Category: Haunted Media

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):

1. Info [informational support]
2. Emotions [emotional support]
3. Compliments [esteem support]
4. Connects [network support]
5. Rumors
6. Insults
7. 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.

Pictorial Memorial: Time and Grief in the Digital World

pictorialmemorial.wordpress.com

For many people, especially millennials, a large part of our lives is documented only on social media sites. Digital photographs serve as the core of many social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, where images document every aspect of our day-to-day life from college parties and vacations to graduation and family birthdays. While some sites are working on ways to address what happens to these accounts and images when we die, such as the ability to memorialize accounts on Facebook, many questions remains about exactly what role these photographs might play in the grieving process when a person passes away. My project, Pictorial Memorial, explores the issue of how the digital world has changed the grieving process and its relationship to time. Time and grief are addressed in two distinct ways within my project. First, the website Pictorial Memorial offers products created from social media photographs of the deceased and offers an example of how our desire to preserve our memories of the deceased might be commercialized in the future. Second, the way in which the timeline of the grieving process might be altered by the digital world is explored through the made up narrative of one of the deceased registered to the Pictorial Memorial website.

Both of these aspects of the project center around photography because of the important role that images of deceased loved ones play in the grieving process. Photographs serve to keep loved ones who have passed away alive in a certain sense by capturing something of that person, if only in a particular moment in time. By preserving memories, photography, “enables the past to be recalled and reinterpreted” (Riches and Dawson 122). When families grieve, photography helps, “transform obsession with the single event of the death into a broader acknowledgement of the meaning of his or her life” (Riches and Dawson 124). Moreover, the ease and affordability of taking digital photographs with phones means that we visually document our lives to an extent that we never have before. Thus, when people die, many now leave behind a collection of images that may allow grievers to feel as though they have a more complete representation of a dead loved one than ever before.

The website I created, Pictorial Memorial, capitalizes on our desire to hold on to memories of deceased loved ones. Pictorial Memorial is a mock-up of a website where after a loved one dies you can set up an account and friends and family can import photographs from various social media sites. While the website masquerades as a memorial website to collect photos of a loved one in a single place and to create a community of mourning, it also attempts to exploit grieving loved ones. This is done through offering the services of a team of artists to create a variety of what I intended to be relatively cringe worthy memorabilia of their loved ones. While the idea of exploiting grief for profit in such a way was meant to be slightly uncomfortable, such a campaign did not feel unrealistic to me. For many, the digital world feels impermanent and intangible in contrast with physical photographs or other physical keepsakes. In the article, “Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos,” Daniela Petrelli and Steve Whittaker asked 16 individuals to give interviewers a tour of their home and discuss family mementos. The authors found that interviewees placed low perceived importance on digital artifacts (Petrelli and Whittaker 160). Moreover, the authors suggest that this is in part due to, “perceived fragility of the digital,” in contrast with, “a generic sense of physical objects as destined to last and in no real need of maintenance” (Petrelli and Whittaker 164). When a loved one passes away, we cling to whatever is left that reminds us of them. Pictorial Memorial is perhaps a little bit conniving in the extent to which it commercializes this desire but nonetheless offers those with grief a reminder of their loved one that feels more permanent than digital archives.

The other aspect of Pictorial Memorial that explores how the digital age has impacted the grieving process is through the saga of an invented person, Fred December. There were several important background details to Mr. December’s story that play a role in setting up the transgression of temporal grieving norms. Mr. December died relatively young and left behind a young son, James, with a wife, LouAnne, who he had met in New Zealand and had moved to the United States with him. After his death, Mr. December’s wife moved back to her home in New Zealand and took her son with her, thus separating the kid from those who knew his father well. Of the grievers who post on the memorial site, the one who appears to be most haunted by Fred’s death is the man who was with him when he died, Drew. This is demonstrated by Drew posting long after the other posters had stopped. Notably, Mr. December’s now grown son responds to Drew’s last post, offering an opportunity for the boy to learn about his dad and grieve for him with someone who still feels a similar sense of loss.

