An incredibly sophisticated, new type of digital memorial is the digital avatar…this area is sometimes called “augmented eternity,” whereby an individual persists through text simulated text conversations, for example. With Roman, pictured here, a friend collected thousands of texts (so his personal data) that he’d exchanged with friends and family before his death and created a kind of text chatbot that responds to texts using language he used and context clues. As of April 2024, the App no longer appears to be available.

Digital avatars, sometimes called “griefbots” are an emerging form of online memorialization. While these are not currently as common as memorialized social media profiles or commemorative websites, experiments, prototypes, and research in this area warrant attention, as they may shed some light on new directions or future trends in digital memorialization. 

As popular media coverage has observed, if digital avatars sound like a plot from Black Mirror, there is a good reason for that. In an episode entitled “Be Right Back,” a grieving character uses a service that aggregates all of her late partner’s social media, text messages, and other online data to create a believable facsimile of the experience of communicating with him via chat. Two years later, mourning the loss of her best friend, Eugenia Kuyda used the resources available through her software company to construct a digital avatar based on Roman Mazurenko.