Blog – Page 7 – Death in the Digital Age

In some ways, control of one’s image after death seems linked to the concept of a digital will. A few weeks ago a friend brought to my attention the concept of a “Fannish Next-of-Kin,” a term dubbed by the Organization of Transformative Works in regards to their fanfiction archive. The FNOK can assume control of the deceased’s account after their death and execute whatever the deceased asked them to do, such as removing the user’s stories, orphaning them (removing the author’s name but leaving the stories up), or publishing the remainder of unfinished works. Like a person’s image, this form of digital will concerns the future of a profile, a representation of someone’s self.

Fanworks are more closely tied to the community in which they were created than a traditionally published work is–fanfiction writers and artists communicate with each other and with their audience more directly. Requested works especially belong, in a way, to the community–members of a fandom bounce ideas off of each other, prompt each other, and spin off other people’s works. Taking down someone’s fanfiction after their death erases the community effort. On the other hand, if a person doesn’t want their family to find their works, the community should be understanding of the deceased’s wishes.

When an actor or model participates in the creation of a piece, they are part of a community. We cannot claim full ownership of our image–photographers and editors have approximately equal investment in the creation of the work. But a digital will, which requires the subject to define how they see the future of their work, can be negotiated while the subject is still alive and involve the other contributors. We can’t make a blanket rule because not everyone has the same views on how they want their work treated.

Commodification of Death, and How to Deal with Disputes

Group E

jareynoldsApril 4, 2019

The articles from Wednesday, and particularly some of my class mates’ blog posts touch on the commodification of death in our society. It is clear that celebrity deaths more often than not lead to more ‘fame,’ whether it be more followers, more hits, or more streams. However, I’m not sure this is really so much a marketing tool, as Richy brought up, as it is an artifact of our digital society. While increased ‘fame’ for someone like Nipsey Hussle is definitely a good thing, he is certainly an outlier in this regard. Nipsey stood for a lot of things, most notably changing the ways in which we struggle to see eye-to-eye with one another, and he spread this message through his music and many other efforts. In the case of, as a random example, Mac Miller, he didn’t necessarily have such a stance that was worth increased fame. Of course it is sad to lose such an artist, but Mac Miller having more streams on Spotify doesn’t impact society in a greater way.

In terms of dealing with images of a person and uses of their likeness, I think that people’s likeness, including but not limited to cartoon renditions and physical images, should belong to them. In the case of dead celebrities, I believe that their estate should be allowed some say over how the deceased’s likeness is used. The problem with this is that its just not feasible, with the way the internet works, to fully control something like this. The way I see it, the estate should have the right to sue in cases of unauthorized use AND misuses of the deceased’s image. However, it is important that these suits aren’t carried out just for monetary profit, but rather to maintain a person’s image in their absence.

Further, to respond to one of Tess’s questions, I don’t think there’s a difference between calling them images or biometric data or likeness, but I see where the confusion might lie. At the end of the day, these are all ways to describe the same information that is unique to an individual and therefore carries tacit connections with that person, no matter what. Like I said before, though, I’m not sure exactly how this should play out legally, but fundamentally I’d like to think that I get some say in the way that pictures of me are used.

How Can You Come Back If You Never Left

Group E

kalebeyApril 4, 2019

Our recent readings and discussions have focused on the “resurrection” of dead celebrities; I find this premise intriguing particularly in how it contrasts living reactions to the deaths of the non-famous.

I’m reminded of when we watched the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back. We respond to events, like deaths, in frameworks of their relativity to ourselves. Martha in the episode, for instance, had a much more visceral reaction to losing Ash than, say, her sister did. Celebrity is built upon boosted amounts of people feeling connected to a distinct individual. The boundaries of that connection are not or perhaps cannot be designated except by societal opinion case-by-case, leading to transgressions.

Modern production, distribution, and media only encourages the relationships people feel they have with celebrities who usually do not know them individually. So, disruption happens most definitively when the famous person dies. The physicality of their relationship per fan never actually existed; it therefore cannot be taken away. If a family member dies, closure occurs in that those left behind cannot interact with that person anymore. When a celebrity dies, a fan can still watch movies, listen to music, buy memorabilia,etc. made by that person, just as they did before the death.

