Privacy with Public Access: Digital Memorials on QR Codes

Digital memorials are part of a bigger picture of changing rituals for mourning, remembrance, and legacy. However, the focus of this presentation is how digital memorials perforate the (already uneasy) distinction between private and public, both in physical and emotional space. The ongoing study takes the departure in gravestones with QR-codes; objects at once physical and digital, underhandedly putting presumably private content within public reach. A plethora of issues of privacy and publicness are at play within the study's two connected but rather different empirical spaces: the physical space with the stonecutters, the cemetery, and the grave, and the emotional space of significance and forms of expression. In this study, the gravestones with QR codes act as a prism for cultural change within the subjects of death, bereavement and memorials. The ongoing negotiation of definitions in the borderland between private and public is exemplified, and with the presentation, we are ensuring a continued discussion on privacy as well as legacy in our digital society.