Artist’s Statement
In discussing death and its relationship with technology, we devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to discussing how technology can expand the ways in which we both encounter and engage with death—be they via memorialized accounts, digital wills, or even cyber cemeteries. What we have not spent as much time or effort considering is whether technology can trivialize real-world death.
We have certainly talked about technology’s desensitizing aspects in discussing video games; it almost seems like an unavoidable pairing—violent video games and claims about desensitization. In fact, we read an article by Carly A. Kocurek (“Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games”) in which she focuses primarily on violence and attempts to mitigate that violence through dehumanization and the monstrous. Kocurek finds that a common side effect of these attempts, however, is desensitization to violence that echoes “long-standing propaganda strategies…used to justify real-world violence against marginialised groups [sic]” (Kocurek, 88). With her article, Kocurek cautions against the unquestioning acceptance of video games’ treatment of violence, especially as it relates to the finality of death.
In addition to the dehumanization that she points out, video games also exemplify the manner in which technology warps the impact and consequences of death. In most games today, death is not permanent (games that do have “permanent” or more consequential deaths or often marketed on those aspects themselves). Rather, it is a temporary setback, often even designed as a hook to get the player to keep playing rather than discourage him or her to quit. Some games even attempt to make death entertaining—coming in the form of everything from a simple fall in a Mario game or the graphic disembowelment of Mortal Kombat. A host of games even let the player re-watch or re-experience their own death like the Kill Cam in Call of Duty or the Super Meat Boy deaths replays, crafting that enjoyment of mortality into the core element of their games.
Other evidence applies similar arguments to other forms of media. With her article “Media Exposure and Sensitivity to Violence in News Reports: Evidence of Desensitization,” Erica Scharrer suggests that video games are certainly not the only desensitizing agents in our lives; television and films also do their part to desensitize us to violence, and, as relatedly, to death. She actually goes on to say that “extreme” forms of violent media—like horror movies or violent video games—are not the only contributors to our desensitization; rather, even “daily exposure…” to commonplace depictions of violence and death as seen in places like “ordinary news media outlets” can weaken our emotional responses to and perceptions of violence and death (Scharrer, 301-302).
Still, most news outlets tend to treat these subjects with professional respect and reverence. Newspaper and local news affiliates, especially, seem to honor their material by reporting appropriately concerning the topics of death or violence—as they usually intend to foster ties with the community and also only have a limited amount of time or space to which they can devote their coverage. Essentially, there are limits imposed by these means of “daily exposure[s]” on their coverage.
The “daily exposures” that are cable news networks are a whole different manner. These businesses unabashedly milk tragedies for all their worth, relying on them for steady income and viewership. Networks liked CNN or Fox News or MSNBC trivialize death by covering it on repeat and rehashing the same sad looks, phrases, and statistics to maximize their viewership.
But cable news networks are nothing new, and clearly not what one would call technological innovation. Instead, the digital successor to the “daily exposure’ of cable news would be social media. After all, what else besides social media and could devalue everything it hosts through sheer overexposure in the manner that cable news does. With social media, death again takes on the familiar form of entertainment as it did with video games or network news, also stemming from similar reasons. Like video games, death on social media is means of temporary form of amusement, whether it comes as a silly Darwin Awards-esque video or an article to get incensed about briefly, we always end going back to back to browsing through friends’ profile pictures. It is only on social media that an article concerning a group of students dying in a fire is essentially giving the same weight as cute puppy gif.
This devaluing of death was actually the motivating idea for my Haunted Media Project. At first, I intended to tell a story about death via social media—specifically a mystery about the death of a group of students solvable through hints dropped on social media platforms. I was hoping to represent the entertainment value of death, essentially seeking to amuse the reader with a story of death in commentary on the relationship between that media, the story, and the audience.
However, I encountered several problems with that approach. First and foremost was one of logistics. It was admittedly quite difficult to juggle all the accounts that I had intended to use—hard keeping track of everything, but even more difficult registering them, as most websites, especially Facebook and Reddit, require numerous identity verification steps all throughout the process. As such, I re-evaluated my goals, and instead strove to represent the desensitization to death that I have described above, creating a subreddit, two websites, and about twenty-four accounts to populate these digital spaces.
Rather than tell the mystery that I first set out to do, I intended to model the devaluation of death into a fleeting form entertainment via social media. I still kept elements of my first project idea, keeping the budding fictional metropolis of Springfield, North Carolina. I made a subreddit for it (r/SpringfieldNC), drawing inspiration from the subreddits of other cities (and other subreddits in general), and proceeded to populate that subreddit with a host of fairly vacuous posts, ranging from a post about an annual Police barbecue to an unanswered request for gym recommendations. The one relevant post (and fairly meaningful one outside of the protesting picture) is the one concerning the fire at the local university, sandwiched between a post about a hot dog stand called Wonder Wieners and a question looking for a reptile guy for a kid’s party. If one were not specifically told what to look for, one would likely miss that post completely, as there is nothing besides title that sets it apart from the other posts.
Clicking on the fire post leads the reader to a barebones local newspaper article that goes over the details of the fire in brief without really saying much requiring much attention. This is meant to parallel the kinds of articles that are often linked via social media sites like Reddit. Rather than read a detailed article, many users might read the headline or post title and go directly to the comments, where the article will often be summarized (either by another user or a bot) in a single line starting with the acronym TL;DR (standing for “too long, didn’t read). Or, even more helpful than the summaries, is the user that gives live updates in the comments about culled from Police Scanners, Tweets, live broadcasts—a user overeager to get involved in the gritty details of the events depicted in my project.
Here, the over-helpful user gives a link to the site of the university where the accident happened. This site is intended to poke fun at institutional responses to tragedy—especially those that happen via the Internet. Here the university offers up a relatively cold, formulaic response to tragedy that echoes the detached nature of its online medium—complete with a flickering candle gif for people that died in a fire. The help they offer is not quite helpful at all, and the site constantly links to error pages as the University site was not prepared to handle the traffic at the magnitude it was. Additionally they talk of hosting and moderating a group memory page for the deceased individuals, but there is very little headway made there at all, suggesting an overall disinterest in the grief of others.
Of course, along with the gung-ho white knights, there come trolls. We have seen the damage trolls can do with articles like Whitney Phillips’s “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online,” but, with the general devaluing of and detachment from death that is propagated by technology and social media, we also see can see a change in the trolls. As a result of that detachment, there’s less personal involvement (both from trolls and normal users) within the comments section of a post about death; in fact, sometimes even the users that are involved in the constructive (or at least non-trolling) discussion in the comments might still end up making a tasteless joke. Yet the divorce of the users from the subject matter and serious tone allow for those kinds of jokes, which are often received well with numerous up-votes on the site. Together, these elements are intended to model the devaluing and detaching nature of social media as it related to death and technology.
Works Cited:
Kocurek, Carly A. “Who Hearkens to the Monster’s Scream? Death, Violence and the Veil of the Monstrous in Video Games.” Visual Studies 30.1 (2015): 79–89. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16.12 (2011): n. pag. firstmonday.org. Web. 6 Apr. 2017.
Rogers, Katie. “What Is a Constant Cycle of Violent News Doing to Us?” The New York Times 15 July 2016. NYTimes.com. Web. 6 Apr. 2017.
Scharrer, Erica. “Media Exposure and Sensitivity to Violence in News Reports: Evidence of Desensitization?” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85.2 (2008): 291–310. Print.
Instructions