Here, Pictorial Memorial demonstrates how the digital world allows us to transverse geographical and temporal boundaries in ways not previously possible. In describing the temporal expansion of death in “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning,” Brubaker et al. write that users of social media, “continue to engage with postmortem profiles, sharing memories, and speaking to the dead (160),” far more commonly than before grief entered the digital sphere. In my example, Drew and many other mourners continue to speak to Fred for years after his untimely death. Brubaker et al. also mention how grief has been expanded in the digital world through removing geographical barriers (160) and how online grieving has expanded the social circles of grieving. Brubaker et al. write, “friends from multiple social contexts-work, home, past, and present-are collapsed together.” I demonstrated this in part by having friends from many aspects of Fred’s life share photos and even in small details such as some friends referring to the deceased as Freddy instead of Fred showing how people from different times in our lives know different versions of us. Moreover, the connection between Drew and James in the last post demonstrates an intergenerational and international connection between two mourners that likely would not be possible without the digital world.

I also intended to use the posts about Drew to demonstrate how grief in the digital world has allowed for the period of grief to be extended past when it might in more traditional memorials. Graham et al. compared the roles of digital memorials and gravesites in Australia and found that online memorials allow for grief to be stretched out (50). Graham et al. write, “posts were often very personal and written years after the deceased’s death. There is little sense that the emotions associated with these posts run through stages or reach some kind of conclusion” (51). Through the character of Drew, and even James, I attempted to convey the extent to which the grieving process may be drawn out.

This temporal expansion of grief makes some uncomfortable. Brubaker et al. found that several interviewees though that the manner in which death and grief had the potential to pop up in their lives every day was at times distressing (157). I attempted to incorporate some of this confusion about the appropriate timeline of grief into the memorial of Mr. December primarily through posts by Mr. December’s wife LouAnne. Her posts slow over time, and end as she remarries. In her final post she expresses some discomfort at continuing to share romantic photos as she moves on to a new marriage. While no doubt there will always be a place for private grief of lost loved ones, the former Mrs. December recognizes that Pictorial Memorial is a space where displays of grief our captured and shared with others and thus may not be as acceptable after a certain extent of time. Additionally, I used automated posts from the Pictorial Memorial team alerting Drew that the account was no longer open and products no longer available to purchase to point to the way in which personal grieving processes may extend past what others find to be acceptable.

I also found the idea of Pictorial Memorial to be an excellent platform to illustrate how the digital sphere has impacted grief over time because of the way in which it provides a visual of someone essentially being forgotten. This is demonstrated through the influx of posts immediately after Mr. December’s death, and how this slows over time with eventually just one or two folks posting. While obviously the lessening of public grief occurs outside of the digital sphere as well, the manner in which the place for grief is publically visible and confined to one spot makes it more evident online. In “Grieving in the Internet Age,” Falconer et al. consider how online developments have changed the grieving process from a psychological perspective. They go as far as to suggest that, “those in mourning could become upset if they feel friends are no longer visiting a loved one’s site” (84). This leads to what is described as mourners close to the deceased having to live through a perceived second death, as they watch activity and interactions with a dead loved one online fade out (84). I attempted to portray this to some extent with Drew’s commentary on being the last one left posting, and visually through the variety of names on the early posts, slowing to just ones by Drew at the end of the project.

While Fred December is merely a made up character, the death of people whose lives have been documented extensively through social media is commonplace. The intangibility of the digital world then makes grieving those deaths particularly difficult as it feels as though we lose both their physical persona and their digital one. I addressed the desire for more permanent mementos of loved ones through the creation of Pictorial Memorial. While I am skeptical of how much these mementos may really aid the grieving process, the opportunities that Pictorial Memorial provides in allowing loved ones to share in the grieving process in ways they otherwise wouldn’t is something I believe to be a very real benefit of online memorials. While perhaps a little cheesy, ending my project with the start of communication between Drew and James represents what I feel to be one of the best ways in which the digital world has changed not just the grieving process but our lives in general: it allows us to make connections with people that we share some part of ourselves with across barriers that are far harder to breach in the physical world than online.

