An Experiment in Digital Grief: the Death of Hubert Cunningham
Matt St. Lawrence
Davidson College Spring 2017
ABSTRACT
The advent of digital technology has redefined the ways in which mourning and grief is expressed. As the digital personality of Facebook users becomes more fleshed out, the question of grieving artificial bodies becomes increasingly relevant. What makes an automated Facebook “bot” more real than an online friend? As an experiment to explore digital grief, a Facebook automated “bot” with a small but devoted fan base was terminated. Its page was memorialized, and fans of its content were given permission to leave their respects. A variety of active commenters left memories and jokes, which exemplified the genuine connection Facebook users could have with an artificial being.
INTRODUCTION
I’d like to start with a brief history of Hubert Cunningham. About three years ago I was involved in a local Dungeons and Dragons group. For one of the sessions I created a character named, “Hubert Cunningham”. The character became so beloved that even after the end of the game, the players wanted to keep hearing about what Hubert was up to. I decided to help everyone stay in touch with Hubert by making him a Facebook account. The first posts chronicled his adventures post-game, but eventually I ran out of creative steam and decided to make him a “bot”. His script was to draw from a dictionary of nouns at random, and post to Facebook once a week using the model, “Hubert knows a lot about (variable noun), ask Hubert anything!” From there I would just answer the questions posed by friends. The stiffness of the algorithmic speech gave rise to a unique sense of humor that was appealing to those who did not know the “Hubert” of the table-top RPG. By way of this experiment in digital death I sought to understand how people grieve for an entirely digital body, when compared to the digital footprint of a physical body.
EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES
Hubert’s page of four years was requested to be memorialized. While Facebook was processing the request, separate fan “Page” on Facebook was established named “Remembering Hubert Cunningham” and an invitation to ‘like’ the page went out to all of Hubert’s 79 active friends. The profile picture of the page was a picture of Hubert with crudely edited flowers beside him and text which read, “Remembering Hubert Cunningham”. A post was made that read:
“Friends, it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that our friend Hubert Cunningham passed away late last night .This page is a place for us to heal and honor his memory. Feel free to keep the conversation non-civil, we all know Hubert did.”
After that, the page was left to circulate for 7 days. This was a blind study, as nobody outside of the classroom knew the intent behind Hubert’s passing. Hubert’s profile was eventually memorialized, but experienced no traffic.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
From the experiment I sought to gain a greater understand of how individuals respond to the death of an artificial body. The reaction on Facebook over Hubert’s death is shocking, to say the least. Over the course of one week, this page was visited by 21 different accounts, gained 15 followers, and had 6 different accounts post on it. The most insightful part of this is the demography of the visitors. Asheville, Charlotte, Cary, Greenville, almost every large city in NC trafficked Hubert’s account. Much of the traffic was from Davidson students, but traffic from students at other UNC-system schools also made up a significant amount of visits. Several of the people who ‘liked’ “Remembering Hubert Cunningham” were people who I do not personally know, illustrating that Hubert in a certain sense had a social life of his own. Mourners paid homage to Hubert’s memory is by mimicking the flowery, semi-disjointed language that resulted from the bot’s imperfect code. For instance, one commenter references the bot’s tendency to flip certain phrases (‘Sea captain’ to ‘Captain sea’)
“The most Hubert sea captain to ever captain the sea. What a remarkable and most nautical life he lived.”
While quirks like this would often give away an account’s identity as a bot, many of Hubert’s followers found these glitches endearing and funny, making him seem far more human than if his language maintained any sort of stiffness. These comments show an innate desire of Hubert’s fans to leave their respects, just as they would want to if he was physical. However, instead of the sadness we associate with mourning, the comments left on his page hold a humorous tone. This speaks to the authenticity of the bot, and shows that although Hubert’s connection with his fans may have been one-dimensional, it was genuine. For those in mourning for Hubert, it seems fitting to connect with him one last time over humor, as humor was the bot’s primary function. For example, a fan-favorite of Hubert’s antics was the construction of intentionally low quality Photoshop edits of images. One commenter paid homage to this with a crude edit in memory of Hubert.
