This is Your Life on Tech

Why do digital remains – the data left behind when we die -- matter to everyone on the planet...not just two thirds of the world connected to the Internet?

Why is it true that we live inside the Internet, or inside of an archive?

What are our responsibilities to the digitally preserved dead and to history, and how do our current ways of dealing with the dead connect us to ancient history?

What happens when we combine AI with digital remains? Are we entering a new era of dead labour?

Host Dr Elaine Kasket, cyberpsychologist and author of Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World and All the Ghosts in the Machine, explores fascinating intersections of psychology and technology with equally fascinating guests.

This week she speaks to Dr Carl Öhman of Uppsala University in Sweden, formerly of the Internet Institute. Dr Öhman is best known for predicting, in conjunction with his colleague David Watson, the date at which the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. His upcoming book is The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die, and Why You Should Care. University of Chicago Press is releasing it in April 2024.

Music used under license from Epidemic Sound.

When we combine the existence of ‘digital remains’ with current and emerging technologies, we arrive at some pretty weighty and interesting questions about what it is to be human, and what it is to really relate. In getting to grips with these topics, I can’t think of a much better conversation partner than Mórna O’Connor.

Dr Mórna O’Connor is currently involved in a four-country research consortium about digital death: Digital Death: Transforming Rituals, History and Afterlife, or DiDe for short. This recent blogpost gives a sense of her thinking/work at the moment.

What’s a ghostbot? Have you ever encountered a digital zombie, and could you become one?

Should there be a legally binding ‘do not bot me’ clause in your will? How about a digital do not reanimate me (DDNR) order?

When we mix the popularisation and accessibility of large language model (LLM) AI with ‘digital remains’, what happens?

Are we entering an era of dead labour, when the knowledge and the labour of the past can be concretised in the data that we leave behind, and exploited for profit?

Professor Elaine Kasket is author of Reboot: Reclaiming your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World and All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data. In this Reboot episode, she speaks to two close colleagues about why now is such an important moment to confront the reality of digital afterlives.

Dr Debra Bassett is the author of The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives: You Only Live Twice, a Visiting Fellow at the Open University, and a digital afterlife consultant.

Dr Edina Harbinja is Reader at Aston University Law School, has worked in ‘digital death’ or ‘digital immortality’ or ‘digital legacy’ for more than a decade, and is the author of Digital Death, Digital Assets and Post-mortem Privacy.

Is technology a third wheel in your relationship? How does it come into the interactions between you? Does it help, or does it get in the way?

This week, speaker and author Elaine Kasket is in conversation with Kara Fletcher about technology-related issues in couples relationships and the connection between tech use and attachment styles.

Attachment styles are patterns of relating and responding in relationships, and they include secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised. While there’s not a straight line from infant/childhood attachment and adult attachment patterns — a lot of things can influence our reactions and responses in relationship — there’s a significant correlation.

For more information, check out the LifeOnTech newsletter on Substack. You can buy REBOOT now in the UK, wherever books are sold.

In the fifth of 10 special podcasts corresponding to the chapters in Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World, author and psychologist Elaine Kasket asks whether there's the science to back up fears about teens and screens. She speaks with Karen Mansfield, expert on teens and tech, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Here's the fourth of ten special podcasts corresponding to the chapters in Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World. Author and psychologist Elaine Kasket will be looking at the world of behavioural tracking, social scoring, and educational technology in schools, with the help of a primary head teacher, privacy lawyer Al Gidardi, tech journalist Amelia Tait, and educator/writer/journalist Ant Heald.

here’s the third of ten special podcasts corresponding to the chapters in Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World. In chapter 3, I came face to face with a befuddling issue: how’s a writer to address the issues like young children’s privacy and parental ‘sharenting’ without coming over all judgemental?!

In this episode, I (that’s author and psychologist Elaine Kasket) try to work that out. I share the recording of a conversation with my own child that inspired REBOOT in the first place - with that now-13-year-old’s permission. (I also had to pay her, which seems fair enough given the topics covered in this episode.

I also speak with Amelia Tait, UK-based journalist who has spent much of her career investigating children on the Internet, and with Leah Plunkett, author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online.

Full-length interviews with both Amelia Tait and Leah Plunkett, complete with transcripts, will soon go behind the paywall for paid subscribers to Life on Tech.

Stay tuned — later this week we’ll be talking surveillance, social scoring, and behavioural tracking of school-age children with a host of new guests and contributors to REBOOT.

This week, the second of ten special podcasts corresponding to the chapters in Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World.

In this episode, author and psychologist Elaine Kasket talks with author and mum of two Stephanie V. about parental anxiety, high-tech monitoring and the digital divide of infancy; with Oxford Internet Institute director Professor Victoria Nash about what's drawing us to so intensively surveil our offspring; and with Professor Tama Leaver of Curtin University in Australia about what’s happening to all the data accumulated by ‘baby wearables.’

Have we come to think about tech-facilitated ‘surveillance parenting’ in infancy as simply good, responsible parenting? And, if so, what are the implications for both our children’s present and their future?

You can pre-order now, wherever you get your books! Search for Elaine Kasket and REBOOT.

This week, the first of ten special podcasts that correspond to the chapters in Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World. Author and psychologist Elaine Kasket talks gender reveals and sonogram sharing with Jenna Karvunidis, the regretful inventor of the gender-reveal-party phenomenon; Professor Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth; and ‘Martell’ and ‘Jayda’, parents who shared not only their joyful gender reveal video on social media but have also continued to chart their children’s development online as their family grows.

You can pre-order now, wherever you get your books! Search for Elaine Kasket and REBOOT.

You're in a relationship with technology...and you've got boundary issues. Elaine Kasket talks about psychologist Erik Erikson and her reboot of his famous psychosocial life stages.