stay in the online space for a long time, and in forms and formats that are not always accurate.

As we discuss in this article, digital death or the lack thereof, has numerous implications for data curation, analyses, and integration, as well as in establishing robust linkages between the content and the context of research discoveries and applications. Hence, pervasive digital transformation and wireless connectivity on the planet, and the rise of thanatechnologies and ICTs have shifted our attention to the temporal dimension in data science as well.

Macrolevel analyses forecast that the “digital remains” of deceased individuals will increase markedly in the coming decades in this century (Öhman and Watson, 2019). What happens to the digital remains of persons once they cease to exist physically? Moreover, as individuals are increasingly treated as reserves of data capital, concepts such as the right to nonparticipation to prevent future data exploitation, in a context of ICTs, are worthy of further reflection (Iliadis, 2015). This and other related temporalities associated with thanatechnologies are important new dimensions and questions in planetary health, data science, and systems medicine.

Thanatechnologies, digital death, and data (im)mortality raise a multitude of complex technical and social questions in digital societies for which we do not have definitive answers yet. However, asking the right questions and mapping the emerging and broadly relevant issues at the science and society interface in relation to data (im)mortality, and by extension, digital transformation, are essential initial steps in the search for answers toward responsible embedding of digital technologies such as IoT and AI in planetary health.

This article examines and calls for new ways of thinking about digital death and thanatechnology as integral dimensions of digital transformation and data (im)mortality in medicine, media studies, and society in the 21st century.

In the next section, we present a picture in which digital transformation has been evolving over the past decade in particular, and under narratives such as the Industry 4.0 and the cyber-physical systems (CPS).

Situating Digital Transformation in a Historical Context

CPS and the Industry 4.0

The current enthusiasm for digital transformation in various sectors dovetails, in part, on larger scale changes in the way ICTs have been conceptualized and deployed on two sides of the Atlantic, in North America and Europe in particular over the past decade. Two frameworks are noteworthy in this regard: the CPS and the Industry 4.0.

The CPS has come to the fore in debates around digital transformation in the United States notably, referring to an increasing temporal and spatial proximity of the digital and physical worlds, for example, by ubiquitous digital connectivity, sensors, big data, and digital technologies such as AI, machine learning, and IoT. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has noted in reference to the CPS:

“Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computation and physical components. [..] New, smart CPS drive innovation and competition in a range of application domains including agriculture, aeronautics, building design, civil infrastructure, energy, environmental quality, healthcare and personalized medicine, manufacturing, and transportation. Moreover, the integration of artificial intelligence with CPS creates new research opportunities with major societal implications” (NSF, 2019).

On the other side of the Atlantic in Europe, another framework on digital transformation was Industry 4.0 (Kagermann et al., 2013), first deployed at the Hannover Messe Fair in 2011 as part of Germany's strategy for high tech and digital transformation. Since then, the Industry 4.0 has evolved and spread from Germany to other parts of the industrialized world as well as the low- and middle-income countries with an eye to automation, smart factories, and hospitals enabled by digital technologies, and the IoT, AI, sensor, and big data in particular.

Industry 4.0 and related digital transformation is often discussed as the fourth industrial revolution. The prior three industrial revolutions happened onward from the 18th century, with steam power and new mechanical industries of textile and iron defining the first industrial revolution; the rise of electric power, light bulb, and telephone, steel and oil industries defining the second industrial revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century; and finally, the second half of the 20th century characterizing the third industrial revolution brought about by computerization, production automation, and the Internet.

As we examine and highlight the emergence and evolution of thanatechnology and its impacts on data (im)mortality, bearing in mind the overarching narratives such as Industry 4.0 and CPS in which digital transformation is taking place can offer both historical and critically informed big picture insights.

In the next section, we discuss thanatechnology both as a driver of data (im)mortality and a caveat for data veracity as human kinds seek new ways to memorialize and make sense of their deceased and grieve in the digital age.

Thanatechnology

Why is this relevant to digital transformation?

Data (im)mortality is one of the key pillars and dimensions in digital transformation theory and practice. Yet, this subject matter has received inadequate attention, despite the rise of thanatechnology and digitalization of death, grief, and loss in the 21st century, and the ways in which these new social phenomenon can, and do indeed, impact on data (im)mortality, and by extension, digital transformation in public space, the industry, and beyond. Looking back over the past decades of systems science, data (im)mortality was often discussed in a research realm but unfortunately, often in ways disconnected from the impact of digital media and social networks and the new frontiers in death studies that have collectively broadened the issue of data (im)mortality to a context of everyday life.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Rise of digital zombies

The greatest fear of every human throughout life is, arguably, that s/he will face death eventually. The human kind since time immemorial have made every attempt to postpone and come to terms with this fear and their demise through rituals, and developed the phenomenon of farewell. Although death and immortality remain cultural elements and taboos in the collective subconscious of societies, radical changes have also been observed in these phenomena and practices with the rise of thanatechnology.

We argue in this article that the death of a biological living being requires its integration with the new culture, social values, and technologies of the digital age (Yıldırım, 2012). For example, memorialization of the social media accounts of the deceased individuals is one way that transforms their digital footprints toward data or metadata (im)mortality. The “dead in the cyberspace” in this scenario remain dead but their memorialized digital memories (e.g., photos and writings of the dead) impacts the grief process wherein the physical death is challenged by sustained digital presence of the dead through memorialized social media accounts for instance.