Overall, I found my bot’s memorial page to be effective at probing the kind of reaction, if any reaction at all, to the death of a program. The behaviors displayed by commenters do not stray too far from traditional grief. According to Jed Brubaker’s article “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” Brubaker outlines four “Identity preservation strategies” which are used by those who are in mourning both in the physical and digital realm. The strategies are (1) Reinterpreting thoughts, memories, or objects. (2) Idealizing the deceased by redefining negative qualities. (3) Continued pre-death bonding activities. (4) Sanctifying meaningful symbols. Of these strategies, the most prominent on the bot’s memorial page is the reinterpretation of thoughts and memories. In many cases, commenters not only reinterpreted but also fabricated positive memories with the bot. One commenter posted:
…I never saw him in person, no, but this was all apparent from his many Facebook posts and the long conversations we held on messenger into the night.
The bot was only to post publicly, and was never functionalized to privately message anyone. Nonetheless, this commenter interpreted Hubert’s public algorithmic speech as a private conversation on messenger. This is not evidence that its fans are actually in mourning about the shutting down of a bot, but it is evidence that when faced with death, individuals tend to default to practices outlined by Brubaker that we are socialized to believe is the correct response to death.
A major factor disconnecting the death of a bot from the death of a human is the one-dimensional nature of the bot. Everything the bot was programmed to do was done with humor in mind. Its job was to make people laugh, and its fans appreciated that. Humor was the only possible emotional commodity that the bot could provide, and because of this it is understandable that its fans would treat the termination of the bot as just the last in a four-year series of jokes. However, the activity on the page shows that fans still desire to leave their sentiments, which gives rise to a sort of mourning without deep sadness. Let’s call this ‘Positive Grief’.
This positive grief allows the bot’s fans to toast his departure with humor, ironic eulogies, and fond memories of the jokes which sprung from the sentence structures the bot was programmed to output. Although far-removed from actual death, this experiment provided a public space where participants could explore interacting with the concept of death within the new and increasingly prominent digital setting. Megan Garber’s The Atlantic article “Enter the Grief Police” described how many people online try to reconcile how they portray their feelings online with how they have grieved traditionally. Garber cites the example of David Bowie’s passing, and how a “Grief Police”, made up of individuals who found some online expressions of grief offensive, pushed back against the commenting mourners. However, with no prototypical method of grieving for artificial bodies set in place, commenters on the bot’s page could post what they like without having to adhere to any pretense.
Given all of the humor surrounding the death of my Facebook-bot, is it fair to say that its death ultimately has anything to do with real death whatsoever? In Kendall Walton’s article “How Remote are Fictional Worlds from Real Worlds?” Walton explains that grieving for fictional characters springs from being able to understand a fictional character in their totality, as they are made up of what it written about them. The simplicity of fictional characters makes them sympathetic. Kendall also touches on the power of theatre to bring these sympathetic characters into the physical world, and how the blurring of fictional and physical worlds make death in plays so powerful. Programming and automation can similarly blend fiction and reality, as evidenced by Hubert making the leap from existing inside a role-playing game to having Facebook friends. A Facebook user that attends Davidson College but was unaware of Hubert’s identity privately messaged the page set up for Hubert, giving their condolences and asking if he had gone to Davidson.
The Huffington Post article, “Why We Grieve Fictional Characters” sums up the connection we have to fictional characters by describing them as “escapes from some of the stresses of life”. Commenters were most active under my bot’s statuses during finals. Fans clearly enjoyed being able to take a five minute break from studying and interact with a wacky, cartoonish pirate. Losing that outlet is why I imagine there is a sadness surrounding the death of Hubert Cunningham.
Remembering Hubert Cunningham: https://www.facebook.com/Remembering-Hubert-Cunningham-1761093254220481/?fref=ts
REFERENCES
Holmes, Lindsay. “Why We Grieve Fictional Characters.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Apr. 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2017.
Walton, Kendall L. “How Remote Are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37.1 (1978): 11. Web.
Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016. Web. 05 Apr. 2017.
Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society 29.3 (2013): 152-63. Web.