While looking over my posts from this semester, I realized that I usually wrote about things that intersected with my natural interests. These topics included literature, social media, and personal implications from the reading/viewing material. I think that overall my posts have gotten less introspective and I’ve become more comfortable speaking about the topics without relying on personal anecdotes. For example, one of my earliest posts was “How would I want my persona built after I die?” and my last post was “Can robots have ethical dilemmas?” (clearly, I also like asking questions in my titles).
A lot of my blog posts built on material from other classes I’m taking this semester. For example, in “Can robots have ethical dilemmas?” I discussed a reading from my class Time In Space In Creative Nonfiction with Professor Perry about the warping of time in life-or-death situations that applied to the ethical decisions that self-driving cars must make. In my haunted media project (not a blog post but still a post of mine on this site).
The most interesting thing I discovered when reading my posts was the connection from my first post to the last few days of class. I discussed how technology, or the lack thereof, can elicit horror. I wrote: “This desire to be less dependent on technology could play a role in horror movies. Soon, movies may soon be able to realistically rely on the setting of an isolated home that lacks technology. Viewers would understand why the characters would want to go there because they realize that it can be a relief to escape the technologically-saturated world.” I think that this relates well to Station 11 because that novel dealt with the horrors of life after technology collapses. This connection, and reflecting on my blog post in general, made me aware of just how pervasive the subject of death in the digital age really is.
Robin Marantz Henig’s article, Death by Robot, discussed the myriad of ethical dilemmas posed by those trying to blend the worlds of morality and humanity. Should Fabulon give their patient medicine to ease their suffering, even without permission? Should a military robot shoot someone because of the weapon it’s using, or because of what the person is wearing? Should a car on autopilot choose to hit another car or a pedestrian? The questions about self-driving cars seemed the most pressing because that technology was the closest to being actualized.
However, I think that the conflation of ethical dilemmas faced by humans and those faced by self-driving cars is inappropriate. Although John Seabrook’s personal story, Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91 shows just how much your brain slows down during a car accident, I think that the decisions a driver makes are mostly instinctual reactions to an unfamiliar situation. You have a split second to choose whether you’ll hit a barrier, a car, or even another person. Often, this probably isn’t even much of a choice, but more of a subconscious response where our own internal auto-pilots take over. This is much different than engineers or ethicists thinking about a hypothetical car crash and programming in a response. The difference is that the former is spontaneous while the other is predetermined. The former is somehow an easier decision to make and to live with than the latter.
In another vein, I wonder if cars were programmed to hit safer car models over less-safe ones, such as a Volvo instead of a Mini Cooper, if that would discourage people from buying the safer models. If safety turns you into a target in accidents, why not go with something that is objectively more vulnerable, but might be less prone to be hit in the long run?
A quick survey of recent works of true crime across multiple mediums suggests a growing interest in using audio elements. Examples include Netflix’s docuseries Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019), Audible’s audiobook Evil Has a Name: The Untold Story of the Golden State Killer Investigation (2018) and the podcast Serial produced by Sarah Koenig(2014). These all readily come to mind as examples of true crime narratives that rely heavily on auditory components and also enjoyed some sort of virality after being released. They all use voice recordings of first-hand witnesses to crimes; witnesses and accuses perpetrators alike bear testimony and get to tell their story in their own voice. Media producers are smart to use audio in their productions. Voice recordings create a sense of intimacy and immediacy and place the speaker in the room with the viewer/listener in an unavoidable way.
My inspiration for this project was threefold. First, I was inspired by the first two projects, which looked at some of the previously mentioned true crime shows that privilege audio, such as Evil Has a Name and Conversations with a Killer. Second, I drew inspiration for another project I did this semester that utilized the Makey Makey technology to bring photos to life with the voices of their subject. Third, I was inspired by some of our class readings.
