Digital tombstone not selling like hotcakes
Digital photo scrapbooks are apparently not popular with the bereaved.
The is an electronic altar to the departed, designed to be propped up on top of a grave. It's not doing that well, maybe because it's a product that inherently contradicts itself.
What would Marshall McLuhan say? The medium is the message. In many people's eyes, digital video technology speaks of the electronic future, while traditional granite and marble reference the geological past. Honoring those gone before us is normally a backward-looking activity. The Vidstone seems antithetical to the aesthetic of monuments and memories--a digital scrapbook, with its delicate electronics, is not exactly impervious to the elements over the years--it's ephemeral, rather than lasting.
Of course we'll be eating crow in a few years when every headstone has one.
Read the full AP story at CNN: "Death goes digital: The electronic tombstone"