One day we will no longer be there. But all the tracks we have left will remain online, our history just a click away: from social profiles to our most intimate memories. Without realizing it, the Internet has filled with digital ghosts, inactive accounts ready to remind us of their existence: this is what it means to live (and die) in the social era. Beatrice Petrella, journalist and voice of the podcast “Still Online”, from which this essay is taken, investigates the phenomenon between tech, right and imagination, trying to answer questions on which the jurisprudence also started questioning recently: what happens online when the body is no longer there? What will be the fate of our data, passwords, virtual images and alter ego? Will we all become holograms? But above all, are we sure we want it?
Although a taboo remains, with the spread of technology our relationship with death is also destined to change: phenomena such as Grieftok or the spread of virtual and griefbot cemeteries, artificial intelligence capable of replicating conversations with our dear dear ones, demonstrate this. Mourning is no longer a private experience: it has expanded in the virtual world exactly like everything else, redefining our relationship with loss and memory.
Who is Beatrice Petrella
Journalist and Podcaster. For Storytel she is the author and voice of “Still Online”. He made “beyond”, an investigation into the Italian Incel universe, thanks to the Roberto Morrione prize for investigative journalism. For Espresso he investigated the anti -aborticists at the University of Pavia, for tomorrow he told the freedom of the press in Malta. On the siamomine magazine and in the podcast «Tiktalk», with Martino Wong, he tells how online life affects the offline and vice versa. On Instagram and Tiktok it speaks of topicality and foreign policy.
