Author: grpecheck

Artist Statement for Haunted Media Project (In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips)

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Grant Pecheck

DIG 215: Death in the Digital Age

Haunted Media Project Artist Statement

 

One of my earliest friends at Davidson College actually was not actually a Davidson student, although I did not learn that until after the third or fourth time I met him. His name was Patrick Braxton-Andrew and from the very first day, I knew him as “Uncle Pat.” Uncle Pat was a Davidson College alumnus who ran for the cross-country team during his time as a Davidson student. Along with being a freakishly fast and fit person, Uncle Pat was also a phenomenal soccer player and being an avid soccer player myself, it was unsurprising that we met one another at a Davidson Men’s Club Soccer practice.

Over the three years I knew Uncle Pat, I grew to be great friends with him. I would see him at Club Soccer, on runs around campus, and would regularly have a beer with him at Brickhouse Tavern on Thursday nights. Uncle Pat was one of the most industrious, friendly, and motivated people I knew. He ran his own tutoring company, PBA Ventures, in which he facilitated tutoring opportunities for Davidson College students to work with local high school students in the area. I asked Pat if he enjoyed his company and line of work and he told me he was proud of himself for starting a successful business. When I asked him how the money was, he laughed and said “I’m living the dream, man. I run this company and it gives me enough money to be able to travel two or three months out of the year.” Besides being a great friend and athlete, Uncle Pat was an adventurer to his core and loved to visit South America and Asia, using the money from his company to self-finance cheap but incredible trips around the world.

When I saw that first Facebook post on October 31, 2018, that Uncle Pat had gone missing while traveling in Mexico, my heart sunk. I told my roommate who is from Mexico what had happened and where Pat went missing and he said that the area was not a good place to disappear, causing my concerns to only escalate. Things only got worse over the days as little information turned up and there were few leads on Pat’s disappearance. Then, just as I had learned that Pat had gone missing via Facebook, I saw another Facebook post and was devastated to learn that he had been killed in Mexico, about ten days after he first disappeared.

While I had a community of people on campus who all knew Pat and with whom I could grieve, I saw the entire experience of learning about Pat’s disappearance and death via Facebook play out before my eyes and watched as people grieved and sent support to Pat’s family via the Facebook page “Missing/Desaparecido – Patrick Braxton-Andrew.” When we were assigned this project to create a digital artifact having to do with death, I decided I would create a Facebook page to recognize Pat’s life and share some stories of him. In doing so, I was able to “digitally participate” in the death and subsequent celebration of Pat’s life, a phenomenon described in the article we read in class, Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning. The authors in the article describe how Facebook allows people to learn of a friend or acquaintance’s death from afar and still participate in the grieving process and celebration of life, despite being physically distanced from the deceased. When the Davidson community held an event in recognition of Pat’s life, I was unable to attend because I was back home in Los Angeles for a wedding at the time. Instead, through Facebook, I was able to do my own personal celebration of Patrick’s life and share some of the ways he impacted me and those around me, despite not being temporally or physically near him.

In designing a Facebook memorial for Patrick, I had a number of practical decisions to make. The first was whether or not I wanted to make this page public, private, or hidden. I decided that I would make the group private, such that any person would be able to search for the group and request to join it but I would control any content as a moderator. I was not sure if I wanted to publicize the page and invite a bunch of friends to it or just have one or two friends join. Since Facebook mandated that I add at least one person to the group, I added a couple of my roommates but chose not to publicize the page beyond that. Unlike many public Facebook memorial pages, I wanted this to be a more private affair, something akin to a “finsta,” or private account that many people use to publish more personal and less curated content on Instagram to a smaller subset of their friends and followers.

Another important decision I had to make when creating this page was whether or not to use Patrick’s real and full name. I decided to use an alias instead of using his full name of Patrick Braxton-Andrew for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was not sure how his family or friends would respond if they searched for any memorial pages for Patrick on Facebook and found the one I created. I was not able to find any information one way or the other about the family’s wishes for there to be a specific memorial page to share stories about Pat so I decided to err on the side of caution and not name the page after Patrick specifically. Instead, I used a random name generator online to create a male, caucasian name with a hyphenated last name. The ensuing result was “Brady Virgil-Phillips” so I named the Facebook group “In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips.” Beyond any concerns about Pat’s family or friends not responding well to this page, I also recognized the potential threat of online grief trolls, a phenomenon we studied closely when we read LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. In the article, Whitney Phillips interviewed a number of trolls, including “Paulie Socash.” Towards the end of the article, Paulie said that one of the best ways to stop and root out grief trolls is by making Facebook pages private so that administrators can moderate content and group participation on the page. As such, while I had already created the group under an alias for Patrick, I decided that making the page private would also help me insulate against the possibility of any random grief troll trying to post vitriolic comments and undermine my memorial to Patrick’s life.

