Social network users' religiosity and the design of post mortem aspects

Abstract

Social networks increase the challenges of designing real-world aspects whose computational abstraction is not simple. This includes death and digital legacy, strongly influenced by cultural phenomena, such as religion. Therefore, it is important to analyze youngsters' concepts of death in the web, as the Internet Generation outnumbers other groups of social network users. Besides, due to their age, many of them face other people's death for the first time on the web. This paper analyzes to what extent these users' religion and the belief in afterlife may signal guidelines for a social network project that considers volition towards digital legacy. The data herein analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively come from a survey-based research with Brazilian high school students. The contributions for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies comprise design solutions that may consider aspects of religion, death and digital legacy, also improving users' and designers' understanding on these issues in system design. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.