To access the pages:
https://www.forevermissed.com/stephen-hillenburg/#about
http://www.qeepr.com/profile/StephenHillenburg/
Life and death go hand-in-hand together, no matter what. Borrowing the saying common in George R. R. Martin’s continent of Essos, “Valar Morghulis,” or in English, “All men must die.” It is certain that everyone you know, have known, and will know, will die. In doing so, we will all leave things behind: husbands and wives, children, pets, money, houses, trinkets, and more. Humans have, more-or-less, learned some effective ways of coping with such losses, methods that are employed all over the world, tracing back tens of thousands of years. Whether it be burial rites, a cremation ceremony, or a funeral at sea, we know very well how to handle the physical process of death and what to do with the dead. However, the practices get more complicated as they begin to relate to how to handle grief, bereavement, possessions left behind, among other things. When technology was simpler, and humans lacked platforms to easily and quickly share thoughts, stories, and emotions about the dead, as well as mementos of their time on Earth, the grieving process was much more formal and involved wakes, masses, and long periods of time and energy spent by a community to support those in mourning. As Graham, Arnold, Kohn, and Gibbs mention in their article on the subject, “the gravesite memorial uses its carved stone, inscriptions and position in place to imply a mode of relations that is modern, structured, objectified, formal and intransient: the dead remain spatially sequestered, socially dead and bureaucratised.” Now, with the advent of the internet, not only is the process of dealing with the digital footprint of the deceased a complicating factor, but also the internet provides a powerful, but double edged tool to help people deal with their emotions such as grief and sorrow. We use the internet to both ease and speed the process of mourning by creating an image of the person we want to memorialize that is “subjective, personal, and fluid” (Graham et al). In this way, we revitalize the dead by continuing to interact with their photos, videos, quotes, and stories, but we also distort the idea of the deceased in very individualized ways. I wanted to examine this dual nature of the internet as both a wildly progressive aid in processing emotions and supporting others going through loss, as well as a public space, susceptible to the whims of relatively anonymous users and domain hosts who might seek to cause more harm than good (or at least benefit themselves) in such trying times.
In order to analyze the internet and its role in grief and bereavement process, I created an online memorial page for Stephen Hillenburg, the creator and original animator/director of the hugely successful cartoon, Spongebob. Hillenburg passed away in 2018 due to ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease) complications, and is enshrined in most young American’s minds as someone who contributed greatly to their childhoods. These two qualities, his recent, real-life death and his notoriety make Hillenburg an ideal candidate for online memorials, and indeed he does have more than one made and maintained in his name. For my purposes, it was useful to be able to appropriate some of the content from those pages, as well as to imitate other, similar memorial websites for celebrities. Furthermore, I thought it pertinent to create my memorial page for Hillenburg using an available site that exists with the sole purpose of hosting online memorials.
In perusing my options, I came across a couple of decent looking host sites. The first I used is called forevermissed.com. I began to make the page, started adding photos, and then found myself cutoff by the paywall- this site wanted me to choose between paying $6 every month, paying $48 every year, or paying $95 one time in order to have access to all the features the site offers. I then found qeepr.com, what is essentially a mix between Facebook and LinkedIn, but for dead people. Qeepr offered full functionality of all features for free, but did not allow me to play music or leave candles or flowers for the deceased. This got me to thinking about the nature of these sites. We generally assume that websites exist because they generate revenue, even if it’s just enough to cover the costs. But neither of these sites have any ads. Qeepr will sell you a QR code that links to your Qeepr page, printed on a keychain that costs $70. Between that and the $95 fee for premium features on Forevermissed, I can’t see a huge opportunity to make sales. Given at least some costs for maintaining servers as well as continuing to control the domain, I would assume that both of these sites have sufficient revenue streams – but I can’t believe it comes from selling keychains with a QR code on it. So, it might be logical to conclude that there is another revenue stream for these sites, and it is probably related to the collection and selling of user data. However, this is pure speculation, and not a rabbit hole I have time to dive into.
