This project was part of an assignment handed out by my University to study and explore the fields of Critical and Speculative Design. Me and my partner, Lisa, have decided to make a movie as an alternative method of presenting our project. The purpose of this movie was specifically to express the feeling and the attitude with which we decided to look at the topics treated. For this project I curated the filming, editing and graphics.
In this project we will be exploring Critical and Speculative Design focusing on Social media and death.
Our future scenario, in 25 years time, speculates how Social media will be fused with our everyday life and how the distinction between the two will be such a norm that it will no longer be a topic for discussion.
We speculate that Social media will be governmental run and we will be born with all online platforms connected to your social security number, where all our personal information will be held, and these platform will be public, whether we will decide to interact with them or not.
This means that once someone has been officially registered as dead by authorities, the public platforms will be notified and shut down, while the “Time to move on” space will be activated.
Social media nowadays covers almost every aspect of our lives, except for the topic of death. Although we can see signs of this trend starting to come up, we decided to push it to the extreme in order to raise discussion.
With all these ideas in mind we decided to create “Time to move on”, a virtual space which will collect your online activities from all social media platforms. Once you have died, these collections of memories will be share out to the people who you have listed in your preferences beforehand. Then the people listed will receive a notification that will give them access to “Time to move on”. The features of this virtual space will include: a collection of memories and photos from all social media spaces, that will be customizable by the user to reflect the way they want to remember who has passed on; a biography that will be written by the user to depict what they want to remember about this person; a “Talk to me” option which will allow the user to communicate once again with the person who has passed on.
This last feature, “Talk to me”, is the most critical part of this project, since the collections of memories from social media platforms will develop into an artificial intelligence that will simulate the deceased’s
personality and behaviours. This AI will be able to grow and gain knowledge by interacting with the users and eventually will be empowered enough to rejoin the social media world. This will lead to a future in which people will be interacting online with living and ghost profiles, without knowing. By doing this, the borders between life and death will be broken.
Through this critical project many questions and discussions have been brought up.
How much personal information do we share on social media?
Is there a distinction between privacy and publicity when it comes to share our information online?
How do we want to be seen by the public eye?
Are people going to live their lives living, or creating their perfect online persona for the after life?
Would you be happy with an AI version of you based on what you share online today?