My daydreams about this project were grounded in reality: I wanted to discover what information I could glean from the tweets by using skills from my computer science courses. Eager to flex my coding muscles, I jumped into the project. But I started running into roadblocks: I couldn’t get as many tweets as I wanted, I struggled with remembering the syntax of JavaScript, the data wasn’t as easy to work with as I had hoped. With the clock ticking, I mentally reset and reminded myself that this project is intentionally not grounded in reality. We’re supposed to take an almost-plausible idea, one that nearly fits into our reality, but add an element of the uncanny to it, something that makes us examine the object and shudder with relief that the world isn’t that screwed up. Keeping this in mind, I adjusted my mindset and developed Impakt, a macro-social media site that distills down a celebrity’s death to handful of figures to deliver one final reading of the social climate surrounding him or her.
The Impakt of Social Media Grief Competition
Impakt analyzes the millions of para-social relationships that Twitter users have with a given celebrity. This data analysis gives a large-scale representation of the impact a celebrity had on society around their demise. The obvious goals of Impakt as a “brand” are to make the user aware of the impact of a death of a celebrity, to highlight the para-social relationship between the fans and the public figure, and to trivialize death by making it another social media gimmick. As an art piece, its “goal” is to push social-media grief into the realm of the uncanny by further distancing users from the actual death of the celebrity and turning generating attention into a competition, valuing the quantity of social media attention over the quality. The cultural attention shifts even farther from death to trivial “here-and-now” things, like the Internet and the media. Sherlock suggests that these media “facilitate a new type of ritualized, collective mourning that potentially serves to distract mourners from the physical reality of death” (169). The deluge of images and messages in mourning and memorializing tweets provides a distraction for the Twitter user from being reminded of his or her own impending end. As Sherlock states, “to control the corpse is to control death, disorder, and chaos”, and so “a culture that promotes the notion of a symbolic immortality” would aid in distracting us from our own mortality (169). If we create a culture that minimize the finality of death by continuing to celebrate a celebrity after their demise, we cultivate the belief that we will also be celebrated and respected after our death, capturing a sort of immortality. Impakt attempts to enhance this mindset and take it to an extreme. By making popularity and impact a social competition, people are even more concerned about their image after death, and may choose to include in their will the hiring of tweeters or bots to preserve their social relevancy after death.
Postmortem Digital Identity
Yet, what role should be assigned one’s digital identity after death? What are the moral and cultural guidelines that the bereaved should be expected to follow? Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish touch on these questions in their examination of online memorials and the digital identity postmortem on Facebook. Facebook’s protocol when handling the passing of a user consists of “memorializing” a user’s page, which partially freezes the page so no new friends can be added and no personal information can be modified. Brubaker et al. argue this protocol “prioritizes the needs of a now-dead individual over the grieving community that remains” (161). The grieving community can post memories and content on the deceased’s wall, adding detail to the postmortem identity and creating a divergence between the pre- and postmortem identities of the deceased. Since the owner of the page no longer can filter the content allowed on their wall, survivors may take offense to posts or images added to the page by commentators (Brubaker et al. 161). Even the deceased might not have approved of some of the content.
The Do’s and Don’ts
How much control should you have over your postmortem social identity? What should the moral standards be for grievers and commenters? Odom et al. suggest paying attention to the “delicate social arrangements” surrounding managing these digital representations and not simply allowing a profile to exist with restrictions. Impakt places no such restrictions on the information displayed on the site: any publicity is good publicity. The philosophy of Impakt encourages tweets of any kind about the celebrity, with a weighting system that centers more on the sincerity of a tweet rather than the sentiment. Negative tweets (“Insults”) impact the algorithm just as much as positive tweets (“Compliments”) (see section “The Tunes of Tweets”). This reflects Walter’s idea of postmodern death, by which private feelings of the dying and bereaved are publicly proclaimed as a form of individual expression. Regardless of the motivation or sentiment behind a tweet, any form of grief in a public place does not ensure the same level respect that one receives by grieving in private. An individual has the right to express themselves as they wish in public, accounting for the repercussions of posting anything on a public platform.
