Abstract
Based on an analysis of the American Lifenaut research project, I attempt to capture immortality created today as a network of relationships among human and non‑human factors. Lifenaut was established in 2006 as a pioneering project in the field of creating posthumous digital avatars. The users involved in the experiment gather data on the www.lifenaut.com platform to retain their personality in a digitized form after biological death. Part of my work is reconstructive – I describe the assumptions of the American project and the main concepts associated with it, such as “mindclone”, “mindfiles” and “mindware”. In the second part I present the results of my own avatar creation experiment and confront them with the sociological perspective of symbolic interactionism (G.H. Mead, H. Blumer) and relational sociology (B. Latour).
Highlights
ARTIFICIAL MEMORY AND PRIVATE IMMORTALITY “Immortality is a social relation” – this is one of the important thoughts contained in Zygmunt Bauman’s book Śmierć i nieśmiertelność
Bauman is primarily interested in symbolic immortality, a substitute formula created by culture which attempts to suppress the awareness that the biological fact of death is synonymous with complete disappearance3
Has this measure in the twenty‐first century been devalued? Perhaps today, thanks to technology, we can become immortal “on our own”? More than a decade after Śmierć i nieśmiertelność, in: Postmodernism as a source of suffering Bauman suggests a certain trail in this matter, adjusting the vision of symbolic immortality to the changing cultural and technological context: The container, to which individual human acts were formerly placed for eternal storage, which were granted the right to immortality, was collective memory [...]
Summary
I used the program with varying engagement and frequency, looking at my own willingness and natural impulse to systematically collect data and improve my avatar Such a procedure of research, called symbolic interactionism, is recommended by one of the leading representatives of the sociological orientation that interests me in this text. I acknowledge that the virtual immortality of Lifenaut is the production of symbols that must be seen in the process of uninterrupted social (symbolic) interaction This classic interpretative orientation in the final part of the text I supplement with a newer theoretical approach, a relationship sociology represented by Bruno Latour. Today to understand society without taking into account the interaction between human and non‐human factors
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