weird life

What happens to your online self when you die? There have been many cases of death hoxes where people have faked their own deaths on the internet, but for those who *really* die, what happens to their blogs and websites?

Take for example, the case of Sek Man Ng (Simon Ng, 18), who was murdered, along with his sister (Sharon Ng, 21), moments after he updated his site. It was his blog that put the killer in jail.

Read the full story here.

Such events really, really make you think. Under normal circumstances, things such as bank accounts, mail accounts, clothes, posessions and other items are put away, the deceased buried or creamated, and closure is offered to grieving friends and relatives. With an online self, however, things are very different. Without any knowledge of passwords or even the knowledge of the existence of a blog account, family members are virtually powerless (and clueless) to do anything to provide closure on a similar scale. Online passwords are kept secret and it is difficult to even know where to begin when it comes to which online accounts to check. We have MSN accounts, AIM accounts, Yahoo accounts, Email accounts, Friendster accounts and blog accounts. Where do family members begin? Is there a standard procedure to deal with online accounts after one's death?

Sek Man's xanga site is still floating in cyberspace, providing a posthumous dialogue between his mind and the world out there. This online conversation continues with no indication of being closed down. It is a story with no closure, no final chapter, and no segueway into the last days of his life. Sek Man's physical presence may have come to an end, but his virtual and cyber presence lives on. Perhaps this is why his story is so incredibly fascinating - his blog is an online, modern-day equivalent of Anne Frank, with a beginning, a middle, but no end. The only ending we know of is the tragic one that we have read about from other sources. It is a story that has been left open to interpretation. Like an abrupt end to a relationship, we are left wondering what went wrong, why, and what could have been.

Examples such as the one above have grave implications on issues such as online identity, corporeality, and embodiment. We put so much of ourselves and our thoughts into our computers that it is possible to discover more about an individual by looking at his blog and his computer than talking to him or her. Should we lose this data, we lose a great part of our identity.

Will our blogs one day serve as posthumous witnesses to our online exitence or will they, like Sek Man's journal, float in cyberspace, waiting for someone to remove them?