Sail’s Pedagogy

What happens to your land and possessions in Second Life when you die? What if you had a Second Life partner? or others were renting from you?

Greg Lastowka, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who is writing a book on property rights and virtual goods.

After the Virginia Tech shootings in 2006, for example, Facebook realized it needed to change the way it handled users’ deaths and created a way to memorialize profiles, so that friends and family members could continue to visit them and grieve together, posting condolences and thoughts. Before that, presenting a valid death certificate led to erasure, a common practice among other service providers as well.

The opposite happened in WOW (World Of Warcraft) when a Chinese teenager known as Snowly died of a stroke in late 2005 after spending three consecutive days in a game, her fellow players on World of Warcraft, a virtual world, decided to hold an online memorial. Dozens gathered to pay their respects, and the service was going as planned, until it was attacked by a rival group, and the mourners’ avatars were massacred.

There are a couple of ways to resolve the question of who has access to what when a person dies. One is for everybody to name a digital executor, who will receive a person’s latest passwords when a death occurs. Second, each time someone created an account, the service provider would ask the user what they wanted to have happen to it at death — erasure or access — and if the choice was access, to name an executor.

Michael Wesch, cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, has studied how new media are changing the way people relate to each other and thinks there is great potential for the traces left behind to speak to future generations.

In one future he imagined, the dead themselves might become avatars: “Computers may gather all those traces, and my son could get online, and have interactions with a computer-generated entity that would simulate what I would be like,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of court cases in the past about how best to preserve our cultural heritage,” Mr. Wesch said. “The future battles could very well be about this type of information and how it’s handled.”