“Skype from the past.”
That’s the idea for a new social media application created by a small start-up team from MIT’s Entrepreneuriship Development Program in the morbidly titled e-death industry.
Although there are many applications and programs that offer similar services – such as Deathswitch, which sends personal messages to loved ones, and Liveson, a service that allows your Twitter account to remain active after you have passed away – Eterni.me aims to take the idea to a new level.
Eterni.me is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Marius Ursache. It creates a “virtual you” – an avatar that your family and friends can interact with after you pass away – by gathering information from your digital footprint, trolling through your social media accounts to create “real” memories that can be shared with your loved ones. It can be shaped to mirror your look and your mannerisms to give a more life-like effect. While its creators haven’t yet released the exact platform it will be released, people are already interested.
Thousands of people have subscribed to the service, which is yet to launch. A beta is set to be released in 2015.
While confronting, the idea behind the application is not entirely new. British television creator Charlie Brooker explored the idea on in an episode of Black Mirror, a series which explores the darker side of technology.
Robert Fordyce, a social media researcher from the University of Melbourne believes that this new application won’t change the way social media is used in the long term.
“There is no fundamental changes in how people socialise occurring with Eterni.me, merely a change in how people access archival information about a person they used to know. I doubt that any features of Eterni.me will be implemented into existing social media platforms, and I do not see it taking off,” he said.”The success of a platform such as Eterni.me is contingent on having people die as a part of its business model, and this is something that generally doesn’t happen particularly quickly within any social group without that social group ceasing to exist as such.
“It’s not a great model for future investment.”
Fordyce believes that curiosity is driving the number of early subscribers, rather than a desire to use the application.
“While the idea of having an existence living on over computer hardware has been around for many years, and some sort of idea of digitally-enabled immortality or something might be inspiring people to use it, I doubt they’re in the majority,” he said. “There will be some people who engage with it … as a form of memorialisation of a loved one. But I feel that this is probably not going to replace the cultural practices around funerals and memorialisation that already exist.”
Fordyce also believes applications such as these have seen their day.
“I think there are two main issues with the platform as a service. One: the way the algorithm works is that it responds to user input. Even if it can effectively represent the departed in a convincing way, it will grow over time to become more like the people talking to it than the person who passed away.
“Two: constant contact and reminders of people are going to be extremely painful for people to deal with. Being reminded of the absence of a loved one is hard to stomach, and having a social media platform present this to you is not really going to be that comforting. I feel that it’s going to be unable to actually represent anyone with much success, and I think that’s going to stop it growing past this initial stage of public attention and development.
“I think they (Eterni.mi) were lucky to get a good advertising campaign going, based on their interesting idea, and that, basically, that’s it. There’s nothing much behind the platform,” he said.