Thus, no boundary has been created, and celebrity deaths lose their grounding as applied to fans. It was odd when Martha, in Be Right Back, resurrected Ash’s voice and eventual body (sort of). Listening to David Bowie’s music after learning of his demise, though, was regarded as normal and in fact encouraged in reality. That example specifically goes further: Bowie’s posthumous music releases in 2016 garnered much higher listening rates as well as slews of comments about degrees of devotion to him and his work, attempts to physically connect with or to connect more than others with Bowie.

The absence of physicality in celebrity-fan relationships, as opposed to mere person-to-person relationships, fictionalizes them. I’d be interested whether more toxic behavior happens related to celebrity deaths or to more intimate deaths.

Group D

sumolinekApril 3, 2019

In this class we’ve talked a lot about “keeping people alive” through technology such as AI, but not so much about keeping the physical manifestation of someone alive. I think it is very interesting that the only time the physical (or representation of physical) body is important in remembering the dead is when the dead person is a celebrity. For some reason seeing the physical representation of a dead celebrity whether on stage at a concert or in a movie does not seem as strange as if that person where to be a deceased loved one. For example, in the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back Martha buys and interacts with a re-creation of her boyfriend Ash. It was really unsettling for me to watch how their relationship progressed but reading the articles about Tupac and Carrie Fisher performing after their death seemed very normal to me. I wonder if this is because we do not actually see celebrities as real people and are able to separate them from the rest of the population. For all I know no one has tried to create holograms of their deceased loved ones to have at the dinner table.

The other thing I thought about during these readings was related to my Haunted Media Project. In the tributes I found for Robin Williams one of his characters was almost always referenced and I felt as if that was a way for him and his legacy to be kept alive in the eyes of his fans. Maybe this is why it would not be strange to see stars like Carrie Fisher is movies posthumously since we don’t actually see her in the Star Wars films we only see her character.

Why Death as a Marketing Tool Is Not So Bad

Uncategorized

ritovarApril 3, 2019

Recently, one of hip-hop’s major icons, Nipsey Hussle, had recently been murdered outside his co-owned shop last Sunday. His positive impact on the music industry and his activism to help the poor socioeconomic communities in Los Angeles had made him a popular artist among many. However, the news of his death created a wave of people to immediately use his death as a form of advertisement. Many people have milked the use of his music in their YouTube videos or used his name in titles to gain a surge of audiences. In the matter of fact, his active Instagram has just gained an estimated seven hundred thousand followers along with his music gaining more streams. Although we see this with many celebrities after their death, some individuals have used the names of such artist to milk out as much coverage for their benefit and profit out of those margins.

Despite the benefit of using an artist’s death as a form of further exposure, artists that continue to live past their deaths can be beneficial to future generations. I find that many artists today are influenced by other artists who have passed away but continue to live in current society because their work is still used and distributed. For instance, young rap artists XXXTentacion who was murdered is still producing music and artwork under his name. Although much of the work that is being distributed is being profited by his family, his unique form of screaming rap has influenced other artist to borrow from his style.

If we take a break from music and look into films, Stan Lee, the creator of many superheroes including Spiderman, holds an essential role in Marvel films. There is this tradition where he appears in many films as an easter egg for many fanatics. In the most recent Marvel film, Captain Marvel, Stan Lee had made an appearance even after his death. However, the fact that his name was never used as a marketing technique for the film itself, many fans were curious in how the company would be incorporated and maintained the tradition of Lee appearing in the films. Therefore, this continuous act not only interest fanatics in how the film will incorporate Lee into the film but also highlights the importance of tradition with Marvel films.

Although there are benefits to the use of celebrities names after their death, the question remains of where the line is drawn to respect those individuals and when should celebrities stop being used for profit.

Parasociality or just sociality? Quotidian Occurrences of “(Estranged) Familiarity”

Group D, Uncategorized

kmwalshApril 2, 2019

Though all of the pieces we read for today have to do with celebrity culture, I’d like to move the focus of this discussion for a moment away from celebrity deaths. Predominantly because, when discussing parasociality invovled with phenomenon like holograms and the utilization of soundbites from dead people, I think we can apply these instances to more quotidian occurrences as well.