While we discussed in class the very public nature of grieving on social media and the ways in which people will memorialize and share stories about the deceased in digitally public groups designed for that specific purpose, I decided to go in a slightly different direction with my Facebook group to celebrate the life of Patrick. As I said earlier, I made the group private, which meant that anyone could search for and see the group and anyone who specifically joined could see what I had posted in the group. However, after reading Logging On and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to Mourn, I decided that I wanted my celebration of Patrick’s life to be of a more private nature and chose to treat this Facebook group as almost a digital diary in which I could reflect on my memories of Patrick. In the conclusion of Logging On and Letting Out, Carroll and Landry talk about how social media sites serve “both private and communal purposes in the grieving process, and that as an aggregate they can form an important narrative of and for a person’s life and legacy as a type of memory.” This captures the essence of what I wanted from “In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips:” a private use of social media as a digital archive in which I could share the interactions I had with Patrick and the things I knew to be true about him as a way to construct his legacy in my mind. I could add people to the group and share my stories and memories of him if I wanted but for the most part, my goal was to digitally archive and celebrate Patrick in a private manner. In doing so, I chose to spend about a week filling out the page with personal stories, photos, and memories of Patrick. All of these entries celebrated the quintessential elements of Patrick’s personality such as his kind-natured soul, his love of travel, and his incredible athleticism.

In reflecting on the experience, I found the process of digitally memorializing Patrick to be cathartic and generally uplifting. Given that Patrick passed five months ago, I have come to terms with his passing, so this exercise was not so much a way for me to grieve as it was a fond remembrance of Patrick and a celebration of all the wonderful things he brought to my life and the lives of those who knew him. I consider Patrick to be one of the best people I ever had the pleasure of knowing and this project was a way for me to cement my understanding of Pat as a community-oriented and caring role model that all of us could look up to. As a result of learning about the remarkably varied uses of social media to help us grieve or celebrate the lives of those who pass on, I found that my project, a mostly private and personalized memorial to Patrick, proved to be a touching way to remember the life of one of the best people I ever knew at Davidson.

Link to the page “In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips”
The page’s privacy settings are private so request access and I will approve the request to join ASAP. The reasons for making the page private are explained above in the artist statement.

 

Works 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.” Information Society 29 (3): 152–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.

Carroll, Brian, and Katie Landry. 2010. “Logging On and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to Mourn.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30 (5): 341–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610380006.

Phillips, Whitney. 2011. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16 (12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i12.3168.

 

Yes, There Should Be a “Right to Be Forgotten”

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Google needs to stop complaining. They already engage in a number of unethical data practices (in my estimation) such as selling off your data and search results to companies who then target you with ads. They also are in the process of feeding incredible amounts of data from the internet to its artificial intelligence programs. They are a for-profit business, and while I do not see an issue with that, they also should stop complaining when people ask them to consider taking down non-germane, old, and unflattering search results.

 

One of our articles for class Friday, “What Happens to Your Data When You Die?” talks about how the Supreme Court of the EU ruled that individuals have a “right to be forgotten” and that Google is, in fact, responsible not only for the data that comes up in results but the order in which that data appears as well. Google claims they are just a “card catalog,” but the article dismantles that claim and the misleading neutrality of that term. Even if they are just a catalog or newsstand, Google and its algorithms still determine the order in which results are presented. To claim that they or their results are value-neutral is laughable.

 

Google acts as if its some backbreaking imposition to have to review individual complaints or requests for certain search results to be removed or scrubbed. Given how much Google takes from us (the article describes the relationship between Google and users as “feudal”) I hardly think it is too much to ask of Google for it to consider taking down unflattering results that fall under the “right to be forgotten.” Data under that category is defined by the EU Supreme Court as “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant.”

 

As we are living in an era in which one single tweet or post among the thousands we have generated over the course of our lives can end our careers or decimate our social standing, I believe those who have learned from their mistakes or whose mistakes happened so long ago that they no longer matter should be able to move along with their lives. Courts expunge criminal records all the time. Google should do the same. The decision to request a search result be removed still requires initiative from an individual who is displeased with said search result. I do not believe we should force Google to review all of its search results and determine which deserve to be eliminated under the “right to be forgotten.” That would be an unfair task, and, for all intents and purposes, it would be impossible. Nevertheless, if a user submits a request for Google to review a search result and asks that they consider removing it, that is more than reasonable in my estimation. Google takes far more from us than it gives back. The right to be forgotten is a necessary first step in rectifying that imbalance.

People Are Immortalizing Their Loved Ones…..in Teddy Bears?

