Pictorial Memorial: Time and Grief in the Digital World
pictorialmemorial.wordpress.com
For many people, especially millennials, a large part of our lives is documented only on social media sites. Digital photographs serve as the core of many social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, where images document every aspect of our day-to-day life from college parties and vacations to graduation and family birthdays. While some sites are working on ways to address what happens to these accounts and images when we die, such as the ability to memorialize accounts on Facebook, many questions remains about exactly what role these photographs might play in the grieving process when a person passes away. My project, Pictorial Memorial, explores the issue of how the digital world has changed the grieving process and its relationship to time. Time and grief are addressed in two distinct ways within my project. First, the website Pictorial Memorial offers products created from social media photographs of the deceased and offers an example of how our desire to preserve our memories of the deceased might be commercialized in the future. Second, the way in which the timeline of the grieving process might be altered by the digital world is explored through the made up narrative of one of the deceased registered to the Pictorial Memorial website.
Both of these aspects of the project center around photography because of the important role that images of deceased loved ones play in the grieving process. Photographs serve to keep loved ones who have passed away alive in a certain sense by capturing something of that person, if only in a particular moment in time. By preserving memories, photography, “enables the past to be recalled and reinterpreted” (Riches and Dawson 122). When families grieve, photography helps, “transform obsession with the single event of the death into a broader acknowledgement of the meaning of his or her life” (Riches and Dawson 124). Moreover, the ease and affordability of taking digital photographs with phones means that we visually document our lives to an extent that we never have before. Thus, when people die, many now leave behind a collection of images that may allow grievers to feel as though they have a more complete representation of a dead loved one than ever before.
The website I created, Pictorial Memorial, capitalizes on our desire to hold on to memories of deceased loved ones. Pictorial Memorial is a mock-up of a website where after a loved one dies you can set up an account and friends and family can import photographs from various social media sites. While the website masquerades as a memorial website to collect photos of a loved one in a single place and to create a community of mourning, it also attempts to exploit grieving loved ones. This is done through offering the services of a team of artists to create a variety of what I intended to be relatively cringe worthy memorabilia of their loved ones. While the idea of exploiting grief for profit in such a way was meant to be slightly uncomfortable, such a campaign did not feel unrealistic to me. For many, the digital world feels impermanent and intangible in contrast with physical photographs or other physical keepsakes. In the article, “Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos,” Daniela Petrelli and Steve Whittaker asked 16 individuals to give interviewers a tour of their home and discuss family mementos. The authors found that interviewees placed low perceived importance on digital artifacts (Petrelli and Whittaker 160). Moreover, the authors suggest that this is in part due to, “perceived fragility of the digital,” in contrast with, “a generic sense of physical objects as destined to last and in no real need of maintenance” (Petrelli and Whittaker 164). When a loved one passes away, we cling to whatever is left that reminds us of them. Pictorial Memorial is perhaps a little bit conniving in the extent to which it commercializes this desire but nonetheless offers those with grief a reminder of their loved one that feels more permanent than digital archives.
The other aspect of Pictorial Memorial that explores how the digital age has impacted the grieving process is through the saga of an invented person, Fred December. There were several important background details to Mr. December’s story that play a role in setting up the transgression of temporal grieving norms. Mr. December died relatively young and left behind a young son, James, with a wife, LouAnne, who he had met in New Zealand and had moved to the United States with him. After his death, Mr. December’s wife moved back to her home in New Zealand and took her son with her, thus separating the kid from those who knew his father well. Of the grievers who post on the memorial site, the one who appears to be most haunted by Fred’s death is the man who was with him when he died, Drew. This is demonstrated by Drew posting long after the other posters had stopped. Notably, Mr. December’s now grown son responds to Drew’s last post, offering an opportunity for the boy to learn about his dad and grieve for him with someone who still feels a similar sense of loss.
Here, Pictorial Memorial demonstrates how the digital world allows us to transverse geographical and temporal boundaries in ways not previously possible. In describing the temporal expansion of death in “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning,” Brubaker et al. write that users of social media, “continue to engage with postmortem profiles, sharing memories, and speaking to the dead (160),” far more commonly than before grief entered the digital sphere. In my example, Drew and many other mourners continue to speak to Fred for years after his untimely death. Brubaker et al. also mention how grief has been expanded in the digital world through removing geographical barriers (160) and how online grieving has expanded the social circles of grieving. Brubaker et al. write, “friends from multiple social contexts-work, home, past, and present-are collapsed together.” I demonstrated this in part by having friends from many aspects of Fred’s life share photos and even in small details such as some friends referring to the deceased as Freddy instead of Fred showing how people from different times in our lives know different versions of us. Moreover, the connection between Drew and James in the last post demonstrates an intergenerational and international connection between two mourners that likely would not be possible without the digital world.
