"In recent years more and more of our lives takes place online. But what about our afterlives?
Thanks to the digital trails of data we leave behind much of "who we are" can be
reconstructed-even after our death. Sooner than we think the dead will outnumber the living on
Facebook and in time AI technology will allow us to "interact" with the departed. In this
short thought-provoking book Carl èOhman asks us to consider what happens to our data after
we pass away. How do we decide what data should be preserved? What sorts of ethical issues does
it raise? We live in what èOhman calls the post-mortal condition one in which the dead and the
living coexist online through digital remains. Examining government digital heritage committees
public archives NGOs museums and commercial institutions èOhman analyzes various forms of
data preservation and digital reanimation ultimately calling for us as a society to
acknowledge and to engage creatively with our condition. He calls for us to reevaluate the
relationship between the living and the dead and to work together to create a shared ethics of
preservation. This isn't just the duty of our digital overlords. These are our lives our
deaths and it is time we think seriously about how we want our data to be treated"--
