Tuesday, March 21 (Week 10)

• Rob Walker, Cyberspace when You’re Dead from New York Times (2011)
• Alex Senemar, What Happens to Your Data when You Die? from Medium (2015)
• Ethan Chiel, What Happens to a Twitter Bot after Its Maker Dies? from Fusion (2016)

Who are you saving?

People present the best of themselves on social media. People who live online cultivate a specific brand or image around their name, but are almost nothing like their online profiles in real life. I’ve met people who had thousands of “likes” and followers on Facebook, but who were real doorknobs in real life (not to sound condescending). They were just stuck to their phones all day long, which makes sense.

So, who exactly are you saving when you apply to one of these digital wills for your online personality? Typically, a person will be saving the best image of themselves, which is fitting for a funeral. Of course, we want to remember the best things about our loved ones after they pass. These happy memories will live on and be accessible to view online, as long as the website is still operational. The best part is that you now have total control over how you’re remembered. This isn’t that different from people who plan their entire funerals to a T; complete with the song, speeches, and ceremony procedure all lined out.

Apparently, you can even modify how much of your online profile is revealed. Some digital wills give the applicant the ability to show, or hide, as much of their information as they feel comfortable. According to Rob Walker’s, “Cyberspace When You’re Dead,”:

“Given the degree to which the most popular online platforms involve promoting a quasi-public persona — the “you” who declares fandom of Bob Dylan and Flannery O’Connor, but not the “you” who binges on “Jersey Shore” reruns and TMZ.com — this instinct seems logical. If we try to control the way we are perceived in life, why not in death, too?”

The only risk that accompanies this procedure is that you’re losing the whole person. Why not give family complete access over these materials? They will find all of your belongings, secret letters and diaries, and any other physical materials you tried to hide some way or another. Why are people so eager to wipe out and cleanse their profiles by scrubbing it clean of any sort of dirt? Everyone has dirt somewhere, and it’s all already recorded online somewhere. I don’t understand why all of the online materials of a deceased person can’t be opened by a family with a simple application.

Anyways, the memorials that do survive aren’t exactly perfect. Walker states that online memorials are occasionally guilty of, “wiping out meaningful material and replacing it with ‘a thousand ‘sorry this happened’’ messages.”

Despite the amount of progress that has gone into developing these memorial programs, they are still emerging so there are some bumps along the way… like the time in 2016 when Facebook notified a ton of people that they were dead:

“For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was briefly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we now have fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it,” said a company spokesperson by email, (Roberts).

You can almost hear the users saying, “I’m not dead yet!”

Works Cited

Roberts, Jeff John. “Facebook Bug Tells Users They Are Dead.” Fortune.com. Fortune, 11 Nov. 2016. Web.

Walker, Rob. “Cyberspace When You’re Dead.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 08 Jan. 2011. Web.

I wanted to do the reflection post, but unfortunately my finals have stacked up and I knew I wouldn’t be able to deliver a decent post.  I would love to talk to you about this class sometime, though! Thanks for an awesome semester!

Repair and destruction operate as the main themes of Station Eleven. From the destruction and reuse of old buildings to the figurative death and rebirth of the characters, repair and destruction offer a new look at Steven J. Jackson’s “Rethinking Repair.”

Jackson’s article mainly focuses on the destruction and reparation of material objects with an emphasis on the qualities of innovation, knowledge/power, and the ethics of care. This post will take those qualities and apply them to two characters, Miranda and Arthur, in order to grasp a deeper meaning behind them.

Death is not the same everyplace, everywhere, and for everyone. Everybody dies but not all in the same way. Some people die while they are still alive.

Miranda: Rebirth

 “She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothiers and her hair sticking up, washing her hands and peering anxiously at herself in the ladies’ room mirror; a twenty-seven-year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear, in tears because she’d seen herself on a gossip website that morning and the headline was agonising: IS ARTHUR SECRETLY CALLING MIRANDA? (Answer: no.) (Mandel, 205)

Miranda was a living Spector. She hid away in her cartoons and Station Eleven with little regard to her life, her happiness, and her aspirations. Miranda had a rough beginning with the abusive and clingy Pablo, but her life became marginally better once she met Arthur. Her promising romance with Arthur, unfortunately, ended in the most bitter way possible. Miranda hit the lowest point in her life at the anniversary dinner party where Arthur and his mistress were openly flirting and blatantly ignoring her presence. Jeevan’s picture of Miranda in her sunglasses and dangling cigarette at four in the morning helped memorialise the worst moment in her entire life.

