Sunday, February 15, 2015

Have You Thought About Your Social Media Legacy?

My husband and I need to update our wills. The task is long overdue, but when it comes to this stuff, procrastination rules the day. I paid attention, though, when I came across a brief article about the importance of letting your family know what you want to do with your social media presence after you’re gone. Honestly, I’d never thought about this before, but I also realized that I needed to address this with my family. You see, I have many networking sites, and they only know about two of them, let alone the passwords for each. If I passed away tomorrow, where would they find my long list of passwords?

The other issue is what, if anything, do I want to leave behind on social networking? It didn’t take me long to decide that I want it all gone after I pass, but this won’t be true for everyone. Those who liberally share photos of growing family members might want to leave a legacy for future generations. Perhaps there are pieces of writing or blogs that they want others to enjoy. It’s a decision that each of us must make, but once you’ve made it, you’ve got to let someone you trust know about your wishes. Whether you leave something in your will with the location of your passwords, or do it another way, is up to you. This brings me to another recent article, I read in PC Magazine.

The article states that Facebook will now let you provide a “legacy contact”, which is a person who will post announcements and messages on your “memorialized” timeline. The legacy contact will not be able to log in as the deceased or access private messages. The article provides instructions about how you can add your legacy contact.

I can see where this idea will appeal for some, but probably not for me. I do know that at least two of my 300+ FB friends passed away quite some time ago, yet their FB pages still remain up and dormant. It’s rather disconcerting. It also makes me wonder how many other people on FB are now deceased? Maybe some are still alive but for health or other reasons just don’t participate anymore and never intend to.

Personally, I prefer to tie up loose ends. If I disappear just because I’m bored and don’t want to do participate in blogging or social networking anymore, I’ll let you know.

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