Among the two approaches to the Haunted Media Project, I mainly take the one that cyber-space is a place for grieving. Instead of focusing on the grievers, I am more interested in the presentation of the deceased on his/her memorial site. In order to achieve this objective, I build a Facebook memorial page for, not a real person, but a dead fictional character from a comic book. My aim is to show that how the deceased is like a fictional character who has no agency. When he becomes only an online profile showing multiple personalities after he is dead, his RIP page is for the living friends, family, and even strangers to express their one-sided feeling, but not for the dead himself.
Multi-identities of the deceased
My project is mainly inspired by the Computer Science study conducted by Jed Brubaker, Gillian Hayes, and Paul Dourish “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning”. In the article, they suggest that friends and family have to face “multiple and conflicting narratives of the deceased” and social media may amplify the challenge of achieving consensus among these complicated identities (2013, 153). Since social networking sites, such as Facebook, allow isolated acquaintances of the dead to mourn, they become a “techno-spiritual spaces in which the identities of the deceased are inter-subjectively produced by the contributions of SNS friends” (154). In order to re-create this multi-identity conflict, I intentionally choose a protagonist who appears as various characters in different short stories in the comic series for my fictional RIP page. Sapphire, “the deceased” on my memorial page, is one of the main characters in a Chinese comic Beryl and Sapphire. (See book cover below. Sapphire is the blue one, as you can recognize him by his name).
The comic series is constituted by diverse short stories which usually have no narrative connection between each other. In each story, Sapphire will take a different role, such as a knight, actor, computer programmer, scientist or even a supernatural creature, although his appearance remains the same (Yes, he is presented in a stick figure in the comic, but he also has a “human” appearance in the illustrations and the adapted Anime. I will talk about the use of this more in the later paragraph). For the sake of a distinct and clear demonstration of the multiple identities of the deceased, I pick the two most disparate, if not contrasting, characters Sapphire takes in two short stories– a brave knight who dedicated his life to defeat the Evil King and a mad scientist who kills everyone who tries to stop his inhumane experiment. In the memorial page, “his acquaintances” (all created by me with different accounts) post pictures of the knight-Sapphire and the scientist-Sapphire and argue which one is his “true” identity. As you may notice, the knight-Sapphire and the scientist-Sapphire share the same figure – a blue stick man or a young man with blue hair, with only some small differences of his clothes (the knight wears a cape and then an armor; the scientist wears a laboratory coat). Consequently, I hope that this display of two distant characters can serve as a dramatic analogy for the complex but isolated narratives the deceased possesses which is “not possible to arrive at a singular identity” (154).
<–Knight-Sapphire
Scientist-Sapphire–>
<–Survivors arguing the identities of Sapphire
Comprehensive image built by collective memory
When the survivors post various memories (pictures) of the deceased, the deceased’s image will become more comprehensive and well-rounded. In order to do this, I take the advantage of the diverse forms of Sapphire’s figure (a stick man and a natural human form) in the comic, illustrations and the adapted Anime.
Left: the comic VS Right: the Anime
As you see in the RIP page, the figure of Sapphire gradually evolves from a stick figure, which only gives the most basic and vaguest form of a human, to a black-and-white sketch, to a chibi form (“a smaller form of an existing character, meant to look cute. Usually has irregular proportions, with a big head and tiny limbs” (Wikipedia)), and eventually becomes a “real” man in the Anime.
stick figure
black-and-white sketch
“Chibi” 
Anime
Building around this idea, suggested by a classmate in the MVP session, I also update the profile picture of the RIP page regularly according to the new pictures uploaded in the visitor posts.
With the choice of the platform, I aim at demonstrating that the Facebook memorial page is “a vehicle for reconstructing, rehabilitating, and maintaining a postmodern identity in collective memory” (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, 154). In order words, because the Facebook memorial page is a place for distant survivors to present different sides of the deceased’s characters, the deceased’s image shown on the page will eventually become more complete than in a traditional family album that only shows his character in a singular environment.
Authenticity in online grieving
Nevertheless, does all the pictures of the deceased posted on his memorial page accurately show his identities? In the past, as culture critics Susan Sontag claims, “photographs furnish evidence” (1971, 5). However, as we discussed in class, in the digital age where editing and taking a picture out of context is only a piece of cake, photographs may have lost its function of proving ones’ personalities and justifying his actions. This problem may be especially serious when the person in the pictures is dead thus being unable to explain himself. When I am choosing the “photos of Sapphire” to upload in the visitor posts, I deliberately crop them so that the picture’s quality may be lower and there will be just a few Chinese characters or a part of another person left in the frame, but the English-speaking audiences will not be able to understand what they mean or what is happening in the narrative. By doing so, I intend to arouse the issue of online authenticity in my project.
