Usually, Still Spoken is about how your data lives on through technology after you die. But how do you live in technology before you're able to form your own digital footprint, perhaps before you're even born?

When I was writing one of the final chapters All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, I ended up in an unexpected place: thinking about how I'd created a digital reflection for my own child that would eventually form part of her digital legacy. These days, there's data generated, mined, and monetised about us from digital gestation to digital afterlife and everywhere in between. What are some of the ways that happens?

So in this episode we're looking the other end of identity, and there's no one better to do that with than Tama Leaver, a Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia; the President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR); a regular media commentator; and aChief Investigatorin theARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

This episode is a preview of host Elaine Kasket's upcoming book, provisionally titled This is Your Life on Tech (2023)- a technopsychosocial exploration of the human life span, looking at how technology is the third force in almost all the relationships we have across our lifetimes.

Written and produced by Elaine Kasket; recorded in April 2021.

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound:

Royal Lullaby (All in the Family)
Snooper's Paradise (Jon Bjõrk)
Computer Wiz (Marten Moses)