A Facebook application called If I Die was launched in 2011, billing itself as “the digital afterlife Facebook application” and allowing users to create a video or text message that will be published after they die (and verification of the death).

again revealing the extent to which social media platforms, and Twitter, in particular, are changing the hierarchical nature of who should find out about the death first.

the essence of a photograph is death. Because a photograph does not change whether its subject is living or dead, it is in a way an inherently posthumous

The form and content of posting messages to deceased users on social network sites seem to suggest three beliefs about afterlife: (1) that the deceased can receive electronic communication, (2) that the deceased is in heaven, and (3) that the living user someday will be reunited with the dead.

The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead.

Second, in the absence of action by a third

the phenomenon of profiles “outliving” their owners—amounts to a sort of immortality, a matter of potential but not necessary discontinuity with Christian traditions.

One woman lamented, “ironic that facebook is suggesting i ‘reconnect’ with a friend who was murdered this year,”

The form of death-related posting practices suggests an important dimension of how users imagine the afterlife, namely that the deceased may be able to receive electronic communications from the living.