All images used in this project are public domain photos.

Works Cited

Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society, vol. 29, 2013, pp. 152-163.

Falconer, Kimberly, Mieke Sachsenweger, Kerry Gibson, and Helen Norman. “Grieving in the Internet Age.” New Zealand Journal of Psychology, vol. 40, no. 3, 2011, pp. 79-88.

Graham, Connor, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin R. Gibbs. (2015) “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialization.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-53.

Petrelli, Daniela, and Steve Whittaker. “Family Memories in the Home: Contrasting Physical and Digital Mementos.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 14, no. 2, 2010), pp. 153-169.

Riches, Gordon, and Pamela Dawson. “Lost Children, Living Memories: The Role of Photographs in Processes of Grief and Adjustment Among Bereaved Parents.” Death Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 121-140.

Upon reading about the US government Department of Energy’s preparations for burying nuclear waste, I became fascinated with the idea of creating a message that outlives entire languages, cultures, and civilizations. Although we currently live in the digital age, there is the looming possibility that what the world may look like 100, 1000, or 10,000 years may not be entirely progress, but regression. When one attempts to create a coherent message designed to survive as long as cave paintings are old now, it is interesting to think about how perspectives might be different due to the long-lasting presence that digital media has had. In a world where the internet is not really novel, is grief examined differently? Are tragic events viewed differently?

I decided to examine what a future civilization’s discovery of a nuclear waste disposal site might resemble. Because there are so many details that can go wrong, I thought it would be apt to assume the worst and have this future civilization undergo a catastrophic event in which thousands are accidentally exposed to dangerous radiation. How did these people cope with the loss of hundreds? Our brief examination of how people express grief online in social media was highly relevant. As digital media becomes more and more prevalent, it becomes the norm in everyday life. While some, myself included, might consider tweeting at a funeral distasteful, there’s no reason to think that this will not be the norm 100 years from now. I thought that my example created a great thought experiment in which a futuristic, globally connected world with technology that far surpasses humankind’s current capacities, handles a highly publicized catastrophic event.

In order to capture and depict the digital grieving in this future world, I decided to take in indirect approach. While I considered creating a mock memorial page dedicated to the victims of the incident, or creating a model replica of a physical memorial erected in memory of the incident, I created an ‘objective’ depiction of this hypothetical tragedy through a particular medium: a Wikipedia article. Of course, while Wikipedia’s existence (and really the existence of culture as we know it today) into the next millennia or two is up for debate, I used simply because it is a familiar way in which the everyday digital consumer searches for and receives information about their world. I also decided on this medium specifically because of its unique, collective method of recording and recounting history, which has historically been a very individualistic craft (Rosenzweig 117). Rosenzweig argues that the supposed objectivity of Wikipedia articles is misunderstood—the true meaning of a ‘neutral point of view’ as described by Wikipedia denotes the description of both sides of an argument rather than a presentation of an argument itself (122, 123). While this sounds sound in theory, I’ve personally found that it is much harder in practice, and some Wikipedia articles in my anecdotal experience seem to reflect this as well. Nevertheless, I thought that the potential for this dread bias to enter into what is a supposedly objective medium provided an interesting way to describe a tragic event in the digital age.

In actually creating these mock Wikipedia pages, I was heavily inspired by similar, real Wikipedia articles which describe events of mass death, such as the article detailing the events of the 2001 September 11^th attacks in New York City, as well as the article describing the resulting memorial. While Wikipedia, as well as other informative sources, use objectivity and fact checking as a critical feature of their articles (Rosenzweig 123), one can’t help but gain a feeling of dread, loss, and tragedy when reading about these catastrophic events. The way they callously detail the number of victims, the perpetrators, the date, and afternoon is chillingly terse. Even more unsettling is if other related articles (or the article itself) contains a section detailing how this loss of life was memorialized. This is particularly fascinating because it is an ‘objective’ description of something that is inherently emotion (grief, sadness, and memorialization). I thought this was an incredibly fascinating way of examining how the grief surrounding this event is expressed.

