Digital Inheritance Exploration (DIE) through Digital Inheritance Model (DIM) - a guideline for digital assets planning after death

When a user passes away in today’s digital world, they may have more than just physical assets or property; their footprint extends into cyberspace. This has resulted from the materialisation of digital communication tools like mobile phone as memobilia has transformed the device as a memory storage tool; where the growth of personal digital data are created, stored and accessed. These digital data are digital asset in today’s data driven society, as the data has numerous values like monetary value, sentimental value, privacy value and sensitivity value. However, users are aware that they are creating permanent online archive of their life but they have never thought of managing the data after death. Therefore, this innovation explores the concept of digital inheritance as future digital legacy plan. The development of this project involved empirical study include qualitative method and quantitative method. Qualitative study used in-depth interview as the data collection technique. The informants for this investigation include 10 informants of young adults and 10 informants of expert related to the new media industry. Quantitative study used survey with PLS-SEM analysis and targeted to 395 respondents. Results depict that majority of users and experts have strongly agreed with the relevant of planning for digital assets in this 21st century through a concept of digital inheritance. This project manages to explores valuable findings for the development of a Memobilia and Digital Inheritance Guidelines designed through Digital Inheritance Model (DIM). This guideline can be commercialised as it works practically as reference to various area of interest include digital media, religion, law and policy. Thus, the results of designing this guideline have implications towards the awareness of young adults, government and policy makers in protecting individual’s digital assets through the formulation of strategies, acts and policies that allow digital rights to take place through the digital inheritance concept.