The Fate of Digital Legacy in Software Engineers’ View: Technical and Cultural Aspects

Interacting on the Social Web, people, feelings and properties are connected, and generate digital legacy beyond life. Digital life goes further than the bodily one, and software limits make it difficult to model these aspects, especially concerning taboos and beliefs connected to death, which can condition the proposal of solutions to the digital legacy. Besides, there is a great difference between the criteria for identifying citizens in the real and in the virtual world, including notions of life, death and posthumous data. The design of interactive systems concerning these issues is discussed in this chapter, based on bibliographic research, observations of the Web and field research on software engineers’ opinions. Herein, we also discuss the volitional element, namely, software planning considering the user’s decision on the destination of his digital legacy. Such technical feature is connected, in this paper, to the influences that come from software engineers’ taboos and beliefs on death, which may limit their capacity or wish to think of post-mortem legacy.

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