A social afterlife? Now, live tweets from the well and truly dead

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL August 20, 2013
Munch's portrayal of "an infinite scream passing through nature"

Munch’s portrayal of “an infinite scream passing through nature”

Edvard Munch once confessed to finding it “difficult to imagine an afterlife”. The Norwegian painter best known for The Scream, said he couldn’t conceive of it in the way that Christians, or many religious people, did. He appeared to doubt that “conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.” He might have been more persuaded had he lived in the age of LIVESON, a service that provides for our “social afterlife”.

It appears still to be at the experimental stage, but promises that when “your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” or that it “will keep tweeting even after you’ve passed away”.

If that sounds ghoulish in the extreme, there’s more.

The service urges users to nominate an “executor” to their LIVESON “will”. They, it says, will “decide whether to keep your account ‘live’.”

Clearly, death will not stand in the way of live tweets, possibly with the possibility of many re-tweets and favoriting. It is not quite what George Eliot meant when she said “our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

Live tweets from the hereafter are a headstone placed right at the busy intersection of the information superhighway and the organic lived reality of the 21st century.