As we become technologically advanced, we are inclined to channel our emotions through digital platforms. Whether it be uploading photos of a lost one or ranting on a situation online, these posts that we upload to the web become eternal. Our power to take back anything that goes on the internet cannot be done. One of the main elements of uploading things online is that it allows many people to live beyond their deaths. Specifically, one of the many forms that individuals have become eternal is through the use of social media in which their loved ones create memorials to remember their lives. However, social media had always this culture of following trends and seeking the new. Therefore, I find that such memorial pages to be less impactful today compared when they were heavily used on Facebook. Although some platforms still remain to use the network as a way to mourn death, the fact that technology is revolutionizing quickly creates this urge to create endless possibilities of connecting the digital to the physical space. In other words, technology can improve the ways in which we mourn on social media by creating platforms that push the boundaries of the physical by going beyond a touch on a glass screen.
To begin with, I will review the context of online memorials and why using social media to mourn is essential to my haunted media project. In Connor Graham’s journal, “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” he explains that the significance of the World Wide Web is to have online sites that can be used for commemoration and different kinds of support: emotional, informational and instrumental(Graham, 39). The power of the internet allows people to compose pages where the lives of people who have passed away can be shared with friends and create a community that pays respect to those individuals. These memorial pages not only inform the public on lives that have been lost but as well as express the positivity that those individuals had spread (). The positive aspect is that much of the focus lies when mourning is done online. Rarely do you find individuals post information that puts those in that have died in a negative light. For instance, in Whitney Phillips’s journal, “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online,” she explains that the tragedy of an American model named Chelsea King had a Facebook memorial in which individuals had posted their condolences and sympathetic comments on the page. Some of those posts had a similar tone of positivity in where Chelsea had left the world creating a positive impact. Some of those statements were like “heaven is lucky to have you, look out for your family, send my best. (Phillips, 1).” With this example, it demonstrates that memorials have the ability to create this emotional support. It creates a community where the internet allows people to connect through the death of an individual because they both have the same feelings towards death.
Knowing that these memorials connect individuals, I used an online social media platform known as Instagram to present the lives of firefighters who had lost their lives saving people from the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The reason why I decided to use the platform of Instagram rather than other platforms such as Facebook is that Instagram focuses on the image of individual experience. Therefore, using Instagram, I am able to create a physical connection to those posts and prevent further distractions such as other people posting on the page. Although Instagram makes my memorial page interaction limited in which people are only able to comment underneath each individual post, the focus remains on the image. The reason why having distractions on the memorial page was something that I was attempting to avoid is because trolling of memorial pages has become an epidemic on social media. The trolling of memorial pages have been viewed as a form of commentary about the way people have shifted the way they mourn and perceive death. Phillips explains that people that are trolling online force their “victims to confront precisely those things that motivate the popularity of memorial pages — fear of helplessness, fear of losing a loved one, fear of human parts” (Phillips, 6). The aggressive approach to death has been popularized by these individuals to shift the way of thinking about death to a darker comedic way. It is an attempt to make fun of death to a point where it can be made accepted through humor in order to ignore feelings of grief. However, the haunted media project that I have composed prevents such trolling memes to arise and limits people to post. It becomes more of a gallery memorial.
This effect of a gallery memorial further strengthens my goal of creating a space to ponder on the images of firefighters who have lost lives. Specifically, part of the haunted media project involves holograms. Combining the digital space to the physical extends the boundaries of thinking about memories. Michael Talbot explains that holograms are just 3-D photographic images that are created through lasers (Talbot, 1). For my haunted media project, I created an illusion of a hologram by creating an acrylic plastic pyramid that uses the reflection of images coming from the screen. Although these images are not true holograms, the illusion still represents a 3-D image that is not accessible in regular social media. The reason why I decided to use holograms as a supplement to the memorial Instagram page was to allow viewers of the page to engage with the images of individuals who have passed away rather than think consciously about what they will post as a comment on each post. In social media, individuals have a tendency of reflecting what they upload to the network because that information forever gets stored in the cloud of information (Abbe et. al, 2). Therefore, individuals perfect a post in order to not only be respectful to the related family members of the individual of the memorial page but also allow others to see what they have stated. However, using a hologram keeps a viewer engaged with a 3-D model of the individual and plus adds this effect of the eerie in which the image becomes an associate memory in what the person actually looked like in a 3-D aspect.
Additionally, another element to the haunted media project was the theme of firefighters that had lost their lives during the terrorist attack. The reason why I decided to use such individuals for the project was that these firefighters can continue to live to remind people that their service to the country does not go unrecognized as we get a new generation of people who were not alive during the incident. According to Susan Sontag’s article, “On Photography,” she states that photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow (Sontag, 17). Therefore, these images of firefighters came to be an engraved image that reminds these individuals that these people voluntarily placed themselves in situations that other individuals would not do. It adds an element of remembering these individuals as people rather than just a statistic of lost lives. Furthermore, the firefighters that had lost their lives during the terrorist attack do have a physical memorial in New York, yet many lack photographs of what they looked like. Part of death and funerals is perceiving death as aesthetically pleasing. In a BBC article that looked at Victorian culture demonstrated that these individuals were so accustomed to the death of a family member that they decided to take photographs of dead family members in order to remember their existence in the world. Although the photographs of the dead were a practice of mourning and memory, these individuals had made death beautiful by dressing up the dead individuals in fine clothing and jewelry. Today, we continue to take some of that culture by dressing up the dead in their coffin before their burials. Similarly, in my haunted media project, I found that the holograms would imitate this idea of glorifying death and perceiving it as beautiful. The images become the center of attention because it is transferred from this structuralized social media platform with options to interact with the photo to only looking at a 3-D image.
In the end, I found this haunted media project to be a foundation to the start of a new way or mourning. Often times people who have lost lives tend to reflect on the moments of dead individuals through photographs, videos, notes, etc. However, implementing technology such as a hologram would take this practice of mourning to a new level in which the 2-D space on your social media becomes 3-D. The idea of recreating those pictures and images and putting them in a 3-D presentation in the physical space would create a form in which people continue to interact with those individuals who have passed away in front of their eyes and space. Despite the holograms being more presentative of a ghost of those individuals, these images really allow individuals to engage with a physical representation.
Link to Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/9.11graveyard/
References:
Abbe E. Forman, Rebecca Kern, and Gisela Gil-Egu. “Death and mourning as sources of community participation in online social networks: R.I.P.pages in Facebook.” Volume 17, Number 9 – 3 September 2012
https://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3935/3288
doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.3935
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 37–53. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/1472586X.2015.996395.
Jessa Lingel (2013) The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief, The Information Society, 29:3,190-195, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2013.777311
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online.”First Monday, Volume 16, Number 12 – 5 December 2011 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115
Sontag, Susan. “On Photography”. Published by Penguin Books. 1971.
Talbot, Michael. “The Holographic Universe: Does Objective Reality Exist?.” (1991): 1988-2008.