Although Miranda was dealt all of these hardships, she managed to find her way out of it. After the divorce, Miranda took her career even more seriously and devoted her life to her job, cartoons, and Station Eleven. She blossomed into a motivated and dedicated worker, had a dramatic makeover, and lived a busy life of travel, creativity, and success. She embraced the quality of innovation by finding new ways to approach her life and take care of herself. This sense of innovation allowed her to cultivate and entirely new and beneficial lifestyle. Before the Georgian Flu took her life, Miranda was able to become the person she was always meant to be. She had shed her previous life, come to terms with it, and was moving on to greater things. She underwent a rebirth forever leaving the old Miranda behind. Once Miranda began to take care of herself, she achieved wonderful things.

As Jackson points out, “To care for something (an animal, a child, a sick relative, or a technological system) is to bear and affirm a moral relation to it. . . Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often sustain it,” (Jackson 231).

When Miranda learned to value herself and take care of her needs, aspirations, and desires, she learned how to become a stronger person. Instead of hiding away in the shadows, she asserted her own identity and power and was willing to face any challenge that the world offered.

Arthur: Death

“It was disappointment, it seemed to her, that had settled over his face, and there was a strained quality about his eyes that she didn’t remember having seen before.” (Mandel, 209)

Arthur, on the other hand, never found the same piece of mind that Miranda did. Instead, Arthur’s light went out while he was still breathing. The young, vibrant, and eager young man had turned into a perpetual performer, a shell of his former self. Disappointment was rampant in his life and led to his multiple divorces, lack of friends, and other stressors in his life.

“Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the ageing actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy.” (211)

This unhappiness stems from Arthur losing himself. The spirit that once led him to success had been crushed by the overwhelming life of fame. The death of his soul, of the young spirit that led Arthur to greatness, deterred Arthur from finding true happiness.

“Back then, back at the beginning. I was so struck by him. I don’t mean romantically, it was nothing like that. Sometimes you just meet someone. He was so kind, that’s what I remember most clearly. Kind to everyone he met. This humility about him.” (222)

By the end of Arthur’s life, he had lost the compassion, empathy, and genuine qualities that propelled him forward in the first place. Arthur either used up, neglected, or purposefully stomped out any remainder of this spirit and became miserable as a result. There was no more innovation, no sense of repair; there was merely a spiral into destruction.

Works Cited

Jackson, Steven J. “Welcome!” Steven J. Jackson, Cornell University. MIT, n.d. Web.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. Toronto: Harpercollins Canada, 2017. Print.

Michael Jackson topped an annual list of the top-earning dead celebrities for the fourth straight year. He gained more revenue than fellow musical icons Prince and David Bowie. Jackson, who died in 2009, raked in a bumper $825m in earnings for the 12 months ending 1 October, according to estimates from Forbes. That came mostly from the Jackson estate’s $750m sale of the late singer’s remaining stake in the Sony/ATV music publishing catalog to Sony Corporation.

In 2009, Sony paid $60 million for the rights to the Jackson film, This is It, which subsequently became the highest grossing concert film and documentary of all time. Later, Sony agreed to pay the Jackson estate $250 million for the rights to create 10 musicals over the next seven years. Similar to Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe raked in tons of profits after her death. The representatives in charge of her image decided to exploit it and gain monetary rewards by producing cheap knick knacks and derogatory products.

With the risk of sounding pretentious, why are people so infatuated with people who died of drug overdoses? This may be due to the fact that both Jackson and Monroe were cultural icons. Still, why are people so keen on idealising these two idols who led disastrous and notorious lifestyles? The fact that Monroe’s producers were pushing so much ridiculous merchandise out the door to reap a profit is despicable, but what about the people buying all of the crap pushed out of the corporate machine?

