Hey, it's Flora Lixman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, how tech is changing the way that we grieve.

People move around a whole lot more.

It's not everyone who's going to be able to come back to honor someone when they die.

And it turns out that when we can't get together in person,

well, we get together online.

When we think about getting our affairs in order, there's a well-established playbook,

creating a will, naming legal guardians, advanced directives for medical care, funeral plans. But increasingly,

we're faced with another aspect of our legacy to manage. And that is our digital afterlife,

how we live on after we die on the internet, on social media, even as AI replicas. And yes, that's more common than you might think.

So how should we be making arrangements for our post-life presence?

Jed Brubaker has a perspective on this question.

He's an information scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder,

and he leads the university's digital legacy clinic to help people

manage their loved ones' digital affairs. Jed, welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks so much for having me. I know people have run into this in their own lives,

like a Facebook remembrance page or something like that. And what I have heard and experienced

myself, a sort of mixed emotions, where

it's both a little unsettling. Sure. To see this person who's gone, but they're still there.

And also, like, it can be quite nice and heartwarming and, and feed you. And I guess I'm curious how you parse those feelings and

how do people generally feel about digital afterlives? Yeah. I mean, it makes me think about my

own relationship to these. I did my master's degree at Georgetown really focusing on what

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