Memorialization used to be a process only available to the upper echelons of society, important politicians, rulers, military leaders, and occasionally members of popular culture. Sometimes a family could memorialize a passed patriarch, but for the most part only very prominent figures could captivate the audience necessary to truly be memorialized. However, the internet has changed all of that, as technology is wont to do. With the ease of accessibility, online platforms provide opportunities for anyone to have a digital gravesite for as long as the host site stays up. As Kylie Veale puts it in her paper, “Online Memorialization,” “Memorials manifest online as a result of one or more of four motivations: grief, bereavement and loss; unfinished business; living social presence; and/or historical significance.” However it is important to note that these driving factors are only reasons to make the sites, and that it is only possible to have such a tool available to help deal with loss and grief because of the internet itself.
We can see common qualities of memorials in the posts on Hillenburg’s Qeepr site. Most often, we see people “invoking remembrance” (Veale) by harking back to their childhood watching and learning lessons from Hillenburg through Spongebob and his friends. Other times, there are posts that demonstrate commonality and kinship among visitors. The idea is that we are all in this grieving process together, and these posts serve as a reminder of that and as support towards and empathy with other mourners. The issue with the internet, however, is that while such offerings of empathy, kinship, support, and remembrance are quick and easy to share with the page, so too are messages of hate, mockery, judgement, and trolling.
On Hillenburg’s Qeepr page you will find almost as many trolling and grief policing posts as you will true memorial messages. These messages usually mock the dead or those grieving them publicly. The internet all of a sudden becomes a less appealing place to share somewhat personal feelings when you are vulnerable to ridicule just for sharing heartfelt condolences. In some cases, trolls get to work “within minutes of [the deceased’s] death” (Phillips). The ease and simplicity of access that is such an advantage is easily flipped on its head, and well-known deaths become occasions for meme production, attention grabbing, and popularity contests. As we shift away from long-standing traditions surrounding death and mourning, we have to create new norms in order to help guide us through grief, especially those of us experiencing it for the first time. As Meghan O’Rourke says in her memoir, The Long Goodbye, “Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say.” But now, we have come into a new space for mourning in which we lack guides and expectations surrounding what to do or what to say, and this allows for grief policing, or people telling others that they are mourning too much, in the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, these types of people subscribe to “the notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong” (Garber). While it might be true that many people over-perform their grief online, there is a time, a place, and a way to confront people about that, and grief policing is not the most productive method. These reactions to death, and subsequently reactions to those reactions, are just new rituals that need some time and practice in hammering out the details, the expected and accepted practices. Until they are more clearly defined or defended, online grieving spaces are going to be subject to some trolling.
Online memorials are complex artifacts of our technological time. On the one hand, they are the logical progression of the grieving process that is a communal experience of human (and not even just human) life and death. Shared experiences of remembrance, kinship, and support in response to a tragic loss are made easier, more accessible, and far faster in our modern age, and Hillenburg’s Qeepr page reflects these effects. On the other hand, the nature of the internet is vast, free, and open to input from those who might not agree with everyone’s personal but public expression of grief. The fact that anyone can sign on, make an account with anyone’s name, and laugh at, judge, and try to police other people’s feelings is also prevalent in Hillenburg’s Qeepr page. The abundance of trolls contrasted with the sincere, kind messages of remembrance and condolence is a powerful image, one that describes, but hopefully does not define our generation’s mentality towards death and the public expression of emotion. In the end, this digital memorial site illustrates the potential for progress, as well as the potential for more suffering, both brought about by the very nature of the medium. I believe that as we continue to explore the digital realm and become acquainted with its nuances, we can find ways as a society to continue to support each other and share thoughts and emotions in difficult times, allowing for free speech and not cutting each other down for speaking our minds. Truly, “all men must die,” and online memorials and other digital interactions with death begin to show us what comes next for those of us left behind.
References
Veale, Kylie. “FCJ-014 Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead.” The Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004): 1-18.
Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 12, 2011, doi:10.5210/fm.v16i12.3168.
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.