One reading in particular, Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone (Zarrelli 2016) helped me draw connections between the projects that inspired this one. In that article, the idea of eerie technology that captured the interest many inventors 20thcentury, Edison in particular. He tried to create a spirit phone that would allow people to communicate with the dead. In many ways, his ideas about “chatting with ghosts” have lived on (Zarrelli 2016). In many ways, we’ve become more conditioned to hearing the voices of the dead thanks to modern technology that has us listening to songs long after artists have passed. In a more personal way, we’ve discussed in class how people often save and continue to listen to voicemails that deceased loved ones left then. These examples are less eerie than Edison’s original idea, so I wanted to use technology to make the phenomenon of hearing voices from the dead in a more jarring way. To do this, I turned to society’s most eerie people: murderers.
My Haunted Media Project is a mock museum exhibit about some of the most famous murderers, many of them serial murderers and many of them already dead. It’s an interactive exhibit where the photographs come to life with the voices of their subject. Touch the photo frame (in this museum, touching the exhibits is allowed) and you’ll hear the voice of the murderer himself. Touch all of them in succession, and you can make a creepy chorus of killers.
To do this, I used a Makey Makey. I framed pictures of murderers with conductive tape and hooked them up to various keys on the Makey Makey. Next, I found the eeriest voice recordings I could and used Scratch to link them to Makey Makey commands, thus bringing the photos to life with the voices of their inhabitants.
The Makey Makey allowed me to create a museum exhibit with an “enriched interpretive experience,” as discussed by Ruecker and Roberts-Smith in “Experience Design for the Humanities: Activating Multiple Interpretations” from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities(2017). Nowadays, interactivity is almost expected by museum patrons. People are used to having audio guides that lead them through a museum, usually using headphones. However, these voices that accompany patrons are often ones of objective authority. I subvert this by giving voice to the subjects of the exhibit, criminals who frighten us and we wish to keep at a distance.
This project wouldn’t have been possible without technology, which has the power to enhance audience experience because it operates “in parallel to embodied, material experiences,” communicates “expert interpretations,” and allows “audiences to customize” exhibits (Ruecker and Roberts-Smith 2017). In my project, the technology (the Makey Makey) creates an embodied experience by invoking the murderer’s physical presence though their voice. It offers expert interpretations through first-hand accounts, though those are of course susceptible to bias. The technology also allows the audience to customize their experience by choosing which pictures to touch, and how many times they wish to repeat the message.
Another piece of technology that this project relies on is the recent advancements of audio recordings. Preserving 911 calls and voicemails wasn’t always possible and was motivated in part by a court case 35 years ago that provided the precedent for them being used as evidence (United States v. McMillan). In addition to lawyers, media producers have also recognized and capitalized on the affordances of voice recordings. Podcasts and other recorded voice mediums allow for intimacy with the characters by putting them directly in your ear. As mentioned in Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations by Ewan Kirkland, many hypermediated horror will use audio elements such as telephones, radio, and cassettes. They provide an “economic means of conveying backstory… and confer document reality.” In addition, they use “audiovisual effects of technological breakdown as signifiers of a ghostly, evil, or threatening presence.” In many ways, my project builds on these same tactics. The murderers twisted personalities are quickly portrayed in their voices and they make the photo seem even more realistic by providing a more holistic representation of a person. They’re also a bit scratchy and hard to understand, which feels especially eerie because it contributes to the elusiveness and mysteriousness that murderers often thrive on.
I meant for my project to highlight the morbid fascination that our society has with true crime. Murders are horrific, gruesome, despicable acts – yet we are avid consumers of narratives about them. True crime novels, TV/movies, and podcasts have expansive audiences. There is even a category on Netflix specifically for “Binge-Worthy True Crime.” The idea that we would want to binge on the horror is ironic because serial killers are also binging on creating the crime that interests us.
Screenshot from Netflix
There are reasons that motivate us to consume this type of media, though. The first is the adrenaline rush. Horror, especially true crime, makes us feel as if we’re in a near-death situation and gives us the same rush of adrenaline as other thrills, such as roller coasters. We see it as an encounter with something life-threatening, and our body acts appropriately. Audio elements, because of the intimacy they provoke, only serve to heighten this.