Case in point: the mutual friend. Many people in my experience accumulate a wide variety of “mutual friends” via Facebook, Instagram, etc, who they have never met, but nonetheless develop a somewhat tangential relationship with. We become aware of significant or insignificant moments in their lives, their political opinions, their food preferences, date of birth, etc. But the relationship is, to an extent, one dimensional. We cannot conceptualize their “humanity” in its entirety, because they are, and in most cases, will always be, a relational “photograph,” or rather, profile picture to us. Alexandra Sherlock dwells on the notion of para-sociality within celebrity culture, and the way this forms a continuity with Walter Benjamin’s anxieties regarding “aura” and “authenticity” (Sherlock 168). But what if our notion of a person’s “aura” in fact obliterates their entire material reality? How is “aura” defined? In relation to the intrinsic object or to the crowd-sourced perception of the object?

What I mean to say is, to what extent is our real presence actually not that significant in the grieving process for tangential acquaintances? Are we always mourning the holograms of one another if all we are, initially, is holographic to one another? This might be one of those theoretical worm holes that has no end of holes and no resolutions.
But perhaps my conception of parasociality is somewhat skewed. It’s a complex definition that is increasingly complicated by what we are defining as simply “social.”
When I think of the wide majority of my relationships now, many of them have moved from the explicitly social realm to the para-social.

Death for profit

Group D

tmsblogApril 2, 2019

The readings for Wednesday’s class reminded me of the central argument of my haunted media project: the commodification of celebrity death. Just as everything during the celebrity’s life is amount the money and profit which they can make, so is everything after the celebrity’s death. My Haunted media project spoke largely about how there are many theories regarding the death of members of the 27 club, suggesting that their deaths by substance abuse or suicide were actually a business move to capitalize on their fame at the time. While the readings for Wednesday did not approach this subject directly, they do address the fact that celebrities and public figures do make money after they die, and often more money than they made when they were alive.

While I initially found it off-putting that people were fighting over the rights to the images, voice recordings and catch-phrases of the dead, I have to admit I now do not find it surprising. In this capitalist society, in which everything is fast paced and money focused, people will turn whatever they can into a profit. In the case of Marilyn Monroe, the number of people claiming rights to her estate and/or aspects of her identity were numerous. Being that she was a public figure, who has survived the past half a century through video and graphics, Monroe’s network while she was alive reached thousands of people. The claims made by the children of Monroe’s photographers are only taking place because of the money involved. Without the promise of profit through media and market, I doubt these individuals would have come forward to claim something mundane. However, the value assigned to images in our digital generation is far too great to let it go without claiming the rights to someone’s image.

This brings me to two questions which I will leave here:

Who owns your face/biometric data? Does the answer change if you call it one thing or the other?
In submitting yourself to the public eye and the work of consumption during their lives, do celebrities not also surrender themselves to the greater public in death?

Personal Encounters with Facebook Trolls and Death

Sightings

symckennaMarch 31, 2019

I never knew the extent to how hurtful Facebook Trolling could be until I encountered this activity on my recent Facebook feed. Due to privacy and intimate reasons, I will not reveal the name of the deceased person nor the troll, but rather I’d want to explain more about this experience, and the immaturity strangers online have about the mourning of a dead person.

While learning about Facebook trolls in classes previously, I realized how important it was to understand the online memorials and how sentimental they are to the owners of the accounts. However, the idea of this type of memorial according to “Enter the Grief Police”, one of our readings from class, makes death feel cheap and artificial rather than genuine and really apart of our lives. By furthering this concept even with trolls on Facebook, it fabricates the death for not only the family, but those who are encountering the memorial and have a connection to the loved one who may have passed away. With this in mind, my experience reading the comments was very fabricated to say the least.

Online, the husband of the loved one who had passed kindly had asked everyone to respect his space as he takes in the hard events that had just passed. Naturally people are still going to comment and post in remembrance of his wife, but there happened to be more elaborate posts from random unanimous users describing about how she was meant to die, she did deserve the events that happened to her, etc. Fortunately, like the regulations read in class for Facebook deaths, accounts, and trolling on their Help page, the comments were immediately flagged and deleted by Facebook. Though these comments may be eliminated by the social media network, those words and thoughts will never leave the family’s heads, making the mourning processes even harder to recover.