Yet another scenario that is different from memorialized social media digital footprints of the dead is the case of digital zombies. This term refers to the dead that remain alive and socially active in the virtual domain. Digital zombies occur, for example, when the digital media and social networks of the deceased are actively managed by their family, friends, and others who continue to evolve and reshape their digital footprints, for example, by continuing to upload pictures and other material in socially interactive ways. Digital zombies refer to “the resurrected, re-animated, socially-active ‘dead’” (Bassett, 2015) where the deceased persons remain both dead and virtually alive, blurring the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds, perhaps akin to a CPS noted earlier, and importantly, continue to evolve, reshape, and change their digital footprints. On the contrary, the digital zombies and the memorialized Internet representations of the dead is not open to all owing to the digital divides and differences in inclusion and equity in the virtual world (Sofka et al., 2012).

For our purposes in this article, and in relation to digital transformation in planetary health, digital zombies and memorialized social media accounts challenge data and metadata veracity. In omics fields such as personalized medicine research that requires establishing robust linkages between human genome variation and clinical phenotypes, the ascertainment of the latter can become a real and continuous challenge when digital phenotypes are used. In other cases, data and metadata immortality may facilitate, however, the ability to conduct retrospective and prospective large-scale studies of ecological change as the digital data related to human societies and ecosystems may remain available for in-depth inquiries in systems science.

In a large-scale forecasting analysis, it has been suggested that “a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-Western users” (Öhman and Watson, 2019).

The nascent intersections of thanatechnology, data (im)mortality and digital preservation warrant attention and scholarly research in the current decade and beyond as digital health and digital transformation will continue to impact planetary health in expected and unanticipated ways (Fig. 1). To this end, Öhman and Watson (2019) rightly caution that “an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration.”

FIG. 1.

Thanatechnologies and new narratives reshaping data (im)mortality, and by extension, digital transformation in medicine and society.

Digitalization of Grief

Digital zombies, memorialized social media accounts, and the anticipated marked growth in social media accounts of the dead in the 21st century are not the only drivers of data (im)mortality and digital preservation that are impacting digital transformation in various sectors. Grieving includes reactions after the loss of someone, who is important for the individual (Çam et al., 2010). Considering the social, collective, and cultural dimensions of the death that extends beyond the departed, changes happen in the deceased person's social environment. In this sense, when the individual dies, the event results in psychological changes and breakdowns in the people s/he communicated and interacted during her/his life. Relatives and friends left behind by the individual try to get through her/his death. The practice of getting through death brings about the process conceptualized as grief.

Grief is a systematic response to the loss of a beloved one or loss of an abstraction—someone's career, country, freedoms, an ideal, and so on (Freud, 1957). Grief reflects the adaptation reactions attendant to the loss experienced. Grief reactions can appear in various forms in the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains of existence. The content and extent of the grief reactions after the loss of a beloved one differ in each surviving individual.

It is in this overarching context that thanatechnologies are transforming the human experience of grief to a digital realm, something that we have come to witness frequently during the COVID-19 pandemic through mourning of the beloved friends and family in online meetings and social media on a planetary scale. The digital experience during the pandemic is likely to stay and continue in various forms and intensities after the pandemic and will likely serve, in our view, as one of the drivers of data (im)mortality, and by extension of digital transformation. Digital transformation has broad implications in the case of patient-related outcomes research as digital media and digital preservation of patients' experiences and their social networks can be informative in mapping changes in public health.

Conclusions and Outlook

We argue in this article that the future of digital transformation, death studies, and data (im)mortality can be better understood through a lens of cultural studies. In particular, the broad corollaries of death require rethinking in an age of thanatechnologies, digital health, and the new media (Yıldırım, 2012).

The link between death and life appears as a significant factor in the shaping of the burial procedures throughout human history. Sartre (2017) addresses death as an absolute phenomenon like birth. The concept and practice of using gravestones were encountered before the settled life in the course of human history. The ritual of burying the dead with her/his favorite artifacts, animals, and flowers, which represent the worldly beauties, is, for example, the expression of immortality for both the dead and the one who will die someday. Here, immortality is an action, which is longed for, desired, and dreamed of.

Immortality is also a very inhuman thing—it is normally something attributed only to deities, saints, or to those few and amazingly artistic souls who have left a lasting imprint on humanity. We want “instant immortality” in the same way as we crave instant coffee, instant community, and instant love (Jacobsen, 2017). Hence, a farewell is needed for both the everlastingness of the dead and the everlastingness of the dead for the ones who are left behind. In this sense, these rituals that emerge as ceremonies are “the farewell of the one left behind.”

With digital technologies, the remembrance and immortality of the dead in the public sphere are undergoing radical change (Goldschmidt, 2013). Digital transformation became a commonplace element necessary for the act of “commemoration” in grieving after a loss.

The concept of thanatechnology has existed for over two decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased collective awareness of thanatechnology and that ecological threats and existential risks to human societies in the 21st century are real. Thanatechnologies are contributing to the digital transformation of grief, loss, and reshaping the future of death studies. The field of planetary health and systems science have somewhat lagged behind in taking interest in thanatechnology. Moreover, digital technologies are transforming health-related data not only in a person's lifetime but also after her/his death through novel concepts and practices such as digital zombies. It is becoming clear that what we see now is only the tip of the iceberg as the social media accounts and the digital data of the dead will markedly increase in this century.

This article makes an original scholarly contribution by making an attempt to build new bridges between thanatechnology and the ways in which they are anticipated to impact digital preservation and data/metadata (im)mortality, and by extension, digital transformation in planetary health.

Footnotes

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the authors only.

Author Disclosure Statement

The authors declare they have no conflicting financial interests.

Funding Information

No funding was received for this article.

Abbreviations Used

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