X The five charts that were created on the basis of data from the last 118 years (from the beginning of the 20th century to 2018) are drawing tools, brushes. The data includes: birth and death in the physical world; birth and death (permanent removal of accounts) on the Internet on social media. These are online ghosts - profiles on social networks whose users have died but the accounts are still active. As you can see, the last graph is characterized by the fastest growth in relation to others, which means nothing more that the Internet quickly fills with ghosts. Probably in 2098 there will be more accounts of dead users than those who live.

In the second half of the twentieth century, it was noticed that our approach to death, seniors and sick people have changed. Natural death, death of a loved ones as a social event disappeared from our consciousness. In most cases, we are now dying in hospitals, among medical personnel, treated as a "medical unit". Death very often, is accompanied by loneliness, both in the case of a dying person and its relatives. At the same time, we are submitting to the ubiquitous process of commercialization, politicization and unreflective shocking by corpses in public space. Looking at the statistics of the most-watched films of the last dozen or so years, we notice that we are dealing with a cinema flood of corpses. We have been attacked with hundreds of images of death, both real ones coming from reportages, everyday news, and the fake ones that spill out of the cinema screens. Somewhere on the borderline of fear of dying in the physical world, and life beyond the passing time in the new virtual ecosystem, appears a phenomenon that I call non-mortality. Ultra-modern, virtual images that we create and share daily in social media, do not get old. From the moment of registration each day, at any moment we can (or maybe we are obliged to) build our alternative life, which sooner or later becomes our monument. Nowadays, the border between private and public, real and false is lost. We become prisoners under constant observation and control, in full readiness to show ourselves and to be noticed by others.
| Copyright © Urszula Kluz-Knopek ula@adija.pl |