Back in 2008, Jed Brubaker sat on a beach afteran academic conference in San Diego, chatting with a friend. Brubaker, an MA student in Communication, Culture & Technology at Georgetown University at the time, posed a question.
“Have you noticed all these accounts on MySpace that are like, just still there after people have died, why haven't they just been removed?” he said.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, this question would guide his career path for the foreseeable future. Seven years later, he would write a PhD thesis titled “Death, Identity, & the Social Network.” After that, he lbecome a consultant for Facebook as they built features that allowed loved ones to memorialize or delete the accounts of people who had passed away.
Today, Brubaker is an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder. In November, he launched a student-run clinic that addresses the same question he started with all those years ago on a beach.
The Digital Legacy Clinic is, in essence, a pro-bono tech-support service for the dead, dying and their family members. Some might call in for help setting up legacy contacts, basically a transfer-on-death agreement for a digital account. Others want help deleting social media profiles for someone who has passed, while some want to gather and archive pieces of a loved one’s digital footprint.
“Unlike in the past, where maybe love letters swapped between our grandparents were stored in a box somewhere, all of these things are now online,” Brubaker said. “Which is great, because they can be shared, but it also means they're at risk of being lost. And if we don't take action, they certainly will be.”
Though Brubaker is the mastermind, every aspect of the clinic is created and overseen by undergraduate students. They made the website. They answer the emails. They seek out solutions to individual questions. Grace Wiley, a media production major, says it’s been refreshing to work on a project with a tangible, immediate impact on the world.
“We’re actually doing something for the community instead of just writing an assignment,” she said.
Bianca Villordo, an information science major, agreed and added that the experience has made her more confident about being able to pitch her skills to prospective employers after graduation.
“It’s been cool to talk to people and be like ‘Oh yeah, I made this website. Come look at it,’” she said.
According to Brubaker, the average internet user has more than 190 accounts. That’s an immense amount of information spread across websites and servers with a wide array of accessibility, security and archival practices.
“All of our photos, our mortgage statements, our personal letters, major life events — all of these things now have a digital component,” Brubaker said.
In our technology-mediated era, this information is a map of each individual’s unique relationship with the internet — a relationship consisting of patterns, passcodes and shared information. When someone dies, that relationship is lost. It’s up to those who knew them best to reconstruct the parts worth memorializing and sever the parts that no longer serve a purpose.
“I think that it's important for us to be thoughtful about what we want to preserve,” Brubaker said.
So far, the clinic is unique. It’s offering a fundamentally new solution to a fundamentally modern problem, and it’s doing so in a way that’s informed by Brubaker’s 15 years of research history in the area. But, Brubaker hopes his efforts will also motivate social media companies to share some of the load themselves.
“The clinic also provides an opportunity for us as a university and as scholars to make an impact on tech companies, to help them identify the kinds of things that should be preserved and enable policy and features on their platforms to let people do that,” he explained.
Some day, he hopes that dealing with death, as far as social media accounts are concerned, will be made easier through standard, user-friendly guides and menus. Until that day, the Digital Legacy Clinic is here to help.