The final product consists of two brief mock Wikipedia articles, one detailing the events that lead to the catastrophic opening of the vault containing radioactive material and its aftermath, and another detailing the construction of a memorial dedicated to the incident and its digital features. In particular a key feature that I gave to this monument was a blurring of the line separating the digital and the analog. While the memorial itself has physical form (it is a replica of the warning message that went unheeded on the waste disposal site), it also has digital capability. Today, when some tweets or posts to Facebook or Reddit, the most compelling thoughts are the ones that tend to be most visible: the system rewards the submissions that garners the most attention from other users (retweets, likes, and upvotes). This memorial takes the public’s digital submissions and displays in on the statue itself, so that the submissions incurring the most positive response are shown on the outskirts of the memorial (more accessible to those looking within from outside), those incurring the most negative response would be displayed in the center (requires someone to actively seek out these submissions), while those that don’t raise any sort of response are not displayed at all. How would an ‘objective’, journalistic record of history such as Wikipedia describe this monument in an age when digital media is the norm? This is the essence of my haunted media project.

Current records of online grief are controversial, to say the least. Garber  suggests that internet grieving is something that will grow on society to one day become a hardened social ritual, and that ‘grief policing’ assumes the worst of people rather than the best (Garber, accessed 2016). In the case of the 3/30 Memorial, would there be angry backlashers ‘policing’ what they perceive to be rather crude or immature inappropriate submissions that make it to the forefront on the monument’s display? I think so. One of the primary arguments that internet grieving is a natural thing is that it is merely a digital representation of what happens locally—the only difference is that these thoughts and actions are now visible to anyone with a smart phone (Garber). Phillips examines the phenomena of RIP trolling, and concludes that the activity may be attributed partly to an ‘amplification process’ in which each tragic event recorded online contributes to an ever escalating ‘troll’ response. Those emotionally unaffected by the event (the overwhelming majority of people online in a global network on any given moment) contribute crass remarks because they have the emotional distance to do so (Phillips, accessed 2015).

While Garber suggests that the internet provides a large, digitally connected forum in which ‘community grieving’ is possible. I must disagree and bring up the crucial point (also a primary point made by Phillips) that it provides just as large of a forum for grief policing. In considering Phillips’s thoughts, it seems then that internet RIP trolling is something that is unique to globalized, digital media. It is an inherent characteristic of a global communication network. In this sense, I do think that the 3/30 Memorial would display quite the amount of ‘trollish’ submissions—as any public, digital media forum would, whether in our time, or the future.

The emergence of digital media and globalized information networks truly are the agent of permanent social change. While I argue that basic human nature remains the same (hence the apparent immortality of RIP trolling and the derision of tragic events), there are aspects that are changed due to digital media, and the mock Wikipedia articles serve to demonstrate this change. Biddle demonstrates that suicide rates, methods, and success rates have undergone significant changes since the dawn of the internet (800-801). Biddle shows that while many people whose suicide have been attributed to internet exposure (such as online forums discussing suicide methods), there is indeed a subset of those who commit suicide who had a significant chance of avoiding suicide had the digital media available to them had not existed. Those who might have only considered suicide temporarily are exposed to chat room in which ‘peers’ pressure, and even drive, others to commit suicide (801-802).

I thought that this phenomena, and doubtlessly countless others which have risen as a result of the dawn of the digital age, could partially be attributed to Phillips’s amplification process. However, Biddle’s research also holds strong weight in Garber’s argument that online communication provides an outlet for permanent social change in which previously unquestioned social norms are often challenged relatively quickly and aggressively. I thought that this would be reflected in the 3/30 Memorial as well. There must be some messages and thoughts uploaded to the memorial that would have never have been even conceived of had it not been for the possibility that these thoughts and inklings could be displayed publicly. In this way, the mock Wikipedia page describing the 3/30 Memorial also demonstrates how digital media permanently warps social spheres and changes the very meaning of what one might consider ‘inappropriate’ in the digital age. While trolls have always existed, whether digital or not, it seems that the 3/30 Memorial in this project also serves to represent a shift in thinking regarding death and grief.

