Creating a Digital Legacy: How to Leave Your Story Behind Online
- Steven Heumann
- Apr 28
- 4 min read
By Heidi Westfall and Steven Heumann
In today’s internet age, we exist in two places at once: the physical world and the digital.
We experience life through vacations and day-to-day interactions while chronicling them on all forms of social media and digital devices.
You post a picture from your anniversary dinner celebrating your spouse.
You share a link from a business article that impacted your managerial style.
You comment on a friend’s post sharing in their grief at the loss of a close friend.
You see? Our online presence is more than just a collection of posts, photos, and messages—it’s a reflection of our lives, values, and the impact we leave behind.
From social media updates to personal blogs and digital archives, the internet has given us the ability to create a lasting legacy that future generations can access with just a few clicks.
But what happens to our digital footprint when we’re no longer here? How can we ensure that our stories and creative work continue to inspire others long after we’re gone? Whether through intentional storytelling, curated online content, or planning for our internet afterlife, creating a digital legacy is an opportunity to preserve our history and make a meaningful impression.
In this blog, we’ll explore how social media, blogs, and digital archives contribute to our legacy, as well as the steps we can take to manage and protect our online presence for the future.
How Social Media and Digital Footprints Shape One’s Legacy
Teenagers are told all the time to be careful about what they post online because it lasts forever.
Well, the same thing can be said about the good things we publish as well.
Every post, comment, and interaction contributes to your long-term digital presence. The internet allows personal stories, achievements, and values to be preserved indefinitely. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X often serve as digital archives of one’s life. Remember the post we just referenced about celebrating your anniversary? That moment is recorded and preserved for as long as that platform exists.
If you use social media thoughtfully, curating an intentional online presence, you will quite effortlessly create a timeline of your life with so many important moments, and some that will simply put a smile on your face. And when we say ‘thoughtfully,’ this is also meant to help you understand that when you rage post at two in the morning in all caps about whatever just struck a nerve, that post will be preserved as well. Always think, “Do I want to be remembered for this?” before you click the post button (See? Teenagers aren’t the only ones who need this advice).
You can even go through and print out all your social posts, or just the photos, and compile them in the physical world too. Services exist that print photo books directly from your social accounts, so if you want to have physical records, you have that option as well.
The Role of Online Storytelling, Blogs, and Digital Archives
If we’re talking about being thoughtful about our digital content, the best way to do that is through using tools that force us to sit down and convey our thoughts…thoughtfully.
Personal blogs, websites, and vlogs (video blogs) offer a structured way to document life experiences, values, and knowledge. Platforms like Medium, Substack, and personal domains provide lasting spaces for written content.
Starting a blog on your website is incredibly easy. All you need from there is a habit of writing. If you set a goal for yourself to write one blog per week, taking only one hour to write it, at the end of the year you would have 52 blogs talking about your area of expertise, or any other subject that caught your interest. These blog posts can then be compiled into a complete book if you want, published and distributed like any other business or legacy offering.
Online storytelling can be a form of legacy-building, sharing lessons, wisdom, and creative work. Digital archives (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, cloud storage) also help organize and store these memories for future generations.
Planning for a Digital Afterlife (Social Media Accounts, Digital Wills)
What happens to social media accounts after death? Many platforms offer memorialization options. Google’s “Inactive Account Manager” allows users to plan for account access after inactivity. Best practices in this regard are to make sure you have a record of all your social media logins and passwords. This can bring up privacy and security concerns, but it is best to have someone you trust have access to your accounts anyway, in case of fraud, hacking, or you simply forget your login.
Since we’re talking about saving passwords and such, we might as well delve into digital wills. These documents work in much the same way as standard wills in that you are designating trusted individuals to manage or close online accounts posthumously. These would be the people who would have access to your passwords and logins. Services like “DeadSocial” and “Legacy Locker” help users manage digital afterlife planning, but you can also speak with more traditional planners that are already helping you with these types of legacy projects.
The key is to go in with a framework in place for how you want your digital footprint preserved.
Final Thoughts
Social media gets a bad rap sometimes.
Yes, it can be a time wasting, vapid, or even outright negative space, but it also allows us to tap into true human connections and share our personal experience in uniquely heartfelt ways.
As we take advantage of our digital landscape, we are offered incredible chances to preserve our legacy. Photos, posts, thoughtful comments, all add to a picture of who we really were in life. By taking advantage of that reality, we can thoughtfully create our own personal narrative right now.
Don’t shy away from the technologies that define our time. Simply use them with intention and a bit of common sense.
Your legacy can be so much more powerful if you do.
And it can last as long as there’s an internet connection.
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