A study by Vicary and Fraley explored different motivations of a true crime audience, particularly women, in their study Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers? (2010). One motivation of the audience that they found was a desire to learn survival and defense tactics. There is an evolutionary advantage to understanding a killer’s motives and how to protect yourself, and true crime often provides this, even if just by detailing how a crime was committed. Another motivation was a psychological interest in understanding the mind of a killer because they are usually suffering from an uncommon mental illness such as psychopathy. Interestingly, women, despite being the less violent sex, were more drawn to the genre. They suggested that this may be because women are more likely to fear being victims of a violent crime and therefore foresee a bigger advantage to consuming true crime. In addition, often the victims in true crime are women, creating empathy and personal investment in female audiences.
The museum exhibit, then, creates voyeurism of murders and horror that capitalizes on society’s interest in the macabre. It points out the morbid fascination by making it a focal point of a museum exhibit. Furthermore, it’s an interactive, performative exhibit that uses audio and the amicably-named technology Makey Makey to do so. The inherent playfulness in the technology’s name was also an obvious inspiration for my exhibit’s ironic and paradoxical exhibit’s name.
The visual presentation of my project was very deliberate. Obviously, a real museum exhibit would be much more extensive and could include many more serial killers and larger pictures. I was limited by certain materials (the amount of programmable keys on a Makey Makey, the size corkboard I had). I wanted to recreate a detective’s evidence board that connects photos of potential pieces of evidence with strings, creating a physical mind map of the investigation. Though the exhibit doesn’t focus on one particular case or investigation, I think that this remediation is in line with other forms of True Crime that try to replicate police operations. Often, interviews with characters mimic the style of when a suspect is questioned with a single spotlight and other tactics meant to encourage a moral judgment. Though the board is much more technologically advanced than the evidence boards I am remediating, I think that they show the extents that we’re willing to go to in order to understand a killer. I also think that creating a physical object that relies on technology rather than a wholly digital project underlines the inextricable ways that our lives are intertwined with the digital. Just like how our possessions must be reconciled with after we die, the digital legacies we leave behind can be just as complicated for loved ones to deal with.
In conclusion, I was inspired by the rising popularity of true crime coupled with the rise of voice recording in the media. I capitalized on the technological affordances of the Makey Makey and voice recordings to make an interactive museum exhibit that creates an enriched interpretive experience by embodying the subjects of the pictures that make up the exhibit. The subjects voices create immediacy and intimacy as some of society’s most abhorrent figures attempt to tell their own story.
Works Cited
Kirkland, E. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 115–126., doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.
Reucker, Stan, and Jennifer Roberts-Smith. “Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 259–270.
Vicary, Amanda M., and R. Chris Fraley. “Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers?” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 81–86., doi:10.1177/1948550609355486.
Zarrelli, Natalie. “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone.” Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura, 20 Oct. 2016, www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone.
Our class has explored how our legacy can continue after our deaths through digital technologies. Another example of this that goes beyond the historical time period of the digital age is works of literature that have been published posthumously. Many famous works, such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov were apparently unfinished or part of a longer series that was never written before the author passed. Usually, works that are published posthumously are done so without altering them, but sometimes others will step in to try and finish what the author started.
An author who feels that they may meet an untimely end before they have the chance to put all of their ideas down on paper can name a literary executor in their will, who is responsible for managing a deceased author’s intellectual property, and therefore their lasting legacy.
Waterstones gives six examples of books posthumously finished by other authors. Some authors will leave detailed notes about how they want the books to be published, while other literary executors are left to guess about their intentions. This reminded me of our reading, “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning” by Jed Brubaker, Gillian Hayes, and Paul Dourish. In that reading, they talked about the discomfort that some people feel about the “‘interactive digital tombstones” where the “deceased’s inability to moderate content presents a number of issues around representation.” Much like Facebook users who have died cannot control their digital legacy, authors are often in the same situation when their work is published posthumously.