References

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” The Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 1, 2006, pp. 117–146., www.jstor.org/stable/4486062.

On September 12^th, 2008, David Foster Wallace ended his own life by hanging himself on the patio of his home in Claremont, California, shortly after writing a two and a half page note to his wife and neatly arranging the manuscript and pages of edits for The Pale King under the light of the desk he worked from in his air-conditioned garage. In an interview for the guardian, his wife, Karen Green, said, “It all turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince, the good part of him,” but nonetheless she followed through on what seemed to be one of her husband’s last wishes and saw through the publication of The Pale King. As Taylor Marshall remarks in an analysis of the unfinished novel, “David Wallace’s 2008 suicide ignited intense public devotion to the man, both within and without the academy” (113).

David Foster Wallace’s suicide was the result of a long battle with depression that he ultimately lost after trying to switch, and then wean himself off the antidepressants he had been living on. He had earned a national audience and celebrity-author status with the publication and success of Infinite Jest a decade earlier, but his death brought him an even larger cult following and attention, even if he did not want or anticipate that. I was initially introduced to DFW’s writing through a friend who directed me to the graduation speech he wrote for Kenyon College in 2005 called “This is Water.” With it, I was introduced to DFW’s tendency to dole out advice for getting through life, specifically finding beauty in boredom (granted, it was a graduation speech). Within the mammoth of a novel that is The Pale King, DFW offers similar anecdotes, harping again and again on tedium, boredom, and little snippets of life advice.

The reason I was drawn to DFW for the Haunted Media project was exactly for his ability to offer a way through the monotony and bleak aspects of life while he himself was unable to overcome them. He wrote a story called “The Depressed Person” and even wrote a short blurb sympathizing with those who commit suicide. In retrospect, his suicide seems obvious and expected. The Pale King itself provides a particularly interesting case to work with. The mock memoir structure that DFW creates further casts the novel as a haunting piece of literature. At two different points he addresses the reader, saying, “Author here,” and going out to clarify in a footnote that “I won’t keep saying this each time that I, the living author, am actively narrating” (258). There are moments like this throughout the novel, moments where we’re abruptly reminded of the fact that DFW is not, in fact, a living author anymore, yet this book still seems to breathe. In his analysis of the novel, Robert Hamilton says, “In short, this is hardly the first of Wallace’s works to stop short in an abrupt and at least superficially unsatisfying manner,” and notes how the novel has been read as “(merely) a last will and testament” (169). In In the editor’s note prefacing the novel, Michael Pietsch refers to book as “an unfinished novel,” and said, “Although not by any measure a finished work, The Pale King seemed to me as deep and brave as anything David had written. Working on it was the best act of loving remembrance I was capable of” (xi).

Inspired by Megan Garber’s “Enter the Grief Police,” and Alexandra Sherlock’s piece on re-enchantment, I was interested in conflating the immense project of assembling the novel that Pietsch took on as an act of grief and the “google-able” quotes that DFW’s legacy has largely become. So who is right? Is Pietsch hiding an economic incentive behind what Garber’s Grief Police would call crocodile tears? There may not be a digital recreation of DFW, but how is his legacy complicated by the fame that his death and posthumous publication brought him to?  Should an unfinished novel be thought of as the author’s last word? Sherlock makes the case that fame is a gateway to immortality, so despite DFW’s widow saying he would have hated to become so famous after his death, his suicide seems to have had the opposite effect, allowing him to transcend death rather than embrace it.