The Tunes of Tweets
The tweets posted in relation to a public figure’s death run the gamut from insults to tweets of concern to impartial headlines. The categories used for Impakt’s Popularity Breakdown were inspired by Cutrona and Suhr’s (1992) five types of social support as described by in an analysis by Lee and Goh on Twitter’s response to Michael Jackson’s death. This scheme has been applied to studies involving online social support and so Lee and Goh adapted this scheme for the death of a public figure. I expanded Cutrona and Suhr’s five types of social support to seven tweet categories (names of the original types are denoted in brackets):
- Info [informational support]
- Emotions [emotional support]
- Compliments [esteem support]
- Connects [network support]
- Rumors
- Insults
- Other
The categories are explained on the Impakt FAQ page. The tweets regarding Michael Jackson were primarily info (46%), with emotions being the second greatest proportion of the tweets (23%). Through during their study of Michael Jackson’s death, Lee and Goh discovered “categories not normally associated with grieving, such as spreading of rumors, expressions of hatred, and spam, also occupied a large proportion of tweets” – nearly 30% (rumors, insults, and other). The authors suggested that these contributors took advantage of the high Twitter traffic “for a variety of purposes such as spreading rumors, spamming, marketing, and advertising” (473). I emulated these results in the Popularity Breakdown section of Impakt. For most the tweets, they “seemed more like personal and social expressions of emotions and thoughts” with no response necessary from other users, like a condolence book (Lee and Goh 473).
The Nature of the Bird
Twitter’s public, event-driven nature, and 140-character restriction requires tweets to be deliberate, timely, and pithy. These characteristics make it a perfect metric for examining the effects of major events, providing “insight into traumatic events and experiences and elucidate how youth view the world, self, and others from the perspective of youth tweeting about social events and experiences they deem significant and important in their lives. (Patton et al. 229) Even more ideal when dealing with public figures is how commonplace tweeting has become for them to use to interact with their fans. While a celebrity is alive, their Twitter page is a critical part of maintaining para-social relationships and thus is an intuitive medium to turn to when expressing sentiment toward the celebrity. Although Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites are typically centers for lighter content, people engaging with content on these sites “often alter and modify the original intent of software to fulfill a need or desire” (Patton et al. 229). Patton explains that the Internet can ease that need to commune with other mourners and “strengthen group bonds by allowing users to share experiences of mourning… and memorialize the deceased with the use of text, photographs, music…” (Patton et al. 228). The online community also has the side effect of popularizing someone’s death, drawing more publicity than a news story or obituary would have generated. Patton et al. examined a case study of a young woman in a gang who was killed and noted “the public may never have known about Gakirah’s story without the communication capabilities of social media. In the pre-Twitter era, she might have been a name in a back-page newspaper story” (238). This attention may have positive repercussions (e.g. another source of outlet and support for mourners) or attract negative commenters (e.g. RIP trolls or advertisers). For better or worse, Twitter is public. If you wish to keep your mourning private, don’t post on Twitter. Alternatively, online memorializing can provide support and community for geographically-restricted groups so sharing online may help you find a connection and ease the grieving process.
The takeaway
Currently, grieving on social media is still weird, but so is mourning someone you never met. As we’ve seen, the peculiarities of Twitter lend itself oddly well to mourning celebrities and other para-social relationships. Yet the idea and culture surrounding mourning on social media haven’t quite settled into acceptable norms. I challenged the idea of what could be deemed appropriate via Impakt, essentially making celebrity deaths into a quantifiable popularity contest. Since social media is more of a superficial grief setting, mourners generally do not post deep, emotional posts, especially on character-restricted Twitter. With that mindset, it’s perfectly eerie to consider what happens when valuing trivial social media stats takes priority over grieving the loss of someone.
Note: While the finished product didn’t include access to live data, I hope I communicated the general idea of the site. The rankings were an amalgam taken from various tabloid articles. As mentioned, the percentages used were based on Lee and Goh’s results. The most favorited/retweeted tweet, the top 5 words and hashtags, and the frequency graph were generated from actual tweets surrounding Chuck Berry’s death (specifically the last 10,000 tweets returned from the query “chuck berry” taken during the 18 March – 19 March 2017 window).
Works Cited
Brubaker, Jed R., et al. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” Information Society, vol. 29, no. 3, May/June 2013, pp.152-163. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.
Lee, Chei Sian and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh. “Gone Too Soon: Did Twitter Grieve for Michael Jackson?.” Online Information Review, vol. 37, no. 3, May 2013, pp. 462-478. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1108/OIR-05-2012-0082.
Patton, Desmond U., et al. “I Know God’s Got a Day 4 Me.” Social Science Computer Review, vol. 35, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 226-243. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/0894439315613319.
Sherlock, Alexandra. “Larger Than LIfe: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society.” The Information Society, vol 29, no. 3, May/June 2013, pp. 164-176. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/01972243.2013.777302.