Story by
Josh Ong
Josh Ong is the US Editor at The Next Web. He previously worked as TNW's China Editor and LA Reporter. Follow him on Twitter or email him a Josh Ong is the US Editor at The Next Web. He previously worked as TNW's China Editor and LA Reporter. Follow him on Twitter or email him at [email protected].
Social media has added a new dimension to the concept of “last words”. The Tweet Hereafter is an experiment documenting the final tweets of notable people who have died.
Jamie Forrest and Michael McWatters have been collecting the tweets for the past year and have recently decided to publicize the project.
The experiment is bound to be a polarizing one. Recent entries include tweets from Reeva Steenkamp, Caleb Moore, Kevin Ash and Aaron Swartz.
Regardless of how you feel about the site, The Tweet Hereafter is certainly a sobering reminder of our own mortality and the traces we leave on the Internet. Social media is now an integral part of our lives, so it’s natural for it to also be a part of our deaths.
Different social services have taken stances on how to deal with user content after the user has passed on. Facebook has adopted a memoriam feature that can turn profiles for late users into memorial pages. DeadSocial allows people to schedule post-mortem messages across Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Now we can archive our own tweets, but do we want to leave our posts up for the world to see after we’re gone?
If you find yourself morbidly fascinated by the digital remnants of the deceased, you can follow the project on Twitter as well.
(hat tip Daniel Jalkut)
See also: How Facebook has turned the normal processes of dying and grieving inside out
Image credit: FRED TANNEAU / AFP / Getty Images
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