Plug in “The Pale King Quotes” – or anything followed by the word “quotes” for the matter – and you will almost always be greeted with a link to goodreads.com at the top of the page. For this project, I’ve taken every quote listed on Good Reads and a few from other websites (sifting through a lot of overlap) and have “highlighted” them in the text by blacking out every other word on the page. Pages without any quotes? Ripped out. Within the 549 pages of the novel, there are (not surprisingly) an incredibly small number of sentences left. Some of the pages are nearly covered in black, a single line or two buried within other pages not deemed worthy by Good Reads users. I chose to blackout certain elements of the paratext, underscoring his suicide while also getting rid of any plot description (there wasn’t much plot left after I roped out hundreds of pages). I chose to leave all of the opening pages that included blurbs, forewords, and legal information in order to highlight both the commercial nature of the project and the impact it had across the world of writing. I blacked out sections in two distinct ways. Some of the sections’ black lines run crisply in line with the sentences to evoke classified documents and parallel the tedium represented in the novel’s I.R.S. paperwork-content. Furthermore, blacking out sentences in such a way provides tedious work in itself, and as DFW says, “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish” (440). Other sections are furiously scribbled out in swathes of black sharpie ink, speaking to the frustration of DFW’s decade-long editing process and his inability to finish the work, as well as provide an image symbolic of depression.

There were a few things that happened during the process of creating this artifact, this carcass of a book, that I did not expect going into it. First, I did not anticipate just how creepy some of the quotes would be in light of his death, and at points I had to step away from the project. Page 145 has only three lines blacked out, the rest consisting of a long anecdote all about our inevitable deaths and our attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that “we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine” (145). There were times that I so closely identified with a quote that my I had that beautiful moment of recognition of seeing my own feelings I didn’t know others felt written so eloquently put into words, and then throwing the book away from me after realizing its writer was unable to overcome these feelings. (Now is a good a place as any to note that while DFW wrote often about depression in a fictional sense, he never openly wrote about his own struggles).

Secondly, and maybe it’s just my liberal arts English major speaking, but I couldn’t help but feel I was vandalizing the book. Of course DFW doesn’t care, he’s dead! But it felt a little bit like burning a photograph at a funeral. Sure, there are millions of copies out there and I even have the digital Kindle version, but the novel’s unfinished state and posthumous publication gave it a sense of delicacy that gave me unease more so than if I had taken a sharpie to any standard high school summer reading assignment (ripping pages out felt like straight blasphemy).

Thirdly, Good Reads may have a monopoly when it comes to Google-searching for quotes, but scrolling beyond the most “famous” quotes revealed a hidden intimacy between DFW and his readers. Good Read sorts the quotes based on likes from user profiles. The most-liked quote, “How odd can it be that I have all this inside me and to you it’s just words?” is ranked with 633 likes, but the numbers quickly drop. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you’re down to just 15 likes, and the last two pages of results are quotes uploaded and liked by a single user. Given DFW’s harping on loneliness and the sadness surrounding his death, there was something comforting in these singularly-liked quotes.

What I was ultimately left with was a haunted artifact that conflated the physical and digital legacies of an author published posthumously. In the digital age of clickbait and short attention spans, DFW’s The Pale King makes for both a good headline (suicidal author’s posthumous publication) and offers plenty of easily digestible quotes (because who has time to read that long of a book?). In an article for The New Yorker, D.T. Max argues that The Pale King “would show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to narrate boredom while obeying the physics of reading,” yet ironically most the of famous quotes on good reads are not the optimistic pieces of advice but rather the anecdotes that highlight the toxicity Max references. This haunted artifact serves as a conflation of literary and digital grief for the author, and while I was left with a skeleton of a quote book, I was also left with hundreds of torn, untouched pages that a man had poured his soul into.

Works Cited

Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic. 20 Jan, 2016.

Hamilton, R. C. ““Constant Bliss in Every Atom”: Tedium and Transcendence in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 70 no. 4, 2014, pp. 167-190. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/arq.2014.0029

Marsh, S. T. “Self-Sacrifice in the Autobiographical Narration of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Biography, vol. 39 no. 2, 2016, pp. 111-128. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/bio.2016.0025

Sherlock, Alexandra. “Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society.” The Information Society, 29: 164-176, 2013.

