Category: Group B

After reading about the posthumous exploitation of a plethora of famous people, I was eager to find an example of someone who refused to let their digital image be manipulated and commodified by the media. This reaction was in part inspired by the article we read, “Selling the dead,” which mentions the “dead celebrities bill” that New York state Senator Martin Golden introduced in 2011. This bill outlined that it would be a criminal offense to “use the image of any deceased New York celebrity for advertising, merchandising or other commercial purposes without permission from their legal heirs. The ban would last 70 years after their death” (Kirsta). However, the bill was not passed and its rhetoric has been adamantly opposed by media industries. As I kept this in mind, I stumbled upon the story of the great Robin Williams, who actually put in place a restriction on his image being used for twenty-five years after his death. This was mainly in an effort to ensure that his public image was not tarnished, but I was particularly interested in the tone various news sources took when describing this decision. One article features a quote from Laura Zwicker, an attorney at Greenberg Glusker who counsels high net worth individuals on estate and tax planning. She claims, “I haven’t seen that before. I’ve seen restrictions on the types of uses — no Coke commercials for example — but not like this. It could be a privacy issue.” The article also highlights the idea that maybe Williams’ representatives were aware of the novel technologies we’ve been reading about and wanted to steer clear of anything that could tarnish his legacy. An examination of this has lead me to question a couple of ideas: First, how does one dictate what amount of time is acceptable to wait until the dead can be resurrected in the digital world? Second, why does society feel the need to criticize instances in which celebrities take their digital legacies into their own hands?

Robin Williams’ control over his legacy reminded me of the controversy behind Jacqueline Kennedy’s bloodstained pink Chanel suit, which is currently being preserved at the National Archives and won’t be seen by the public until 2103. The legal custody of the deed, which was established in July 29, 2003, and signed by Caroline Kennedy requires the National Archives to preserve the items and prevent the “undignified or sensational use of the materials (such as public display) or any other use which would tend in any way to dishonor the memory of the late President or cause unnecessary grief or suffering to members of his family” (Hallemann).  I think the decision to keep the suit locked away makes sense in that it blatantly avoids sensationalizing the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  But how does one justify that its release will be acceptable in 2103? Why can’t both Robin Williams’ image and Jacqueline Kennedy’s suit just be kept away forever? How does society believe it has a “right” to control the possession of these items?

Public figures are well within their right to limit what is accessible after their deaths, but I believe there needs to be further conversation regarding where we as human beings should draw the line between the wishes of the deceased and our rights to gain the information we seek. 

Works Cited:

Hallemann, Caroline. “Why You Won’t See Jackie Kennedy’s Iconic Pink Suit On Display in a Museum.” Town & Country. Town & Country, 20 Mar. 2017. Web. 03 Apr. 2017.

Kirsta, Alix. “Selling the Dead.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 03 Feb. 2012. Web. 03 Apr. 2017.

“Soon, Kurzweil promises, age and disease will disappear altogether, giving way to “software-based humans” with holographically projected bodies. If Google has its way, mortality will be conquered by human machines.” writes Alex Senemar in the article What Happens To Your Data When You Die?. There are a lot of other articles and perspectives on technology and tackling our mortality, the greatest problem of humankind since it could conceive what death meant. We often hear how technology grows exponentially, and the notion is usually that we will fix the problems of today with technology of the future, versus the present methods that we have today. However, I find it harder and harder to believe that even the technology and methods of the future will truly answer any of the questions the human mind poses.

Just a few days ago I saw a video of a man who got concussed diving into the shallow end of a pool, waking up five days later with the ability to play the piano like a virtuoso. The greatest thing this case tells us is that the brain works in a way that is so complicated, that it seems that no amount of research and understanding can truly answer the questions that need to be answered in hopes of conquering our mortality. Sure, we might one day be able to simulate ourselves, and find ways to preserve personalities, characteristics, and memories. Having said that, I don’t think any of it will ever amount to the level which is natural and real, and in that case, what is the point? If you are not the same person who has died, then we are just further going down a road we aren’t meant to be treading.

Peace

Duka

Alex Senemar in his article for Medium, “What Happens to you Data when you Die?” brings up a critical point which often gets lost in discussions regarding Facebook privacy. We have to be very honest with ourselves, and admit that social media came to prominence for two reasons.

1. Economic/capitalist motivation.
2. Easy data collection of populations.

Senemar points out the Facebook is and always has been a social experiment, which specifically collects data regarding the movement of ideas within a culture. Facebook has integrated itself into our lives to an intimate degree, and essentially translates thoughts, feelings, and habits into data which can be modeled. Every like, sad, love, “wow”, “haha”, and “angry” react is logged to show how you as a member of society connected with something or someone else. As a video is a series of continuous pictures, Facebook is creating a comprehensive series of sociological snapshots, compiled into a data set tracking large trends along with information regarding individual data points.

When participating in sites like Facebook, it should ideally be completely apparent that the data you input will be logged, or at least much more apparent than it is right now. Increasing awareness about the fate of one’s digital footprint is much more useful than debating the semantics behind privacy rights, because the data gathered from social media is a powerful tool not just to track modern trends, but for future historians to revisit and analyze.

Ethan Shiel writes on the subject of “Bots”, examining the fear of what an unchecked bot can post after the death of its care-taker. Having the bot turn off, or censored in some other way, is robbing the future historians mentioned in the New York Times article, “Cyberspace when you are Dead” of a cultural artifact that provides insight into early 21st century life. Just as it would be foolish to scratch out a line of an old poem, censoring the processes of a bot would injure it’s attempt to convey meaning and provoke thought.

