Towards a postmortal society of virtualised ancestors? The Virtual Deceased Person and the preservation of the social bond

Figures & data

Table 1. Comparison table of the Virtual Deceased Person with other digital immortality concepts.

Categories	Digital Zombies (Bassett, 2015)	Paramortals (Onufrijchuk, 2016)	Thanabots (Bassett, 2018)	Digital Immortals (Savin-Baden & Burden, 2018).	Virtual Deceased Person (VDP)
Data gathering process	Post-mortem recreation based on available data	Post-mortem recreation based on available data	Various, from pre-mortem intentional data creation to post-mortem data gathering based on available data	Various, from pre-mortem intentional data creation to post-mortem data gathering based on available data	Pre-mortem intentional creation of biographical and interpersonal data for post-mortem recreation
Degree of autonomy	Non-existent to low autonomy	High, but not full, autonomy	Low autonomy	Various, from low to high autonomy	High, but not full, autonomy
Expected interlocutors	Non-specific	Non-specific	Person-specific and group-specific	Person-specific, group-specific, and non-specific	Person-specific, group-specific, and non-specific
User interface/form of embodiment	Audio-visual non-interactive embodied data	Various	Text and image based interactive data	Text and audio-visual virtual interactive data	Audio-visual virtual interactive data to physical, humanlike embodiment
Purpose	Various	Various	Maintaining continuing bonds	Various	Maintaining the social bond

Figure 1. Interlinked processes of the creation and use of the VDP, the integration of the digital persona and the preservation of the social bond.

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