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For the last two to three weeks, we have been discussing “haunted” media, as well as attempts to immortalize ourselves through technology. Since the creation of the phonograph and telephone, human beings have been consistently trying to communicate with the dead or preserve themselves after they die through the use of technology. We have thus far covered Edison’s spirit phone, voice recordings, photographs, and even modern and science fiction attempts to recreate ourselves through AI and robots on Black Mirror. However, there is a more innocuous and heartwarming yet still slightly creepy way in which people today are preserving and “communicating” with their loved ones: stuffed animals.

 

Yes, stuffed animals. Every now and then, I’ll happen across an article on my feed or timeline that shows a heartwarming video of someone listening to a loved one’s voice that has been installed in a Build-a-Bear. Usually, the people take a voice recording of a lost grandparent, parent, or child from a video or voicemail, and Build-a-Bear is able to install that recording on one of the voiceboxes for its stuffed animals.

While the results are usually quite touching, I do find the preservation of some of these deceased people using stuffed animals to fall into the realm of the eerie. Of course, everyone has their own mechanisms for coping with grief and loss, and surely a stuffed animal is one way for people to hold on to some cherished part of the person they lost.

 

Nevertheless, I wonder if the reliance on these stuffed animals may actually be preventing people from dealing with their grief and moving past it. Just as we recommend people stop following their ex-boyfriends or girlfriends for a while on social media after a rough breakup so as not to ruminate, so too might we advise someone who has lost a loved one not to rely too heavily on their Build-a-Bear replacement lest it becomes an emotional crutch and prevent them from dealing with their grief in a healthy manner.

 

I always think of the scenes from Breaking Bad where Jesse continues to call and listen to the voicemail of his deceased girlfriend as an example of how technology, while preserving the memories or voices of those we lost, can keep us from dealing with our sorrow in a healthy way.

Again, while we may continually try to immortalize ourselves or speak to those we have lost through various forms of media, we would do well to not let those efforts distract us from coping with our grief or living in the present.

Immortality through Technology Has Always Been (And Still Currently Is) Impossible

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Having spent the last several class periods discussing Edison’s spirit phone, Be Right Back, and attempts at immortality through AI, I’ve come to realize that all of our attempts to achieve immortality through rapidly advancing technologies have been fundamentally futile. While we have been trying to use the phonograph, photographs, videos, and now even artificial intelligence to preserve and capture ourselves, none of these efforts have come even close to truly capturing our essence.

 

This is not to say that we can capture some elements of ourselves and indeed it is becoming easier to capture more of ourselves as technology continues to develop. However, as Sterne describes the phonographic recording as “a resonant tomb, offering the exteriority of the voice with none of its interior self-awareness” and Rahnma describes AI as missing “context,” both hit on the essential failure of technology to holistically capture who we are in our entireties. For example, my roommates and I went down to the Charlotte Fillmore this past week to see one of our favorite artists, Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals, perform live. Now, if you go on Apple Music or Spotify, you can listen to lots of recordings of Anderson .Paak’s songs, but none of those capture the joy and energy he brings to his concerts. None of the recordings capture the collective experience of seeing Anderson .Paak live and thus none of them have the self-awareness that Sterne describes. We see a similar experience with pseudo-Ash in Be Right Back as the AI robot version of Ash fails to impress Mar because he does not adequately capture the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Ash’s personality. What exists, be it a recording on Spotify or an AI robot of our dead boyfriend, still is not the same as the real, living manifestation.

 

Rahnma also outlines the limitations of the AI renderings of our personalities, explaining that the digital personas created by AI are useful for counseling but do not capture the context to be legitimate replacements for our actual living selves. The AI rendered persona of a CEO, for example, is still not capable of running a company in the way that the living, breathing human being can. All told, our efforts to capture or preserve ourselves through technology render versions of ourselves that could not hold a candle to who we really are as individuals. Certainly, our efforts have improved as technology has advanced, but even with the most advanced technology at our disposal today, we have still been futile in our pursuit of immortality.

Comparative Horror Analysis: A Podcast Report on Black Mirror’s “Playtest” and “Unfriended”

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Check out my podcast report on the Black Mirror episode “Playtest” and the horror film Unfriended

 

 

 

Works cited:

Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media (Reprint edition). Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2008). Cyberbullying: An Exploratory Analysis of Factors Related to Offending and Victimization. Deviant Behavior, 29(2), 129–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639620701457816
Pinedo, I. (1996). Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film. Journal of Film and Video, 48(1/2), 17–31.
Tryon, Chuck. 2009. “Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures, and Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video 61 (3): 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1353/jfv.0.0034
(Edited 3/7/2019 at 10:30 am ET to accurately reflect the use of sources in the actual podcast)

Dead Set Doesn’t Hold Back

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As upset as I was that literally everybody that we met in Dead Set becomes zombie bait by the end of the show, I have to say I really respect Charlie Booker and the direction he took this show. It is definitely sad that nobody, between the characters we were rooting for initially (like Grayson), those we came to love (like Riq, who made a badass turnaround in the final three episodes to shed his helplessness motif and become pretty courageous), and those we just loved to hate (like Patrick, ugh), survived. That being said, I was awfully okay with the fact that this show didn’t drag out the survival of characters and just killed off everyone in a spectacular display of blood and gore.