I also intended to use the posts about Drew to demonstrate how grief in the digital world has allowed for the period of grief to be extended past when it might in more traditional memorials. Graham et al. compared the roles of digital memorials and gravesites in Australia and found that online memorials allow for grief to be stretched out (50). Graham et al. write, “posts were often very personal and written years after the deceased’s death. There is little sense that the emotions associated with these posts run through stages or reach some kind of conclusion” (51). Through the character of Drew, and even James, I attempted to convey the extent to which the grieving process may be drawn out.
This temporal expansion of grief makes some uncomfortable. Brubaker et al. found that several interviewees though that the manner in which death and grief had the potential to pop up in their lives every day was at times distressing (157). I attempted to incorporate some of this confusion about the appropriate timeline of grief into the memorial of Mr. December primarily through posts by Mr. December’s wife LouAnne. Her posts slow over time, and end as she remarries. In her final post she expresses some discomfort at continuing to share romantic photos as she moves on to a new marriage. While no doubt there will always be a place for private grief of lost loved ones, the former Mrs. December recognizes that Pictorial Memorial is a space where displays of grief our captured and shared with others and thus may not be as acceptable after a certain extent of time. Additionally, I used automated posts from the Pictorial Memorial team alerting Drew that the account was no longer open and products no longer available to purchase to point to the way in which personal grieving processes may extend past what others find to be acceptable.
I also found the idea of Pictorial Memorial to be an excellent platform to illustrate how the digital sphere has impacted grief over time because of the way in which it provides a visual of someone essentially being forgotten. This is demonstrated through the influx of posts immediately after Mr. December’s death, and how this slows over time with eventually just one or two folks posting. While obviously the lessening of public grief occurs outside of the digital sphere as well, the manner in which the place for grief is publically visible and confined to one spot makes it more evident online. In “Grieving in the Internet Age,” Falconer et al. consider how online developments have changed the grieving process from a psychological perspective. They go as far as to suggest that, “those in mourning could become upset if they feel friends are no longer visiting a loved one’s site” (84). This leads to what is described as mourners close to the deceased having to live through a perceived second death, as they watch activity and interactions with a dead loved one online fade out (84). I attempted to portray this to some extent with Drew’s commentary on being the last one left posting, and visually through the variety of names on the early posts, slowing to just ones by Drew at the end of the project.
While Fred December is merely a made up character, the death of people whose lives have been documented extensively through social media is commonplace. The intangibility of the digital world then makes grieving those deaths particularly difficult as it feels as though we lose both their physical persona and their digital one. I addressed the desire for more permanent mementos of loved ones through the creation of Pictorial Memorial. While I am skeptical of how much these mementos may really aid the grieving process, the opportunities that Pictorial Memorial provides in allowing loved ones to share in the grieving process in ways they otherwise wouldn’t is something I believe to be a very real benefit of online memorials. While perhaps a little cheesy, ending my project with the start of communication between Drew and James represents what I feel to be one of the best ways in which the digital world has changed not just the grieving process but our lives in general: it allows us to make connections with people that we share some part of ourselves with across barriers that are far harder to breach in the physical world than online.
All images used in this project are public domain photos.
Works Cited
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, vol. 29, 2013, pp. 152-163.
Falconer, Kimberly, Mieke Sachsenweger, Kerry Gibson, and Helen Norman. “Grieving in the Internet Age.” New Zealand Journal of Psychology, vol. 40, no. 3, 2011, pp. 79-88.
Graham, Connor, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin R. Gibbs. (2015) “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialization.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-53.
Petrelli, Daniela, and Steve Whittaker. “Family Memories in the Home: Contrasting Physical and Digital Mementos.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 14, no. 2, 2010), pp. 153-169.
Riches, Gordon, and Pamela Dawson. “Lost Children, Living Memories: The Role of Photographs in Processes of Grief and Adjustment Among Bereaved Parents.” Death Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 121-140.