Is Social Media changing our relationship with Death?

"Have you ever been at a cemetery, making a mass-visit to a dead loved one?" People do that all the time. Some cultures have a whole "day of the dead" to remember the deceased. The medium may be different (and the reach a bit farther), but the relationship with death is the same.

"As we have become less worried of posting photos of our children and to display our location to a level of accuracy that would have scared us ten years ago, so we have started experiencing death in unexpected ways." - I know I certainly haven't, and frankly the whole "memorializing" of someone's Facebook page is distasteful to me. Nothing like commoditizing my dead childhood-best-friend so that everyone can feel better. I wonder if Facebook will show ads for funeral services in my timeline after I die?

The anime Ghost in the Shell approached this in a pretty interesting way. Making a superficial simulation of somebody is reasonably easy. But real people also have what GitS calls a "ghost", something similar to the concept of soul. It's the added depth of complexity which makes a simulation or a conversational AI radically different from a real person - or a real AI.

My point was a bit different. The day of the deads is a day in which you remember the deceased as a whole. It's not the same, to me, as remembering that particular person, together with all your common friends, in a celebrative way (i.e. "Happy Birthday"). --@puntofisso

I dont know much about this Tupac dude other than that he was famous and died, and then yesterday a hologram was represented of him somewhat convincingly at a public performance on a stage. It makes me reflect that, of my superset of all friends, 99% of them I have not talked to in years, and they could very well be dead. A few actually <i>are</i> and I found out only recently. To suppose there eventually will be a way of programming the states of our personality into some agent, and let others interact with it, I might say this surrogate might be enough to trick my brain that they are still alive. What if facebook could ask you 1500 questions, and emulate the first 80% of your psyche? It would be a weird way to remember someone, chatting with their agent like that. Like that mastergeek at the end of Serenity, perhaps. Some limited interaction thing. It's all damned weird to think about. I am uncomfortable with this thought experiment so far.

no.