In this circumstance, an online memorial was purposely pushed away by the husband to avoid such comments, but the trolls on Facebook are still present within the Facebook community. This accentuates the idea that online memorials are becoming more relied on for deaths, as well as the idea that there are still people out on social media trying to rupture the entirety of the mourning process, as well as break the community of this loved one down. Below you can click on the example similar to the one I experienced recently with Facebook:

“Internet/Facebook Trolls.” The UK & Ireland Database, 22 Sept. 2013.

What We Don’t Know: Life Before Death

Haunted Media, Uncategorized

mapageMarch 31, 2019

In comic books, “women in refrigerators” are the brutally murdered or injured love interests of male superheroes, characters used as devices that provide the men with motivation to defeat their nemeses (Simone). One of the most famous characters who has fallen to the commonplace trope is Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man’s first girlfriend and potentially his one true love. Gwen was thrown off a bridge in The Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1. Issue #121, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” and died not from the fall but when Spider-Man’s web jerked her upwards too quickly, snapping her neck. Her death sparked a massive change in comic stories, as the heroes were no longer guaranteed to win. Gwen is famous only for her death, not her life or character, and in my project I explore the pieces missing from her character, the things that would make her more real, and how her death erased what few pieces of her were not directly linked to her relationship with Spider-Man.

I staged an old phone to appear as if it belongs to Gwen Stacy right around the time of her death, including bookmarks in her web browser, photographs, social media apps, and health information. The pink-and-blue color scheme is meant to match Spider-Man’s iconic suit. Gwen was a science student at the same university as Peter, a choice the writers made so that the two would run into each other easily and not because Gwen had any ambitions (Gianola and Coleman 253). From her very first thought bubble to her very last, Gwen spoke and thought only of her relationship with Peter, occasionally interspersed with doting comments on her father, a police captain with the NYPD. A few months before Gwen’s death, her father, George Stacy, died in a fight with one of Spider-Man’s nemeses, and she was still in mourning when she died in the comics. At the original time of writing, Gwen blamed Spider-Man for her father’s death, a point of contention in her relationship with Peter Parker, who she did not know was Spider-Man.

Gwen’s Photos app conveys her story most clearly. In the beginning of the album, Gwen is pictured with Peter, obviously very in love. Then in December she abruptly begins taking pictures of places in London such as Westminster Abbey and the Darwin exhibit at the National Museum. She takes pictures in London for a month, including some photos from a lab there, and then returns to New York in January. She gets lunch with Peter, hangs out with MJ, and on Valentine’s Day we see her ready for a date with Peter. After that, they have pictures as a couple again. In March, she goes to her father’s grave and takes pictures of the flowers there, has dinner with her family the next Sunday, and does more lab work with Oscorp. All of this is to reflect what we know about Gwen Stacy’s life after her father died: she decided to break up with Peter and went to study in London for a few months before returning to New York, reuniting with Peter, and abruptly dying.

Throughout the whole album, Gwen is seen drinking and partying, two things not consistent with the modern depictions and memories of Gwen. Gianola and Coleman discuss how Gwen Stacy was transformed into a saint after her death, innocent and delighted by the beauty of nature, intelligent enough to work in a chemistry lab (258). The collective memory of Gwen is not so much who her character was as who the fans wanted her to be. In her first appearances in the sixties, Gwen was flighty, interested mainly in hooking up with whoever she found attractive, and partied frequently. She was vain and frequently jealous when Peter paid attention to other women. Gwen’s sainthood came with her death, much like how society tends to idealize real people after their deaths even if that person did terrible things.

The photos in the album, which have edited metadata so they have the same date and time they would if Gwen had actually taken them, are meant to contrast and augment the cultivated Instagram feed. Gwen’s public persona, and the one people are able to reference, is sweet, smart, and loving. She posts flowers at her father’s grave and colorful lab work; her “uglier” tendencies are hidden. Arnold Blumberg suggests that because the boys who read the Spider-Man comics were meant to identify with and sees themselves as Peter Parker, they were also encouraged to see Gwen Stacy as their girlfriend. These readers do not want to see Gwen as she was but as they remember her, a perfect innocent who could not be saved, a representation of first love lost.

