One of the most identifying features of the millennial generation is its undying fascination with online connectivity. Everywhere a millennial goes, its almost a sure bet that there\u2019s a shiny metal smartphone in their pocket or in their hand. This technology is extremely new, however, so there was a time when these same millennials were not constantly updating statuses or posting pictures for the world to see. Instead, the device that connected these kids was much simpler: the flip-phone. I\u2019m sure if you think back to your middle school days, many of you will remember the first phone you had.<\/p>\n
That phone is very representative of a simpler time. The low-quality ringtones, grainy photos (if your phone even had a camera), and requirement to press a button multiple times to type one character of a text might oddly bring back feelings of nostalgia\u2014when the worst thing you had to worry about was whether your parents would let you go to a friend\u2019s sleepover, or if you could scrape up enough money to go see a movie with your first boyfriend or girlfriend. Although the flip-phones of the time were extremely basic in their functionality, they still served many of the same purposes that smartphones do today.\u00a0 The texts, photos, and even games are all still there, they just weren\u2019t as dominating in everyday life as they seem to be now.<\/p>\n
With this project, I decided to try to recreate a generic middle-school-aged boy\u2019s phone. This flip-phone comes complete with a Minecraft themed background, cheesy ringtones, awkward photos, contact list, and well over one hundred text messages, all acting to provide a snapshot of this boy\u2019s life in the days leading up to his mysterious and unexplained disappearance. These artifacts show how normal the kid was; he texted friends about video games, updated his mom on his whereabouts, has poorly taken team photos in his gallery, and the high scores on phone games are still saved. Presumed dead, his mother continues to text him memorializing messages, wishing him a posthumous happy birthday or telling him that she still loves him, with one of the most recent message coming in on March 27th<\/sup>, 2019\u2014what would have been the boy\u2019s 23rd<\/sup> birthday. In a way, the boy\u2019s phone turns into something like an extremely private Facebook memorial page that only his mother seems to have joined.<\/p>\n People grieve for the dead in many ways and with the widespread use of technology throughout the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup> centuries, many people have moved online to help them mourn the deceased. Cell phones are such a new technology that many people are still exploring the different ways in which they can be used to preserve memories of loved ones after they pass. For this mother, the continued texting is a private place for her to release her thoughts and grieve while not allowing external factors to potentially ruin any memories. The fact that it is a cell phone, not an online page, makes the space more intimate and better protected from trolls.<\/p>\n Just as Victorian Age families kept trinkets of memento mori<\/em>, the mother in this project memorializes her dead son by keeping his old cell phone alive (Bell, 2016). The photos examined in Bell\u2019s Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography<\/em> actually contain quite a few parallels to a mid-2000\u2019s flip phone in this context: both are able to capture a moment that is representative of a complete life, but more importantly, both can be used as tools to aid in other processes that the living who surround the dead must endure. As Bell points out in her BBC article, these photos became popular during the Victorian Era as a relatively expensive way to permanently record someone\u2019s physical image, helping families and friends to keep memories of the deceased readily available (Bell, 2016). The flip-phone\u2019s 21st<\/sup> century twist allows the mother to not only capture her son\u2019s personality through digital media, but it also allows her to keep a record of her own emotional reactions to his death in the years following his death, both in the short term and long term. Not only that, but the flip-phone also provides the mother the opportunity to maintain her son\u2019s character long after his death as well. Online memorial pages often times lack original information from the deceased, with a majority of the posts coming from friends or family, who post their favorite memories for the rest to see. In the case of a recovered cell phone, this is not easily done. The phone records exactly how the boy presented himself to the world, becoming a more realistic memorial of who he was while he was still present.<\/p>\n The phone as a memorial site also becomes a great case of what Michael Hviid Jacobson describes as the fifth phase in the history of Death: The Spectacular Death (Jacobson, 2016). The Spectacular Death is described as a phase where \u201cparadoxical tendencies [make] death linger uneasily between liberation and denial as well as between autonomy and control.\u201d The phone, in this case, seems to embody this quote perfectly. It is liberating in the sense that the mother is free to communicate with it however she wants, through grief, sorrow, love, or any other emotion. At the same time, however, it is very limiting in that it will never respond and will never change; it forces its reader to take the information as it is without any sugar coating. This is also what makes it autonomous, as the presence of old data is powerful enough to incite a reaction, while it is still controlled by the mother and father (or whoever is still making payments on the phone so it can receive texts). In another way, this boy\u2019s death has become a spectacle in itself, with the mother continuing to interact with that experience. I guess every project here has become a \u201cspectacle\u201d in a way, due to the fact that we are presenting it in a class completely centered on death, but the fictitious context that the phone exists in is also a spectacle due to the externalization of the mother\u2019s grief.<\/p>\n Lastly, the media by which this story is presented was also meant to reflect a more realistic setting that a few readers might have experience with. A story about a child\u2019s death from only the perspective of the child\u2019s phone could bring back experiences of when you had to endure the death of a friend, classmate, neighbor, or family member not only in the real world, but also in the digital world. I think one of the most natural reactions to this is to wonder what it must be like for the parents of the deceased. Dr. Grace Christ, Dr. George Bonannno, Dr. Ruth Malkinson, and Dr. Simon Rubin published a review, When Children Die: Improving Palliative and End-of-Life Care for Children and Their Families<\/em>, in which they begin: \u201c<\/strong>The death of a child of any age is a profound, difficult, and painful experience. While bereavement is stressful whenever it occurs, studies continue to provide evidence that the greatest stress, and often the most enduring one, occurs for parents who experience the death of a child\u201d (Christ, et al. 2003). The way it effects parents makes me never want to wish that on my worst enemy. It highlights how strong these individuals have to be in order to make it through emotional times, as recent findings show that parents of a child who has passed are more likely to suffer traumatic stress and emotional dysregulation than if they had lost their spouse (Christ, et al. 2003). The mother\u2019s texts to this phone may seem a strange way to cope with her problems, but it is simply what she feels she has to do in order to properly maintain her mental health.<\/p>\n Not everything in this phone is all doom and gloom, though. Take a moment to browse through it and notice the artifacts that the boy had left behind. What can you learn about him from his texts? What about his pictures? Even something as little as a contact named \u201cThe Fixer\u201d with no saved number could tell you something about who this boy was. Play some of the games he left behind, but be careful. Is it right to beat any of his high scores? Would that ruin someone else\u2019s interpretation of these artifacts? It\u2019s a bit of a morbid project, but I think it highlights the importance of these issues, especially as the topic is broadcast in the wake of each new school shooting, taking children away from their parents all too soon.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Bell, Bethan. \u201cTaken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.\u201d\u00a0BBC News<\/em>, BBC, 5 June 2016, www.bbc.com\/news\/uk-england-36389581<\/a>.<\/p>\n Christ, Grace H, et al. \u201cBEREAVEMENT EXPERIENCES AFTER THE DEATH OF A CHILD.\u201d\u00a0National Center for Biotechnology Information<\/em>, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Jan. 1970, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/books\/NBK220798\/.<\/p>\n