You can't take it with you
Google brought us QR codes, those rectangular bar codes that you can point your mobile at and load up the web page linked to that code. They envisaged it being used in magazine adverts and in shop windows. But the ingenuity of man knows no bounds.
Funeral Innovations of America, a company "dedicated to leveraging web technologies to help funeral directors succeed", has introduced "Living headstone memorials" using Remembrance Codes. They will attach a QR code to a headstone which forever links to a memorial page for the deceased. So no longer will people wandering through cemeteries need to try to read the weathered inscriptions. Instead they will simply point their mobile phones at the gravestone and pull up a full colour page with all the life details on there, a sort of Facebook for the afterlife I suppose.
I already find the idea creepy, even more so when Funeral Innovations lists the advantages in bullet points on its website. These include "a new revenue stream for funeral homes", and "a way to drive traffic to your online memorials for years to come". You have to wonder if, in years to come, your memorial page will suddenly appear with Google keyword advertising down the side, adverts for last-minute life insurance and coffins you might be interested in. But you also have to question the use of "forever" in their promotions. Even five years is an eternity on the internet. How long will it be before the QR code has gone the way of the floppy disc? Even with the best of intentions now, there will inevitably come a day when the funeral home providing the memorial pages decides it is time to shut up shop and send the memorials into the void.
If you want to know more and have a mobile phone with bar code reader software, try checking out the QR code attached to this article, and if not, here's the link that it leads to:
www.fosterfuneralandcremation.com/obituary/155
24th June 2011