Reach out and touch (screen) someone?: Erik Campano at WNHH FM.
Erik Campano has been camping out in person in the hospital ICU watching people watch each other die — on screens.
In the process, he’s working at the forefront of an emerging field that is touching all of our lives, not to mention our post-lives.
Call it “digital death” Or: “Computers and dying.”
Whatever you call it, Campano and fellow researchers are exploring how we need to deal with our post-death digital “remains” (like social media accounts), and how the use of digital technology is affecting how we make decisions about when and how people die and how we grieve them.
Campano used to report news in Connecticut for NPR and WSHU. He’s now a doctor researcher in informatics at Umea Unviersity in Sweden. He returned to town last week for a seminar organized by the Yale Digital Ethics Center; he made time to stop in to WNHH FM Thursday to discuss digital death during an episode of “Dateline New Haven.”
“The dynamics of grief and handling your own death and handling other people’s death, they’re changing rapidly with computing. So you want to get a handle on how you personally can interact with this technology in a way that makes it easier for you to process these issues,” Campano said.
That’s why Campano has been hanging out in an ICU. He engages in “deep discussions with people there about this death process.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, people couldn’t visit dying loved ones in the hospital. So they checked in and said goodbye from a distance via screens on a cell phone or tablet.
Many people continued doing that after pandemic-era visiting restrictions eased. Especially people who live, say, three hours away. In the past they might have traveled to the hospital to visit a dying loved one, but now sometimes decide it makes more sense to log in, Campano observed.
“The fascinating question is: Does that have an impact on how we grieve, how we say goodbye? What’s the difference between doing [that] in person or just not being there at all? What I find particularly nuanced here is: Does electronic communication live up to the promise that a lot of people think it has?”
Campano is still at work on exploring those questions. He has some preliminary observations.
He discovered that even more people are choosing this “mediated” digital communication over in-person communication than during the pandemic.
“So in the same way that our relationships in [day-to-day] life, whether they’re friendships or romantic relationships, are often being replaced by electronic communication, text messaging, social media, cell phones … that’s also occurring at the end of our lives,” he said.
Campano said he has found “considerable” evidence that relationships conducted through electronic media are less emotionally fulfilling.
“If you’re sitting at the dinner table with your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend or your best friend and looking them in the eye — that conversation is going to be more fulfilling than if you are trying to hear each other through a scratchy cell phone conversation, right? So the question is, are electronic communication helping us grieve, or are they making it harder to grieve? Are they prolonging the grief process?”
It’s looking like the latter, despite the best of tech intentions to bring people closer together.
Why? “The human grief process is something that has evolved culturally and biologically over tens of thousands of years. For example, historically we’re used to seeing the corpse of a person who died. That gives us physical evidence” of death and a way of processing it.
There’s still lots more to research. We can expect Campano to report back.
Click on the video below to watch Erik Campano discuss at more length how digital tech is affecting the death process, including tips on how to safeguard digital information and make sound decisions. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.