 

The reason I feel this way is because, for the first five or so seasons that it ran, I was a really big fan of The Walking Dead on AMC. In my estimation, The Walking Dead really set the initial gold standard for televised zombie horror. It was gripping, there were great but flawed characters and a solid plotline. However, as of today, I have not watched the show since my sophomore year at Davidson and I realized yesterday after its midseason return (which I did not bother to watch) that I do not even know what season the show is on at this point.

 

So what happened? Well, to put it bluntly, The Walking Dead got boring. It fell into an incredibly repetitive rut with the plot in which Rick and his cohorts find some new “safe” location that seems perfect, some evil person or people show up and create an issue, it all comes to a head in the final episode or two, one of our favorite characters gets killed off, and Rick and his gang escape to a new “safe” location. Rinse, wash, repeat. I know our current villain, Negan, seems to be sticking around but after four or five seasons of Rick and his gang running around, going on supply runs, and climatic end-of-season finale firefights with villains, it got repetitive and I stopped watching.

 

That’s why I have to tip my hat to Charlie Booker. He doesn’t make the show longer than it needs to be, nor does he have any issue with creating a depressing yet clear ending to the show. The conclusion of the show has me thinking about a modified conception of the 7 theses of monster culture, specifically the second one, “The monster always escapes.” I think, for Dead Set, I would revise that thesis to be “The monster cannot be overcome.” I’m no horror expert, but most “modern” horror I’ve watched has a sense of inevitability that the monster will always be lurking, and even if the monster is killed, the protagonists who kill said monster often deal with long-lasting effects of their encounter with the monster.

 

All this is to say that Booker, unlike the writers of The Walking Dead, embraced that inevitability of the monster’s immortality without boring us to death. So hats off to you, Charlie Booker. You may have written a demoralizing end but at least you did not let your show become its own zombie and leave us begging for you to put a bullet in its head.

Adult Merry Is a Bit of a Jerk

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In Chapter 14 of A Head Full of Ghosts, Merry (blogging as the web figure “Karen”) gives a great recap of many horror franchises, including lots of academic, thematic elements that are included in classic movies such as Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, and of course The Exorcist. However, beyond the analytical dissection of The Possesion and bringing in elements of the aforementioned horror franchises, Merry also seems to debate the entire premise of The Possesion, namely that her sister Marjorie was ever actually possessed. She openly questions that premise on page 92 describing Marjorie as “a teenage daughter going through a particularly nasty, devastating psychotic break, while believing (or pretending, yeah?) she was possessed by a demon, and a stereotypical demon at that.” Merry, as Karen, further casts doubt on Marjorie’s supposed possession at later points in her post, insinuating that Marjorie heard of the Great Molasses Flood and the song Gloomy Sunday at the library or via the internet, both of which are entirely plausible.

 

On one hand, it is possible that the conclusion of this book will show us that Marjorie was never possessed (lame) but was experiencing the horrific effects of what would have to be some extreme form of schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. On the other hand, given the absolutely unbelievable nature of the actual things Marjorie did in the past several chapters (speaking in gibberish or different voices, uncontrollable bodily functions, climbing on the walls and spider walking, anyone?) it seems to me that Marjorie might very well be “possessed,” if such a thing exists.

 

In any case, I believe 23-year-old Merry is being a jerk, both to Marjorie and to her father. Even if Marjorie was experiencing a severe psychotic break, she is still suffering greatly from a mental illness and while she has inflicted countless horrors on Merry and her parents, it’s hard not to be greatly concerned for Marjorie’s well-being. Merry, as Karen, even says so towards the end of Chapter 14: “We [the audience] are afraid for her.” Given that, it seems awfully calloused to me for Merry to just trash her sister in a blog post and dismiss her possession so readily. I’m curious as to where the plot will take us and if Merry will develop a better (or more legitimate) reason to be so harsh and bitter towards her sister.

 

Likewise, I believe Marjorie is awfully hard on her parents, particularly her father. I recognize the patriarchal tendencies and framing that permeate The Possession but even at age 23, Merry has not even come close to experiencing something so difficult for parents as being on the brink of divorce and losing your home when suddenly one of your children starts acting possessed. She seems to hold in contempt her father’s religion, describing his attempts at prayer with Marjorie during one of her episodes as those of “an amateur, a poser, a fraud.” Again, I am intrigued to see how the plot advances and if Merry has more of a reason to be so spiteful towards both Marjorie and her father. As of right now, she seems to look back on the events that transpired and attack her entire family which comes off as selfish and rude.