<–What does this Chinese character say?
<–What are they saying in the speech bubbles? Does the survivor really tell the truth about the character?
Moreover, I do not give any background information of Sapphire or the story of the comic to imitate the experience of a stranger coming across this page who does not know the deceased. Inspired by the troll research by online culture scholar Whitney Phillips and the advice from my friend Abby Chan, I make a stranger’s RIP post with a happy background full of birthday cakes to question the sincerity of the “grief tourist”, a stranger whose condolence is possibly a “pathological need for attention” according to some RIP trolls (2011).
<–Grief with birthday cake background. Huh.
While grief tourist is only a special case of random grievers, in general, for a stranger all he can know about the deceased is from the posts written by the friends and family. Yet, as I argued before, the distant impressions about the dead held by different survivors make it difficult for an outsider, or even acquittances, to establish a “true identity” of the deceased when he is no longer here to tell the truth. Therefore, for the strangers and grievers, the deceased may become a nearly “fictional character” who does not have his own voice in HIS memorial page.
Deceased in the memorial page: “What am I?”
Memorial page is self-conflicting. It is established in the name of dedicating to the deceased, but at the same time, it is solely FOR the livings so that it only “symbolically belong[s] to the dead (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, 154).” To the strangers and grief tourists, the profile of an unknown deceased person is similar to a fictional character who is not real but only seen on screen. In some cases described in Phillips’ research, grief tourists may even respond to fake profiles created by RIP trolls (2011). My Haunt Media Project resonates with this irony and the blurring between fiction and reality by presenting a memorial page literally for a fictional character. On the other hand, for the survivors of the deceased, as we discussed in class, posting grieving comments is a one-sided action since the dead cannot respond. Ironically, I find this relationship between the survivors and the deceased in the RIP page is similar to the “one-sided” “parasocial interaction” audiences have with a fictional character in a television show whom, explained by media psychologist Karen Dill-Shackleford, they feel emotionally attached to although they understand that the character is not real and unable to respond (2015, 77). In other words, the survivors’ one-sided grieving posts to the dead’s memorial page can be understood as a self-satisfactory parasocial interaction with a fictional character. While the existence of a fictional character, argued by some philosophers, is “an artifact” or “an object” but not a human being (Thomasson 1999, 10), the deceased in the memorial page, or say the page itself, can be regarded as a fictional object without agency. This is why in my project, the page itself does not interact with any of the “visitors”, not even like any of the posts, but only changes its profile picture (its image) according to the survivors’ impressions. Sapphire, or say the page, never explain his contradictory identities held in the survivors’ minds because he/it has no control over the page. The way we construct an image of a real person by their words and actions online, as psychologist Nick Chater indicates, is no different with knowing a fictional character by their dialogues and actions in a novel (2018). For both a deceased and a fictional character, there exists no “true… [and] definitive interpretation” (Chater 2018), hence the survivors’ grieving and interacting with others on the RIP page is an act of not only “reconstructing… a postmodern identity” (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, 154), but creating and affirming our personal belief to the deceased’s identity. However, the true identity of the deceased can never be recovered by the online memorial page.
The analogy between a fictional character and the online memorial page of a deceased is the reason that, although the profile picture of Sapphire in my page evolves continuously and dramatically from a vague stick-figure to a more human-like, concrete and completed image, it eventually stops at the Anime version. It will never transform into a real person (there are cosplayers play this character, but I do not include those pictures for this narrative purpose) and exceed the boundary of fantasy and reality. In the end, despite being a platform for postmodern mourning, the RIP page may not be a true presentation of the deceased. Even if the memorial page really has an identity (this is where my project shift a little bit to the approach of messages from the dead with the last post by “Sapphire”), would it really be the deceased we know of?
Work cited:
Brubaker, Jed R, Gillian R Hayes, and Paul Dourish. 2013. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook As a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society 29 (3): 152–63. doi:10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.
Chater, Nick. “My Life as a Fictional Character.” Psychology Today, November 03, 2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mind-is-flat/201811/my-life-fictional-character
“Chibi” In Wikipedia. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi_(slang)
Dill-Shackleford, Karen, Cynthia Vinney, Jerri Lynn Hogg, and Kristin Hopper-Losenicky. 2015. Mad Men Unzipped: Fans on Sex, Love, and the Sixties on Tv. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/book/42096.
Ocarina. Beryl and Sapphire. https://ac.qq.com/Comic/comicInfo/id/536332.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16, no.12 (2011). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pages 3-24.
Thomasson, Amie L. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.