Joseph Mitchell, photographed on Water Street, near the old Fulton Fish Market. Photograph by Therese Mitchell / Courtesy Estate of Joseph Mitchell / The New Yorker
Recently, in an English class, we read an essay by Joseph Mitchel titled “A Place of Pasts” that was published by The New Yorker after he passed. The editors explained that the essay was an unfinished chapter from a memoir he began writing but never finished. In class, we grappled with how to read this essay. Usually, we critique what we read in order to learn from it, but we all expressed discomfort about offering criticism on a piece that was unfinished. Not only did it feel like that would be speaking ill of the dead, but it also felt unfair because the piece wasn’t the final product that the author had intended to produce.
Posthumous publishing offers many parallels between the ways that we grapple with the digital identities of the dead. Literary works, like social media profiles, can leave a lasting legacy of a person that may evolve and grow beyond their death. How we talk about these things unavoidably forces us to confront with our own attitudes about death.
Interestingly, they are very explicit about their policies. On the page entitled “What happens when a deceased person’s account is memorialized?” they what the features of a memorialized account. These accounts don’t look any different from regular accounts, and all of the posts the deceased person shared will still be visible. In order to memorialize an account, living users have to contact Instagram with proof of death, such as “a link to an obituary or news article.” Instagram also won’t release the login credentials of a deceased person, but they will allow someone who proves that they’re an immediate family member of the deceased to have an account removed from the site.
I think that the distinctions between a memorialized account and a regular one are very intesting. Memorialized accounts won’t appear in the “explore” page, and no changes can be made to it (including comments and followers). In this way, Instagram seems to be trying to preserve the deceased’s virtual image that they curated before their passing.
Despite all of the procedures required to memorialize an account, things still seem to go wrong occasionally. The help page “My Instagram profile has been memorialized.” helps users who have been incorrectly (or morbidly, prematurely) memorialized by Instagram. Personally, I can hardly imagine how uncanny it would be to log in to Instagram and found out that you have been deemed dead.
Like most episodes of Black Mirror, what I found the eeriest was the sheer possibility of the technology in “Be Right Back.” The whole time, I couldn’t help but think that it would be nice to be able to pretend to talk to a loved one after they are gone, especially if the death was sudden. The sudden death of a young person leaves so much up in the air and it can be hard for the people in their lives to define their relationship with the deceased enough to mourn properly. Martha and Ash weren’t married (I’m assuming) but they were obviously very involved. Feeling suddenly isolated in the world, Martha’s desperation to talk to Ash seemed justified (especially after she found out she was pregnant – a nice touch on the part of the producers to further rationalize her desire). The result was that as I watched it, I really emphasized with Martha and didn’t think that the idea was that absurd until I saw just how horribly it could go wrong (which is probably the ultimate goal in the production of every episode).
However, the episodes seemed to date itself with the technology it scrapes to build a profile of Ash. If someone wanted to learn how someone thought, talked, and felt, Facebook and emails would not be the way to go. I’m formal over email and only use it to communicate with adults when I need information. Like many of my peers, I rarely post Facebook updates. Nowadays, if someone wanted to really get to know me, they could do so pretty well by scraping my texts. My generation constantly text/instant message each other, often about similar topics and with similar tones as we converse in person. The whole point of social media now seems to be projecting a person that is better than who you really are: more thoughtful, articulate, funnier. Intimate digital communication mediums are where true personalities can come across and that’s what I would like my persona to be built after when I die.
Paul Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts left me wondering how we were supposed to read Margerie’s character. Was she an innocent teenager gripped by a dangerous mental illness, or a monster living among us? In this blog post, I will evaluate her against Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses). All seven points and their summarizing quotations come from this essay.
Thesis I: The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body – “An embodiment of a certain cultural moment” (4).
Female sexuality is a cultural moment that Margerie is aware of and capitalizes on. She makes people uncomfortable by appearing in a sports bra and her possession often takes on sexual forms, such as in the masturbation scene (86). Margerie is also tech-savvy and uses the internet to further her creepy knowledge-base and our media-saturated society to try and expose her father.
Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes – “No monster tastes of death but once” (5). This one seems to discount Margerie as a monster. She does die, seemingly for good. However, in our technological society, dying is a complicated act. Margerie has stopped living and aging, but she lives on through mediated representations of herself (although, was the Margerie that was captured on cameras and will eventually be captured in the book is arguably not the “true” her but just a part she was playing). She also lives on in Merry’s memory, which at times seems almost obsessive.
Thesis III: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis – “a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6). Like other stories of possession, a Head Full of Ghosts relies on the of categories to create fear. The possessed is a female child, seemingly the most innocent example of humanity, yet they act in horrible ways that disgust us. Margerie also blurs the boundaries between sane and insane, well-meaning and malicious. She is a daughter, sister, student, devil, sadist, and family annihilator all-in-one – i.e. a monster.
Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference – “monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual” (7). As Cohen says, “the woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender roles risks becoming” a monster (9). Margerie is seen as too smart for “a girl like her” and is seen as aberrant because of this (179). Her mom, the fellow female, points out that a young girl is definitely capable of possessing her knowledge about seemingly obscure topics. The priests, however, are attempting to other Margerie in order to turn her into a monster that they can exorcize.
Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Border of the Possible – “the monster prevents mobility…delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move” (12). I had a hard time mapping this thesis onto Margerie until I focused on the line that stated that all monsters are living a “double narrative” – the one about how they came to be and another about the cultural utility they serve. Margerie certainly has a double narrative, at least by her own account. She claims that she wanted to pretend to be possessed in order to expose her dad’s real sickness, but the ending of the book suggests that she was actually sick, therefore her cultural utility was showing just how delusional and manipulating individuals can be.
Thesis VI: The Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire – “the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing” (17). Merry looks up to her sister and seems to have a complicated relationship towards her possession. She continues to love her sister for the majority of the book. When Margerie’s room became off limits, Merry snuck in while everyone was asleep, obviously unable to resist what was forbidden.
In a different vein, Margerie pokes at a weak spot of the priest’s: an interest in kiddie porn. After an episode that we assume portrayed a reenactment of Margerie’s violent masturbation and Margerie’s discomfort when the priest touches her chest, she seems to be aware of and resisting her own possible taboo appeal.
Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold…of Becoming – “monsters are our children…they ask us to reevaluate…they ask us why we have created them” (20). Perhaps Margerie was created to show us how technology ruins our lives, or how mental illness is a serious issue that can debilitate a person. She isn’t given the help she needed and everything went awry in the end, teaching us that money is not the answer, that reality TV isn’t reality, and that mental illnesses can’t be cured with exorcisms.
By Cohen’s definition, Margerie is indeed a monster, but I think that it’s important to remember that she was turned into one by society and that underneath of it all she was just a sick young girl.
At the end of Tasha Robinson’s article, Modern Horror Films Are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries, she raises an interesting point that what she has been describing may be eventually flipped on its head. As we become more uneasy with technology’s adverse side effects, she says that “maybe that unplugged phone or stolen battery will eventually be seen as an attempted helpful intervention for horror movie characters.”
This point made me realize how I’ve noticed a shift in society that almost romanticizes going without your phone. Leaving your phone at home when grabbing dinner with friends is seen as an act of loyalty. Resorts now advertise not having internet access for a rustic appeal. This desire to be less dependent on technology could play a role in horror movies. Soon, movies may soon be able to realistically rely on the setting of an isolated home that lacks technology. Viewers would understand why the characters would want to go there because they realize that it can be a relief to escape the technologically-saturated world.
Technology can also be disruptive and hard to ignore – things that could put horror movie characters at risk. When hiding in a closet from a murderer, the last thing that you want is for your cell phone to go off. A moment like this in a film could be terrifying, but also comedic in its plausible stupidity. Soon, a common trope may be for characters to put their phone on airplane mode to neutralize the threat it provides.
In the examples I’ve given, the developments that Robinson predicted do not seem as far-fetched. As society’s relationship with technology changes, horror films will have to adapt to stay relevant.
