It errodes and decomposes to nothing, quietly and slowly as thousands of digital worms devour the space you once inhabited. Your essential nature will disappear into an infinite universe of ones and zeros, the curse of conformity finally befalling you as it does everyone else.

Meanwhile, your name will slip even further down Google’s ranking until it vanishes from our collective cyber memory and into a formless oblivion. Eventually, someone somewhere comes along and buries something on top of you - another blog perhaps, or a server shivering towards its inevitable demise. It matters not.

But you’ll be fondly remembered - at least until everyone you know has slipped this mortal coil and had their inbox closed by default.

And when they are gone, a silence will fall. There will be no tapping of keys, no pings of notification. Just a cold, errie, hopeless silence.

There’s a way around this sorry situation, though. You can write something that people will want to read long after your RSS feed stops twitching.

My mom would freak.:-)

To go back to your post, I must say I never asked myself the question of what would become of my online identity when I was gone, but rather always wondered if my parents, family etc. would think about telling my networks of friends “worldwide” (not only online actually, but I studied abroad and have friends my family never met). So I gave my parents and sister a few key pasowrds and made them swear that they would send an email to all my address book if I was to disappear…

This said, if no-one takes the time to close all the accounts and blogs and such, you never disappear. Is Facebook then the new philosopher’s stone?