Exploring Young Adults’ Understanding and Experience with a Digital Legacy Management System

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.

Keywords

• Digital Legacy
• Death
• Digital Legacy Technologies
• Semiotic Inspection Method
• SIM
• Semiotic Engineering