Modern Social Science Research

The physical body departs, but data remains "immortal", and the deceased exists within technology. Cheap digital storage and boundless cloud services have created the immortality of new life, and "permanent" memories are taken over by data. As a new form of media, digital heritage extends an individuals communication ability in time and space and influences their digital performance. However, digital technology is not stubborn and unchanging. From time to time, it contains forgetting and deletionism. This article, through in-depth interviews and participatory investigations, refers to how digital heritage affects interaction mechanisms and mourning cultures. From the perspective of the human body, re-examine the attributes and destination of digital heritage, and re-understand death and mourning in the digital age. Research reveals that digital heritage has restructured the death cognitive paradigm of "existence away from the body", and its technological embodiment has placed humanity in a dual predicament of memory alienation: data immortality dissolves the ultimate meaning of death, while technological forgetting creates secondary anxiety about death. We should be vigilant against the traps of technology, correctly identify the technological illusion of digital immortality, and allow death to return to love and perishable.

Digital heritage; Death; Forgetting; Media memory; Embodied