Yesterday, after I read the TNW Social Media “Twitter should ‘memorialize’ our accounts when we die“ something I thought about last year came back to my mind.
At that time I thought that that concept of mine was a little bit too “dark” to be shared with others. At that time I did not have a blog where to write, I did not even thought to have one.
Last year, it was August, I was updating my Flickr profile when I realize that one of my contacts, not a real friend of mine, but somebody who shared my passion for photography and who was so kind to give me tons of advices, well, that person had not updated his Flickr profile for months.
I am a curious person, so I tried to understand what happened during those months. I was not able to have a clear picture, I only read a broadcasted message from him saying “Something happened, I will not be able to update Flickr that often”.
My curious mind started to wonder, and I asked myself: ” Is there any online service that offers a sort of memorial record of our online activity, so that contacts who are not real life friend, can get to know when the lack of online activity is due to death?”
The answer was – and still is: no, there is not. This became a challenge to me and to my fervid creativity, and led to the creation of a concept: Pathways to Heaven.
The concept is quite simple: Pathways to Heaven transforms your social feed, your social interaction into a piece of art through an algorithm. I am not talking about what people wrote, but how often/when and where they had posted before their online activity stopped.
I know that there are softwares which are able to analyze people’s online activity – mainly used for military and defense purpose. Therefore there must be a way to transform all these information – which are not at all appealing from the visual point of view- into something more beautiful and creative, a sort of still image of years and years spent socializing and interacting online.
Ideally, online users subscribe to Pathways to Heaven (PtH), authorizing it to interact with the user’ social network profiles, collecting information on the background. The PtH user can set up the “lack of activity” time which acts as an alert – the PtH system sending an email to a person that has been selected by the PtH users as the “memorial art” receiver.
Unfortunately, Pathways to Heaven is just a draft of a concept, I am not able to create any software and algorithms are a mistery to me.
But I am curious to know: Would you ever become a PtH user? I would – and I would choose to publish my PtH memorial art, I am sure that it would look wonderful.