The pictured painted by the collection of data from a deceased generation is not perfect. Be Right Back from Black Mirror season 2 shows that data gathered from our social media profiles are only rough estimations of our lives. However, for the first time the habits society shares during a given time period can be both quantified and studied using primary source material, and when talking about the fate of our online profiles I believe it is incredibly important to remember the historical contributions that data of this scale could make.

A couple weeks ago, while flipping through the featured stories on Snapchat, I stumbled upon a VICE article on hacking death through technology. Some Silicon Valley scientists are working on ways to convert human brains to code which can be converted to run on machines. Essentially, people can upload their brain’s memory to the cloud after they die and leave their bodies. Much of the conversation around this topic is hypothetical though, and is very different from the idea of literal immortality, because it is not attempting to defeat biological death. Instead, it is more of a merging of human memory and artificial intelligence. Mark O’Connell, author of the book, To Be a Machine, discusses this phenomenon of immortality through technology in an interview with VICE magazine: tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/imagine-how-creepy-itll-be-when-everyone-refuses-to-age

I found the ideas Mark O’Connell expresses to be especially interesting in light of Alex Senemar’s article, “What Happens to Your Data When You Die?” Senemar introduces the idea of how in the future, “software-based humans” will eventually rule the world and “mortality will be conquered by human machines.” He writes, “As the world grows increasingly dependent on internet technology, many human beings have already begun living like ‘cyborgs.’ Your electronics are collecting detailed information about you every second, not to mention the enormous amount of data you share about yourself while navigating the internet – meanwhile, internet corporations have harvested that data to assemble detailed profiles of your habits and behaviors, in hopes of more effectively predicting and analyzing human activity.” Although he writes that this data accumulated through the internet does not belong to the person, it nevertheless represents them. Its content can say a lot about a person. It also continues to exist after a person dies, which ties back to the idea of memories stored on a cloud transcending mortality.  This made me wonder: is it reductionist to say that a human can transcend death if their memories live on, if a person is a sum of their experiences? And to what extent does the human brain resemble data?

Work Cited

Senemar, Alex. “What Happens to Your Data When You Die?” Medium. Medium, 27 July 2015. Web. 21 March 2017.

Over the past few years, I have become heavily interested in the concept of how to manage memories within our vast digital landscape. I am also particularly fascinated in the newly popularized desire for digital literature and how this medium redefines how we tell stories. In my English 220: Literary Analysis class last year, we read Stuart Campbell’s interactive comic, These Memories Won’t Last, which takes advantage of its digitized format to make an argument about the fragility of memories in digital spaces. Campbell’s piece takes the reader on a journey through the memories of his Grandfather during his time fighting in World War Two, fleeing to Australia as a refugee, and his current struggle with dementia. The central premise of the piece is the loss of memory but also the importance of sharing stories, which is shown by Campbell’s narration of his Grandfather’s memories. If you take a look at the online narrative, you can see that Campbell uses a fading effect to create a sense of urgency to read the story before the images and text disappear. You are also unable to scroll upwards, meaning that you cannot go back and re-read the text without refreshing the page to start from the beginning. Not only does the fading of images and the inability to scroll upwards correspond to the Grandfather’s inability to recount some of his memories, but it also represents how our memories can become less accessible when we project them into digital spaces.

Through the form of his digital story, Campbell demonstrates the short lifespan of data in the digital world which connects to the rhetoric we are exploring in class concerning the curation of one’s “digital afterlife.” In part of Rob Walker’s article, Cyberspace When You’re Dead, he explores how online accounts that eventually become obsolete can influence the cultivation of one’s digital legacy. The fact that Campbell decides to use a flimsy string to hold his story together could comment on the issue Walker explores regarding the preservation of digital memories and enhances the argument about the fragility of memories within online spheres. As I continued to research digital memory for my English class last year, I came across an amazing book entitled, When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future, written by Abby Smith Rumsey. In her book, she describes the need to reinvent how we preserve memory, questioning how historians will be able understand our own time if all of our memories exist in digital codes that may no longer be decipherable. To combat the problem regarding memory in the digital world, she writes, “The new paradigm of memory is more like growing a garden: Everything we entrust to digital code needs regular tending, refreshing, and periodic migration to make sure it is still alive…” (Rumsey 148). This claim leads me to question what spaces are best for the storage of our memories.

Why do we feel compelled to store our memories on online spaces when we know that they will eventually expire? A large portion of Rumsey’s argument incorporates neuroscience into various discussions regarding how data storage differs from memory. Consolidation, for instance, is a facet of internal memory formation that is not enhanced by digital use. During this process, new perceptions are incorporated into the old and “connections between the new data coming into the brain find their home in existing mental contexts or webs of associations” (Rumsey 114). This is a process that can only be performed within someone’s brain. A computer is able to store certain memories, but it cannot make complex and far-reaching connections between specific scenarios like the brain. Relying on our devices as extensions of our brains corrupts the beautiful processes that are built within our own internal systems.

Reading These Memories Won’t Last is especially important as we discuss digital memory and what happens to your data when you die because it reflects the reality of telling a story about fading memories within a medium that is supposed to be timeless. As a result, this raises the questions: Does the human mind become the best place for human memories to be stored? Is it more effective to pass our memories on from person to person through shared stories? Think about it.

Works Cited:

Campbell, Stuart. “These Memories Won’t Last.” These Memories Won’t Last. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 March. 2017.

Rumsey, Abby Smith. When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future. N.p.:n.d. Print.

Walker, Rob. “Cyberspace When You’re Dead.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 08 Jan. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.