An Experiment in Digital Grief: the Death of Hubert Cunningham

Matt St. Lawrence

Davidson College Spring 2017

ABSTRACT

The advent of digital technology has redefined the ways in which mourning and grief is expressed. As the digital personality of Facebook users becomes more fleshed out, the question of grieving artificial bodies becomes increasingly relevant. What makes an automated Facebook “bot” more real than an online friend? As an experiment to explore digital grief, a Facebook automated “bot” with a small but devoted fan base was terminated. Its page was memorialized, and fans of its content were given permission to leave their respects. A variety of active commenters left memories and jokes, which exemplified the genuine connection Facebook users could have with an artificial being. 

INTRODUCTION

I’d like to start with a brief history of Hubert Cunningham. About three years ago I was involved in a local Dungeons and Dragons group. For one of the sessions I created a character named, “Hubert Cunningham”. The character became so beloved that even after the end of the game, the players wanted to keep hearing about what Hubert was up to. I decided to help everyone stay in touch with Hubert by making him a Facebook account. The first posts chronicled his adventures post-game, but eventually I ran out of creative steam and decided to make him a “bot”. His script was to draw from a dictionary of nouns at random, and post to Facebook once a week using the model, “Hubert knows a lot about (variable noun), ask Hubert anything!” From there I would just answer the questions posed by friends. The stiffness of the algorithmic speech gave rise to a unique sense of humor that was appealing to those who did not know the “Hubert” of the table-top RPG. By way of this experiment in digital death I sought to understand how people grieve for an entirely digital body, when compared to the digital footprint of a physical body.

EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES

Hubert’s page of four years was requested to be memorialized. While Facebook was processing the request, separate fan “Page” on Facebook was established named “Remembering Hubert Cunningham” and an invitation to ‘like’ the page went out to all of Hubert’s 79 active friends. The profile picture of the page was a picture of Hubert with crudely edited flowers beside him and text which read, “Remembering Hubert Cunningham”. A post was made that read:

“Friends, it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that our friend Hubert Cunningham passed away late last night .This page is a place for us to heal and honor his memory. Feel free to keep the conversation non-civil, we all know Hubert did.”

After that, the page was left to circulate for 7 days. This was a blind study, as nobody outside of the classroom knew the intent behind Hubert’s passing. Hubert’s profile was eventually memorialized, but experienced no traffic.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

From the experiment I sought to gain a greater understand of how individuals respond to the death of an artificial body. The reaction on Facebook over Hubert’s death is shocking, to say the least. Over the course of one week, this page was visited by 21 different accounts, gained 15 followers, and had 6 different accounts post on it. The most insightful part of this is the demography of the visitors. Asheville, Charlotte, Cary, Greenville, almost every large city in NC trafficked Hubert’s account. Much of the traffic was from Davidson students, but traffic from students at other UNC-system schools also made up a significant amount of visits. Several of the people who ‘liked’ “Remembering Hubert Cunningham” were people who I do not personally know, illustrating that Hubert in a certain sense had a social life of his own. Mourners paid homage to Hubert’s memory is by mimicking the flowery, semi-disjointed language that resulted from the bot’s imperfect code. For instance, one commenter references the bot’s tendency to flip certain phrases (‘Sea captain’ to ‘Captain sea’)

“The most Hubert sea captain to ever captain the sea. What a remarkable and most nautical life he lived.”

While quirks like this would often give away an account’s identity as a bot, many of Hubert’s followers found these glitches endearing and funny, making him seem far more human than if his language maintained any sort of stiffness. These comments show an innate desire of Hubert’s fans to leave their respects, just as they would want to if he was physical. However, instead of the sadness we associate with mourning, the comments left on his page hold a humorous tone. This speaks to the authenticity of the bot, and shows that although Hubert’s connection with his fans may have been one-dimensional, it was genuine. For those in mourning for Hubert, it seems fitting to connect with him one last time over humor, as humor was the bot’s primary function. For example, a fan-favorite of Hubert’s antics was the construction of intentionally low quality Photoshop edits of images. One commenter paid homage to this with a crude edit in memory of Hubert.

