*In my project, Reconnect, there includes a website (listed below), a complete text message thread (attached), and pictures of “the little black book” of information on victims and clients. Links are all listed below*
Artist’s Statement
Reconnect
Annabelle and Abigail Morgan were identical twins born on September 3rd, 2000. They lived with their parents in Denton, Texas. To each other, they were Annie-bee and Abbie-bug; nicknames that had stuck from when they were little girls. Both girls were avid social media posters and texted each other non-stop, they were the other’s best friend. When they turned 13, Abbie started to feel slightly off but wasn’t really sure what was wrong. It took her sister finally dragging her in front of their parents almost a month later for Abbie to realize how sick she was actually feeling. At the doctor the next morning, their pediatrician couldn’t figure out what was wrong and sent her on to a specialist to get blood work done. He figured that since she was showing symptoms like fatigue, easy bruising, and shortness of breath, she could possibly have low iron levels. The results of that test were devastating. The doctors sat Abigail and her parents down and explained to them about how in healthy 13 year olds, white blood cell counts should be somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000. Abbie’s white blood cell count was off the chart high. The doctors told her anemic symptoms were what caused her to feel faint and show symptoms of anemia, but the main problem lay in her inability to fight off infections because of the rapid overproduction of her white blood cells. Abbie had acute leukemia.
Annie was next to Abbie’s side for the next three years monitoring blood cell counts, trying to ward off infections, and keeping her spirits high in the tough moments. Abbie started with a few rounds of chemotherapy, but at 15, her leukemia took a turn for the worse and she began radiation therapy and was even put on a stem-cell transplant list. On November 12th, 2016, Abigail lost her fight against leukemia.
Annie was devastated, she had lost her sister and best friend and didn’t know how she’d be able to go through a day, a week, let alone a year without speaking to Abbie at least one more time. Annie was constantly on her phone looking at old pictures and scrolling through their old text conversations. Although they knew her sister was sick and getting worse, accepting that she was gone now was hard for Annie. Her parents’ full attention was now on Annie 100% and she found it suffocating to try and heal while under such scrutiny. Her escape was online. While surfing on the internet day, another user in a random online forum about grief sent her a link to a very interesting site called Reconnect. It prompted her to enter her full name, cell phone number, and email, along with the person she was grieving’s full name and death day. Annie was hesitant about it but the site promised she would be able to text her lost loved one again and reconnect. When she went through with it, she shakily texted the number that the site emailed her, hoping beyond hope that her beloved sister would indeed be the spirit behind the texts.
For the next two weeks, Annie was slowly more and more convinced that Abbie was the one she was texting. As the site said it would, those texts did indeed help Annie come to terms with her sister’s death, but it also disguised a terrible scheme of identity theft. Unbeknownst to Annie, the “Abbie” she was texting a culmination of a bot that had taken all of her online social media activity and turned it into a book of information, including phrases she was prone to say and pictures, and a real human on the other end of the line that was slowly gathering the childhood best friend names, first pet names, and other such security type questions. The Reconnect site was a rouse to get grieving people that were desperate enough to believe they were talking to their loved ones again and manipulate them into handing over countless sensitive facts about themselves and their loved one, allowing the makers of the site to steal the identity of the passed loved one. The turnaround was amazing on how fast there was always a buyer on the dark web ready and in need of a legit ID that could be used for social security number purposes, voter ID purposes, and a number of other things that The Makers didn’t really care to concern themselves with as long as the money was wired to them. In the end, this reconnection of a lost sister turned into her rebirth as a new identity.
Behind the Piece
The idea behind this Haunted Media project is a combination of four themes presented in Cohen’s Monster Thesis, Zarelli’s Dial-a-Ghost, Walker’s Cyberspace When You’re Dead, and Bonazzo’s Do You Need to Control Your Online Identity After Your Death. Everyone grieves in different ways, however it is more and more common in this digital age for grief to be shared online. Since telephones were invented, this idea that technology could reach beyond that of our physical realm, has been present. In October 1933, the first such idea was born that the human personality doesn’t totally die and that there are small pieces living around, just waiting to be found and spoken to (Zarelli). While this might have been an idea for the telephone in the early days of technological advances, in our day and age we are so much further advanced that it is not a stretch to think that we may now have found a way to bride that link between the living and dead through technology. According to Statista, 98% of millennials own a cell phone, 96% text, and 93% use social networking and the internet in 2014. Taking this information, it is obvious that two young millennials such as Annie and Abbie are deeply entrenched in this age where technology is a main aspect of their lives and time. It’s not too far-fetched to believe that in her young grief, Annie fell for a rouse to reconnect with her sister one last time through the use of something as normal as her cell phone.
In Bonazzo’s piece about your online identity, he outlines how an online account is a digital asset in terms of information that can be stored from your usage of that account. In most states it is illegal to access someone else’s personal accounts, but what about those who do not care about it being legal? Differing accounts have ways of knowing when a loved one as passed on, such as Facebook moving the page to an inactive account and gives your ‘legacy’ managing duties of your page. This doesn’t delete any content online, merely holds captive for anyone to find. This got me thinking how this information could be used maliciously in Reconnect.
According to Cohen, a monster in the horror genre encapsulates seven basic thesis. Of these seven, about five are used to outline the ideals behind my ‘monster’ in the piece Reconnect. (To be clear, the monster is the person on the other end of the text conversation and the one selling the dead identities to buyers on the dark net). The five that are used to form this monster from Cohen’s monster theory are: The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body, The Monster Always Escapes, The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference, The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible, and Fear of the Monster is really a Kind of Desire. Reconnect’s monster form is one of an online participant in chat rooms and a speaker for the dead using their social media history. By using such a culturally relevant method of communicating is the first step to the digital age’s monster. Having an online platform as the means to communicate in the first place means that the monster can leave no trace if their technology usage is savvy enough and con therefore get away with no trace. Next, our online monster persona allows the victim to believe there is a connection to the outside world, seeing the monster as an Other being. This encapsulates the last three thesis in that our monster is a sign of the impossible happening (a loved one speaking from the dead), but yet it is just probable enough to warrant longing and desire for the phenomena to be real. Thus, the Reconnect monster was born to lure unsuspecting grieving family members or friends to talk to him in order to remake the dead person’s identity. In essence, this reconnection of loved ones leads to the rebirth of an identity for numerous purposes such as identity theft, illegal immigration, voting fraud, or organized crime.
This monster is only even possible because of what Abbie left behind; her sister and her online profile. Rob Walker cites your online profile and what you post as reflections of who you are and who you wish to be. This idea led to Reconnect’s monster to have its own bot that boiled down Abbie’s (and other previous victim’s) online profile into enough phrases and nicknames and such that the grieving victim was tricked into thinking there was still a bit of their passed loved one’s personality still texting them.
Ultimately, this haunted media project runs full circle when a death in real life can be remade through the internet and texting, enough so that a newly formed identity using Abigail Morgan and other passed names are still floating around and being used after her death. This use is a form of haunting in the digital age.
Word Count: 1595
References
Bonazzo, John. “Do You Need to Control Your Online Identity After Your Death?” Observer. N.p., 23 Feb. 2016. Web.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Thesis).” page. Web. Found at: courses.digitaldavidson.net/dig215/documents/monster-theory-seven-theses.pdf
“Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone.” Atlas Obscura. N.p., 20 Oct. 2016. Web.
“Media use among Millennials 2014 | Statistic.” Statista. N.p., n.d. Web.