For my haunted media project, I decided to create a realistic but fictional memorial website, called In Memoriam, where ten fabricated people died from a tragedy that never actually happened. I used AI-generated photos from thispersondoesnotexist.com and names generated from name-generator.org.uk in order to create these made-up people, and I randomly chose a residential building electrical fire in the (real) city of Fresno, CA on January 13, 2015 as the cause, location, and date of their deaths. I also used a birthdate calculator to determine the victims’ ages and a job generator for their careers, but used the names of actual schools and workplaces in Fresno in order to further the story’s realism. My website is an example of a grief-centric project, and it features an “About” page explaining the fictional purpose of the site, a “Guestbook” page with messages from the imaginary community, and individual pages for each of the fake victims relaying their birthdate, job and interests, surviving family, and more. I also included a few photos of candles as a nod to the “light a candle” buttons on some of the online memorial sites we looked at in class as a digital attempt to embody or convey physical expressions of grief and remembrance.
I wanted to create a memorial site for a fictional event featuring imaginary people in order to explore the connection between grief and online memorials in a way that would allow the viewer to reexamine their own ideas of communal versus personal grief. My project was intended to make the viewer think about the reasons people would create memorial sites for their deceased loved one(s), whether solely for one’s close friends and family to share memories or as a more public space where others can share their condolences.
In this same vein, Aaron Hess argues that “memorializing on the web is a unique form of communal and vernacular discourse. Using the internet as a specific form of representation, the commemorating webmaster enters the public domain in order to memorialize; this opens space for communal memorializing, but also hampers the commemorating individual’s ability to speak without barriers” (813). I would say that Hess’s last statement is true because, whether someone has created a memorial site themselves or is simply interacting with one through a message, comment, or guestbook, this interaction will always be one degree removed from, for example, speaking or praying at a loved one’s grave. This is mostly due to the fact that these websites are extremely public spaces, where anyone can go and view the profiles or memorials of those who are recently deceased.
On a related note, according to the article, “Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead,” one of the unique facets of online memorials is that “the Internet offers the ability to memorialise in a public place, where anyone can visit at any time, without imposition to others, and without interruption to themselves” (Veale). The immediacy and simultaneous public/private sphere of online memorials were some of the reasons I chose a digital format, rather than some sort of physical shrine, for my grief-centric project. Veale also writes, “So what can cyberspace offer memorialisation? Cyberspace lacks physicality but … can be a spiritual space. Several authors agree this notion extends to memorialisation practice” (Veale). The same is true for my project because the entire site is an example of memorialization without physicality, and potentially a spiritual space for the victims’ families as well due to the images of candles featured on certain pages.
Likewise, in the article “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” Connor Graham et al write, “We show that … online memorials mark a less bureaucratic, more individualised and neo-modern approach to memorialisation where the dead, once again, become part of everyday social interactions and so are given an existence. We also show that online memorials … focus on the immediate family. More speculatively, we suggest online memorials support the wider engagement of a grieving public” (38). These statements are true for my own fictional online memorial as well. For example, the site is meant to be a place for both the imaginary deceased’s immediate family and for the fabricated wider community to come together in memorialization and grief as a part of daily social (media) life. The “Guestbook” page in particular represents this, as it features a form for the user to fill out if they wish, as well as entries and signatures from made-up family or community members to add to the realism of the story. Furthermore, Graham et al also recount that “Web memorials not only mark resistance to the bureaucratisation of memorialisation and a move towards postmodern death rituals but … they also … support continuing bonds between the living and the dead” through “three types of memorial content”: a letter to the deceased, a eulogy or obituary, and a tribute (39). On In Memoriam, all three of these types of memorial content are represented. The letters to the deceased are featured on the “Guestbook” page, in the messages that the imaginary victims’ family members have written to their loved ones; the site itself and its separate pages on each of the victims function as both a group obituary and individual obituaries; and the fictional Meg Stafford’s guestbook entry serves as a tribute thanking the members of the community for their creation of the site.
Another point that Graham et al make in this article is that, “Rather than being a place of internalisation, of quiet contemplation, the Web memorial answers the question of what the bereaved are thinking and feeling, at times communicating ‘wrenching expressions of grief and loss’ (Foot, Warnick, and Schneider 2005) and showing grief as individuated in its expression and extent” (51). The same is true for my memorial site; both the “About” and “Guestbook” pages display community expressions of grief as well as individual ones, leading to a more holistic view of the online grieving process as a whole and a comparison between public and private grief.
In Mark Fisher’s article, “Approaching the Eerie,” the author explains the concept of the eerie as occurring “either where there is something present when there should be nothing, or when there is nothing present where there should be something” (61). Something that I found particularly eerie in regards to this project was the AI-generated photos of the “victims” because of how realistically they depict people who do not actually exist but instead were created by an AI that learns facial features from a database of celebrity faces and generates artificial face photos that become more realistic over time. Another aspect of this project that I found eerie was the act of creating a memorial for people who were never real, because it caused me to think about and wonder what sort of memorials might be created in the future, online or not, both for those people that I know and those that I do not. In the words of Fisher, “We are compelled to imagine our own world as a set of eerie traces,” and these eerie traces are precisely what the act of creating this project made me confront (63).
The process of making an online memorial was, at times, difficult for me, even though I have not (yet) had the personal experience of grieving the death of a close family member or friend. Sometimes I would catch myself looking on real memorial sites for examples of phrases to use or I suppose the word would be “inspiration,” and I would feel a pang of guilt for appropriating and perhaps even tokenizing the real experiences of grief that people feel every day when their loved ones pass away. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to create a fictional tragedy with made-up people, rather than basing my project around true events or real people, was to avoid the so-called “grief porn” that might come from focusing so strongly on the victims and/or perpetrators of a true event such as a murder or suicide. Another unexpected aspect was that I had a bit of trouble constructing my—for lack of a better word—characters’ identities and family members in a way that was simplistic, but still felt real to the viewer or reader. It was also somewhat eerie to me to be creating these two- or three-sentence snapshots of people’s identities, despite the fact that they didn’t actually exist, and it made me realize just how superficial and unrepresentative of someone’s full personality an obituary, online or not, can be.
In summary, the haunted media project provided an opportunity for me to delve deeper into the topic of memorial websites and how people grieve online, both privately and publicly. The process of going through this project also made me think on a more personal level about digital identities, and more specifically, the digital afterlife. My intention was to have the viewer think about these issues, and the reasons people create these sorts of websites to remember their deceased loved ones, as well, and hopefully my project achieves this goal.
Works Cited
Fisher, Mark. “Approaching the Eerie.” The Weird and the Eerie, 2016, pp. 61–64.
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–53, doi:10.1080/1472586X.2015.996395.
Hess, Aaron. “In Digital Remembrance: Vernacular Memory and the Rhetorical Construction of Web Memorials.” SAGE Publications, vol. 29, no. 5, 2007, pp. 812–30, doi:10.1177/0163443707080539.
Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead.” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 3, 2004, http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/.