So far, attending the first leg of the Living and Dying in the Internet Age junior seminar has involved taking simultaneously commonplace and yet recognisably complex terms like human and communication and throwing it through a (digital) whirlpool to see what lies at the heart of the terms in the context of the Internet age.

The human, now “digitally distributed across text messages, Web pages, social networking sites, blog comments, and so on”[1], is introduced as a hybridised figure taking on “multiple presences” in the class, yet possessing individuality. It is not easy to grasp the idea that a human can be here or there and yet also everywhere all at once – but that is exactly the image of the human that has been constructed by the possibilities of the Internet, simultaneously idiosyncratic and generalised. We had also discussed the obvious yet insidious idea of the malleability of our identities online – most prominently through images. With online communication being very much a visual affair, it seems all the more important that we create first impressions that idealise ourselves – who wants a bad image to last forever anyway?

This brings me to the topic to the idea of immortality, though not of the person (to me, even if we managed to upload our entire bodies online, it wouldn’t manage to encapsulate the visceral essence of our selves) but of our data. I had begun the module wondering whether the Internet could be generous enough to embrace the evolving human identity (since after all, I’m no longer the same as I was when I was 12, but any data from the time still exists) and now nearly halfway through it all, I find myself leaning towards the idea of a static immortality – much like in a photograph, a frozen moment in time. As Ansel Adams puts it: “These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago.” If that is the effect of photographic prints, I wonder then how much more everlasting our digital imprints would be.