Overall, I found my bot’s memorial page to be effective at probing the kind of reaction, if any reaction at all, to the death of a program. The behaviors displayed by commenters do not stray too far from traditional grief. According to Jed Brubaker’s article “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” Brubaker outlines four “Identity preservation strategies” which are used by those who are in mourning both in the physical and digital realm. The strategies are (1) Reinterpreting thoughts, memories, or objects. (2) Idealizing the deceased by redefining negative qualities. (3) Continued pre-death bonding activities. (4) Sanctifying meaningful symbols. Of these strategies, the most prominent on the bot’s memorial page is the reinterpretation of thoughts and memories. In many cases, commenters not only reinterpreted but also fabricated positive memories with the bot. One commenter posted:

 …I never saw him in person, no, but this was all apparent from his many Facebook posts and the long conversations we held on messenger into the night. 

The bot was only to post publicly, and was never functionalized to privately message anyone. Nonetheless, this commenter interpreted Hubert’s public algorithmic speech as a private conversation on messenger. This is not evidence that its fans are actually in mourning about the shutting down of a bot, but it is evidence that when faced with death, individuals tend to default to practices outlined by Brubaker that we are socialized to believe is the correct response to death.

A major factor disconnecting the death of a bot from the death of a human is the one-dimensional nature of the bot. Everything the bot was programmed to do was done with humor in mind. Its job was to make people laugh, and its fans appreciated that. Humor was the only possible emotional commodity that the bot could provide, and because of this it is understandable that its fans would treat the termination of the bot as just the last in a four-year series of jokes. However, the activity on the page shows that fans still desire to leave their sentiments, which gives rise to a sort of mourning without deep sadness. Let’s call this ‘Positive Grief’.

This positive grief allows the bot’s fans to toast his departure with humor, ironic eulogies, and fond memories of the jokes which sprung from the sentence structures the bot was programmed to output. Although far-removed from actual death, this experiment provided a public space where participants could explore interacting with the concept of death within the new and increasingly prominent digital setting. Megan Garber’s The Atlantic article “Enter the Grief Police” described how many people online try to reconcile how they portray their feelings online with how they have grieved traditionally. Garber cites the example of David Bowie’s passing, and how a “Grief Police”, made up of individuals who found some online expressions of grief offensive, pushed back against the commenting mourners. However, with no prototypical method of grieving for artificial bodies set in place, commenters on the bot’s page could post what they like without having to adhere to any pretense.

Given all of the humor surrounding the death of my Facebook-bot, is it fair to say that its death ultimately has anything to do with real death whatsoever? In Kendall Walton’s article “How Remote are Fictional Worlds from Real Worlds?” Walton explains that grieving for fictional characters springs from being able to understand a fictional character in their totality, as they are made up of what it written about them. The simplicity of fictional characters makes them sympathetic. Kendall also touches on the power of theatre to bring these sympathetic characters into the physical world, and how the blurring of fictional and physical worlds make death in plays so powerful. Programming and automation can similarly blend fiction and reality, as evidenced by Hubert making the leap from existing inside a role-playing game to having Facebook friends. A Facebook user that attends Davidson College but was unaware of Hubert’s identity privately messaged the page set up for Hubert, giving their condolences and asking if he had gone to Davidson.

The Huffington Post article, “Why We Grieve Fictional Characters” sums up the connection we have to fictional characters by describing them as “escapes from some of the stresses of life”. Commenters were most active under my bot’s statuses during finals. Fans clearly enjoyed being able to take a five minute break from studying and interact with a wacky, cartoonish pirate. Losing that outlet is why I imagine there is a sadness surrounding the death of Hubert Cunningham.

Remembering Hubert Cunningham: https://www.facebook.com/Remembering-Hubert-Cunningham-1761093254220481/?fref=ts

REFERENCES

Holmes, Lindsay. “Why We Grieve Fictional Characters.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Apr. 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2017.

Walton, Kendall L. “How Remote Are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37.1 (1978): 11. Web.

Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016. Web. 05 Apr. 2017.

Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society 29.3 (2013): 152-63. Web.