Social Network Users' Religiosity and the Design of Post Mortem Aspects

Social networks increase the challenges of designing real-world aspects whose computational abstraction is not simple. This includes death and digital legacy, strongly influenced by cultural phenomena, such as religion. Therefore, it is important to analyze youngsters’ concepts of death in the web, as the Internet Generation outnumbers other groups of social network users. Besides, due to their age, many of them face other people’s death for the first time on the web. This paper analyzes to what extent these users’ religion and the belief in afterlife may signal guidelines for a social network project that considers volition towards digital legacy. The data herein analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively come from a survey-based research with Brazilian high school students. The contributions for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies comprise design solutions that may consider aspects of religion, death and digital legacy, also improving users’ and designers’ understanding on these issues in system design.

[1]  Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza,et al.  A Journey Through Cultures , 2012, Human–Computer Interaction Series.

[2]  Brasil. Conselho Nacional de Secretários de Saúde.  Conselho Nacional de Saúde , 2009 .

[3]  Andrew Meirion Jones,et al.  Memory and Material Culture , 2007 .

[4]  John Romano,et al.  Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What's Your Legacy? , 2010 .

[5]  Richard Banks,et al.  Matters of life and death: locating the end of life in lifespan-oriented hci research , 2011, CHI.

[6]  Rebecca E. Grinter,et al.  Technology in spiritual formation: an exploratory study of computer mediated religious communications , 2006, CSCW '06.

[7]  Rebecca E. Grinter,et al.  Extraordinary computing: religion as a lens for reconsidering the home , 2009, CHI.

[8]  Cristiano Maciel,et al.  Issues of the social web interaction project faced with afterlife digital legacy , 2011, IHC+CLIHC.

[9]  F. Coelho,et al.  Ensino científico e representações sociais de morte humana , 2006 .

[10]  Michael Massimi.  Technology and the human lifespan: learning from the bereaved , 2011, INTR.

[11]  Elizabeth Hallam,et al.  Death, Memory and Material Culture , 2020 .

[12]  Rebecca E. Grinter,et al.  Using sketching to support design research in new ways: a case study investigating design and charismatic pentecostalism in São Paulo, Brazil , 2012, iConference '12.

[13]  J. Martins.  A Morte e os mortos na sociedade brasileira , 1983 .

[14]  J. Walter.  On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief , 1999 .

[15]  Jed R. Brubaker,et al.  "We will never forget you [online]": an empirical investigation of post-mortem myspace comments , 2011, CSCW.

[16]  Richard Ford,et al.  Proceedings of the 2009 workshop on New security paradigms workshop , 2009 .

[17]  Cristiano Maciel,et al.  The internet generation and its representations of death: considerations for posthumous interaction projects , 2012, IHC.

[19]  Peter DePasquale,et al.  Security and privacy considerations in digital death , 2011, NSPW '11.

[20]  Charlene Jennett,et al.  Data after death: User requirements and design challenges for SNSs and email providers , 2012 .