Distraction becomes all too easy as we are awash in the cornucopia of advancements spurred by the digital revolution. With eyeballs fixed to headlines about the next iPhone or pictures of crushes on FaceBook, existential questions can tacitly seep into the shadows. It is often said that nothing can hide in the watchful eye of the NSA in today’s database-driven world, but a few new things are born when the entropic force of time is abated even slightly. Death is a fundamental element of human existence, but it would seem that even the dissolution of existence into the sands of time can be partially abated.
While a best friend may pass away in the real world, their FaceBook profile, emails, game avatars, and other digital paraphernalia continue to live on in cyberspace. The mourning process is also evolved. Joyce Walker notes that,
Not only did the Web allow for the creation of both public and private spaces for the activities of mourning, it also allowed these spaces to exist in direct cohabitation with sites developed to meet other rhetorical goals (i.e., information sharing, news, and political discussions).
In other words, with a transformative medium of information exchange and culture creation comes a new paradigm for existence, mourning, and death. Cultural cross-politinaton takes place between political and personal spheres. These new modes of sociocultural interface were brought to the forefront by the events of September 11, 2001. For the first time, news and images of these events were disseminated globally over a medium that not only allowed for democratized consumption but also democratized creation. Lee Manovich considers this new form of interaction as “telepresence” describing it as
one example of representational technologies used to enable action, that is, to allow the viewer to manipulate reality through representations.
The key element of this new reality lies in its negotiability. People don’t have to experience these events and mourn them through one-way channels like television and radio (transformative in their own right), but they are able to actively participate in defining the life, death, and memory. Because this cultural exchange itself takes place over digital mediums in databases, these processes can themselves be studied and evolve understanding over time.
rysamuels
I agree with your claim that the key element of this new reality is negotiability. People are able to actively participate in defining the life, death, and memory of others over digital mediums. They have the power to change people’s lives for better or worse as they interact with one another in front of the community. For better, people can change the social persona of someone by various people communicating and having an expressed liking toward a person that can influence the community to see the individual the same. On the other hand, people can bully and ridicule someone causing society to look down upon someone for his or her short comings.
In the new upcoming film, “Unfriended” directed by Levan Gebriadize, it portrays a high school student committing suicide due to ridicule received over an embarrassing video of her passed out at a party over social mediums. After her death, the student’s Facebook is controlled by an unknown person who post news stories of her death. Then, six classmates, who were jealous of her popularity in school, decide to skype about her death, yet the unknown person uses the deceased student’s account to skype in and the person threatens the group by stating if they log out or stop talking, someone will die.
Clearly, classmates use social media as public ridicule of the student that causes her to commit suicide. Yet, social media is utilized against the classmates as the unknown person uses the social media of Facebook and Skype to frighten and kill the classmates in revenge of the deceased student.