The differences in how Gwen presents herself in her Photos app versus her public page highlight the second focus of my project: public and private data, and how those forms of data affect how we are remembered. Gwen’s party photos are kept where those who would grieve with her cannot see them, locked behind a passcode. Her Instagram profile, on the other hand, is open and visible to everyone. The cultivated persona Gwen presents through Instagram is another form of the “packaging” Sontag describes, arranging and preserving photos for the future (5). The Instagram album emphasizes the images Gwen was willing to show others, the ones that proved that “the program was carried out, that fun was had” (Sontag 9). Her Photos app similarly provides evidence of the places she’s been and things she’s done, but only for her and the select people to whom she shows her physical phone. After Gwen dies, her private data–phone calls, iMessages, iTunes, saved articles, and especially unpublished photos–are lost. Her social media profile would exacerbate the nostalgia that erased what few parts of Gwen’s identity that were not one-hundred percent connected to Peter or her father.

As I’ve implied through the last few paragraphs, Gwen’s Instagram page, or public data, acts as a memorial to her through which others (fictional loved ones or real-world fans) can mourn her. Instagram accounts, once memorialized, do not appear any different from a regular account. As time goes on, they remain a snapshot of that time before the person’s death. When I first created the Instagram account, I followed some accounts made by fans of other characters such as Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker, and Harry Osborn for added realism. A few of the accounts followed back, and several other people have also decided to follow this fake account. In doing so, they unwittingly created a network of the sort Graham et al. describe, a secondary set of mourners beyond Gwen’s family. I also used the account to post a tribute to Captain Stacy, Gwen’s father and the second man around whom her life revolves. The post is tagged with a cemetery in New York and corresponds with a visit scheduled in Gwen’s calendar, establishing a connection between mourning in the physical world and the digital world. Gwen’s memorial page, however, is purely digital and can be “visited” in whatever moment the viewer chooses. It also does not have the same weight that a grave does; there is no gray stone or cross to indicate that Gwen is dead and rests beneath the viewer’s feet. The post is meant to highlight the difference between physical gravesites and Website memorials.

This project is meant to be something of a critique of how female characters in comics have very little to them, but it was more difficult than I expected to create a true personality for Gwen and represent it through her phone. Because there is so little information about Gwen’s life beyond Peter, anything I came up with was pure speculation. The things my project lacks–conversations with other people, evidence of mourning beyond surface-level examples, evidence of Gwen’s ambitions and plans for the future–are the same things that the comics lack. In the end, I felt that sticking purely to what was expressed in canon provided a stronger basis for the project. Even with what little information I had, I was able to construct a trip to London, friendships with other women, and an interest in science-based art.

Representation of women in media has changed quite a bit recently, illustrated by the recent release of Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman; some things, however, have not changed. The Gwen Stacy of The Amazing Spider-Man series still revolves around Peter, still has no defined ambitions, and, most importantly, still dies to further Peter’s character development. What is the purpose of her death, when the shock value from the sixties has worn off and superhero stories are already dark and steeped in desperation? Her ignored backstory aligns nicely with the idea of forgotten data, the things we lose when a loved one dies. Companies like Apple cannot unlock someone else’s phone without a court order, rendering a dead person’s phone a useless brick of encrypted information. What pieces of our lives will be lost when we are gone, and will our families even know to look for what is missing?

References

Blumberg, Arnold. (2003). The Night Gwen Stacy Died: The End of Innocence and the Birth of the Bronze Age. Reconstruction. 3.

Gianola, Gabriel, and Janine Coleman. “THE GWENAISSANCE: GWEN STACY AND THE PROGRESSION OF WOMEN IN COMICS.” Gender and the Superhero Narrative, edited by MICHAEL GOODRUM et al., University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2018, pp. 251–284. JSTOR.

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.

Simone, Gail. “Women in Refrigerators.” LBY3, Beau Yarbrough, March 1999.

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, Penguin Books, 1997, pp. 3-24.

Digital Wills and Communal Works