An older woman living on the third floor of my building was found dead in her apartment last night, on January 5th. Sadly, she had been dead for weeks. Others in the building were surprised when she didn't show up to the holiday party -- on December 17th -- but then realized something must be wrong when the TV had been blaring for days and the newspapers and mail started piling up after the holidays.

My first reaction was similar to that of others I spoke with: How could no one have known? Wasn't someone checking on her? I thought immediately of my mother who for years did not let a single day pass without speaking to my grandmother (also living alone in an apartment) at least once or twice a day. The answer is that my neighbor downstairs was an only child, with no partner, no children, and no living parents. She died very much alone.

Which got me thinking... Even if you don't have any immediate family, it seems pretty hard to disappear in this new hyper-connected digital world of ours. Sure, new media seems to stack up much faster than old media -- but it also requires our participation. So even if I never worked in an office or spoke with my family on a regular basis, enough people would know if I all-of-a-sudden stopped posting twitter updates, blogging, responding to text messages, logging onto AIM/gchat, or adding photos to my flickr or facebook acounts. (Responding to email probably shouldn't be a criteria at this point for determining whether or not someone's alive, at least for me.)

Case in point: Just this past weekend someone posted to an email listserv to which i subscribe suggesting that a fellow blogger might be in trouble because he suddenly stopped posting and had previously written about a medical condition causing seizures. A few replies later to this list of hundreds and someone tracked down a phone number which yielded no response, so concerned blogger number one called the sheriff who visited the subject's premises and found no evidence of foul play. The missing blogger was fine, but had indeed been ill. The moral of the story is that enough people within his online network were able to react and respond and potentially even save his life. Had the worst happened, he certainly would not have died alone.

Similarly, I've received at least two twitter notices in the past year from bike-commuting colleagues moments after being hit by cars. And at least one post-mugging tweet. In all cases, each person's network of friends and colleagues receiving the message would have sent in the cavalry to help were it needed.

Furthermore, there's an increasingly good chance that we'll know where our friends (and enemies) are at at all times, even when we're trying to disappear for a bit. We don't even need need to wait for location-based services on our mobiles. I used to share my every move with friends and colleagues through Plazes, which plotted me on a google map every time I accessed the internet from a new location and then syndicated that info onto my blog and facebook page.

Plazes turned out to be a bit too creepy even for me, but then over the holidays I received reminders from other sites about all of the information they (and presumably my friends) had about my whereabouts: Nike+ told me how far (and how little) I ran last year; Dopplr was standing by to tell me who else in my network was or plans to be in the same cities as me at the same time; and finally TripIt (a great tool that sucks in all of your annoying travel confirmation emails and creates slick trip itineraries) determined that in the last year and two months I've traveled 59,936 miles to 24 cities and 4 countries on 30 trips over the course of 147 days.

The point is that we're increasingly providing ambient life pulses to our friends and family via a growing variety of social platforms that let our networks know we're alive. My niche examples here were running and travel, but the same communities exist or are growing around any other affinity or activity, from music to knitting.

I'd like to think that with this growing connectivity also comes greater connectedness in our society. It's as if we're now able to crowdsource -- or let the network handle -- some of our shared custodial duties to neighbors and community members. I'm not looking to trade in regular phone calls with friends and family, but I sure am glad to know that I'm connected to a network of people who are aware of my existence and, therefore, who will be aware if i'm not existing. Beacuse I'm not the only one who won't have any newspapers piling up outside his door.