Abstract
The current society produces and consumes large amounts of digital content, especially young people. Each person accumulates throughout their lives a set of digital items that will constitute their own digital legacy. Recently, a number of works that focus on post-mortem data and technology have been published. Our work adds to the existing body of work, and explores the perspective of Brazilian young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 on digital legacy management systems. We investigate how this public understands the new concepts introduced by this domain, and what are their attitude towards it based on their experience with the different roles offered by the system, namely the account owner, the trusted contact and the heirs. We selected the system Afternote to provide a context for our exploration. The first step in our study was to perform a systematic analysis of the system, followed by two user studies in which young adults explored and shared their views of the system, based on their focus on the role of account owner or trusted contact. Our results show that participants could understand the novel concepts introduced by Afternote, but some of the processes that would take place in the future represented more of a challenge. They believed the system was useful, but raised many issues and costs associated to its use. These results contribute to the ongoing research, evaluation and design of Digital Legacy Management Systems.
Highlights
An individual’s digital legacy can be defined as the set of digital items accumulated throughout one’s life
Participants explored the system as account owners. We conducted another user study in which we explored with 7 participants their experience as trusted contacts
Our results show that participants were able to grasp the meaning of the new concepts introduced by Digital Legacy Management Systems, represented in DiLeMa
Summary
An individual’s digital legacy can be defined as the set of digital items accumulated throughout one’s life. We conducted another user study in which we explored with 7 participants their experience as trusted contacts (the one who is appointed by the account owner to inform the system of his/her death and act as a representative to carry his/her wishes within the system) In both studies we asked them about how they would feel as heirs of someone else’s digital legacy. Understanding processes that would take place in the future represented a challenge to some of the participants Their experience with a DLMS showed that young adults do not believe their digital artifacts are of much value to others, but they consider that some of it could have a sentimental value to people close to them. We discuss our results and future directions of our research
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