One author critiqued society’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe stating:

1. Marilyn Monroe is notoriously known for is her adulterous acts. She was married and divorced by the age of twenty . . . On top of this, she had many affairs with married men. The most well-known with John F. Kennedy. . . Her sleaziness isn’t something commonly talked about when girls start learning about Marilyn Monroe, but it definitely should be.
2. Marilyn Monroe stared in many movies, which is one of her claims to fame. . . Some would assume that someone who starred in such great movies of the time period must be a great actress. Wrong. In each of her roles, Monroe plays a ditzy blonde who wears tight revealing clothing, is very promiscuous and is only there to accompany the leading male role. . . Girls should have higher ambitions. . .
3. She wasn’t talented what-so-ever, which can be told by her petty acting jobs as dim-witted characters, but many movie agencies have claimed that Monroe sent naked pictures of herself in order to make herself look presentable for the roles she was auditioning for.

So, why do people keep on buying all of this merchandise? Has her image been tailored by her producers so much that we as a society idolise a completely different person?

On another note, the Telegraph article article immediately brought to mind Vincent van Gogh and Emily Dickinson. Although Monroe and Jackson reaped enormous success during their lifetime and afterwards, van Gogh and Dickinson died virtually penniless with zero recognition. It wasn’t until much later that their talent was recognised. It’s no wonder why Monroe and Jackson reaped more financial gain than van Gogh and Dickinson – van Gogh was a starving artist wandering the streets unable to sell a painting, and Dickinson was a recluse. The fame that ensued afterwards, however, is what draws these two pairs together.

Each of these people’s artistic contributions were recognised in the wake of their death, because the world realised that it had lost something special. These individuals contributed something unique to the world that can never be replicated or replaced. Jackson and Monroe most likely reaped even more benefits, because they died so unexpectedly. The tragedy of their untimely demise definitely ramped up sympathy among the masses; people who like to observe the chaos from afar, but who are careful not to get too close.

Works Cited

Greenburg, Zack O’Malley. “Neverland Ranch – Pg.8.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 02 Mar. 2012. Web.

Kirsta, Alix. “Selling the Dead.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 03 Feb. 2012. Web.

Reuters. “Michael Jackson Is Top-earning Dead Celebrity, Beating Prince and Bowie.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Oct. 2016. Web.

Just a quick mention on embalming: check out Jessica Mitford’s short story, Embalming Mr. Jones.  I read it for an english class and still remember each excruciating detail…

It’s amazing the amount of detail we go to in order to make the dead look “decent,” even if that means that nothing inside (or out) is real.

Moving along!

Sterne’s article focuses on the importance of phonography and how it influences everyday life. One example of this in modern times is the black box used in airplanes. The purpose of the black box is to record the conversation in the pit of an airplane, and they often used by authorities to get to the details of a situation whenever a disaster occurs (when a plane crashes, is hijacked, etc).

As you probably already noticed, the black box is not actually black, it’s orange. In fact, it’s not even a box! There are some theories as to why it got it’s name as the “black box,” but none have ever been proved. Some of these theories include:

1. the original design was a black box
2. a journalist coined the term and made it become known as a ‘black box” in the media
3. the only semblance of the piece remaining after a crash is a charred, black box with the recordings inside.

Additionally, it’s not even a box! It’s actually comprised of two separate parts. Check out this post for more information.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: the Story of Success provides transcripts of actual conversations that took place in the cockpit moments before a disaster. The seventh chapter of Gladwell’s work, “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,” uses these transcripts to reveal the larger cultural factors at play.

For example, the crew on Korean Air flight 801 were so restricted to the Korean culture of being respectful to a superior (in this case, the captain) that it cost them their lives. This blog effectively summarises the chapter and provides some decent counterpoints to Gladwell’s theory.

These conversations are useful, because they help airplanes companies figure out how to train their crews effectively to prevent a given disaster.

Click here for a link to a site titled, “Last Words,” which has the recordings of black boxes from  infamous plane crashes.