Death in the Digital Age

As far as literary and cultural studies go, comics are often overlooked.  They’re seen as too childish, too commercial, too commonplace to have any sort of relevance to grand cultural narratives. Now, in recent years that has started to change, but the fact remains that when people think about the “artistic” and the “intellectual,” comics often get the short end of the stick. However, I believe that to omit comics from these sorts of studies is to neglect a subject full of points to make and questions to ask. Comics, and the place they hold in our culture, are unique. They straddle the line between high art and low art, form and content, picture and text. They cross boundaries and borders, bringing people together in support of a diverse cast of heroes and villains. As opposed to a book or a movie, where the plot is self-contained from the very beginning, comics give readers ongoing storylines that continue week to week and month to month. However, what happens when those storylines are broken? What happens when death, the great disruptor, interrupts the stories and fictional lives that millions of people hold so dear?

For my project, I wanted to look at death in comics, specifically how fans react to it. It’s no secret that dying in a comic isn’t exactly the most lasting of things, with about the same level of severity as a slight fever, with a quicker recovery time to boot. Still, when a fictional character dies, that tends to mean something to people, no matter the medium. However, in a place where characters are killed and resurrected with alarming regularity, does death begin to lose its impact? How do people grieve or mourn when they expect to be seeing the deceased in next month’s issue? What does a para-social relationship look like when it goes both ways? Where does the willing suspension of disbelief enter into all this? These are all questions I was seeking to both pose and answer with my project, Death is Cheap, an online compilation of the lives, deaths, and resurrection of comic book heroes.

The title of my project comes from the tvtropes page on this very subject, and I felt it fit. I wanted to create something that compared the grieving of both the fictional comic world and our own reality. To that end, I chose multiple heroes from both DC and Marvel, whose deaths (and resurrections) I felt were unique and meaningful enough to have significant impact in both their world and ours. I wrote in-universe tributes and memorials about each hero, immediately following those with comments and thoughts taken from different comic-related message boards, internet forums, and blogs. There is a definite tonal shift, a change from open grieving to a sort of cynical analysis. To be clear, it’s not that people didn’t miss or mourn for the fallen heroes, but rather that they were genre-aware, secure in the knowledge that their idols would eventually return, whether in a few months to a few years.

One subject I wanted to explore with my project was that of online memorials, of how grieving and mourning sites on the web differ from those in real life. Now, obviously it’s probably a little different when the mourning subject in question is in fact fictional, but there are still many themes that carry over. The article “Gravesites and Websites: a Comparison of Memorialization,” by Connor Graham, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin Gibbs, talks about how “each and every gravesite has, on one hand, a static, enduring component and, on the other, a dynamic, changing on” ( Graham 49). There is the unchanging tombstone, and the flowers that cycle week to week. However, for “memorials” of dead comic book characters, this dichotomy is altered. While the posts and tributes are indeed constantly changing, with fans constantly weighing in with their opinions and feelings about the character, the “static, enduring” part is, in fact, the comic itself.  Even though the character is “dead”, the comic continues to be printed, continues to serve as a lasting memorial to their legacy and impact. The digital forums serve as places where fans can gather to discuss the comics, acting as a sort of permanent wake for the dead character.

When it comes to online memorials specifically, there is a definite ongoing sense of “continuing relationships with the dead…a sense that the dead are receiving messages” (Graham 50). Memorial and tribute sites are, by their very digital nature, constantly changing and updating, always revising and renewing themselves. However, the key difference in regards to comic books is that the dead are, in fact, receiving messages. Comic writers and artists are known to habit different popular forums, trying to see what is and isn’t working for their fans. If a character is killed off and there is a massive outcry, that character can be brought back. The dead, for these memorials, are very much “active listeners”, as Graham puts it. To reflect that, I created a space on my site where users could submit characters they felt particularly strongly about, or whose death (and resurrection) they felt had an especially large cultural impact. Digital memorials are not static like their physical counterparts, and I wanted my site to show that.

Another aspect of comic book fandom I wanted to explore was the para-social aspect, specifically as it relates to the willing suspension of disbelief.  In their paper “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction,” Donald Horton and Richard Wohl define a para-social relationship as one between a “performer” and an audience, wherein the audience feels connected to and invested in the performer, despite a lack of any actual contact between the two. Think about the cult of celebrity that is so prevalent in this era. We have entire magazines, TV shows, large portions of the web, all devoted entirely to what famous people are doing, where they are doing it, and who they are doing it with.  Remember how the world reacted when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie got divorced? People were distraught, crying about how love was dead, how their faith in marriage was shattered. Now, obviously some of that was tongue in cheek, but for many people those feelings were very real. That is what para-social interaction refers to, the imagined give and take between celebrities or icons and their fans. As Horton and Wohl put it, “The more the performer seems to adjust his performance to the supposed response of the audience, the more the audience tends to make the response anticipated. This simulacrum of conversational give and take may be called para-social interaction” (Horton 215).

It is no great revelation that many people have this relationship with comic book heroes. However, since in this case the “performers” are fictional, the “simulacrum of conversational give and take” has a much wider range. The audience has the freedom to imagine their heroes in any scenario or situation, can shape them to fit their own personal narrative. While Ryan Gosling can only ever play “Ryan Gosling”, Batman can mean many different things to many different people. In this way, comic heroes paradoxically have both much more and much less symbolic meaning than performers in “traditional” para-social relationships. While they can appeal to a wider range of people with their ability to shift and stretch as the times and customs demand, they also do not have one singular personality, making it harder to find one defining aspect. It’s an interesting question. Is it better to be a monolith, powerful yet inflexible? Or is it better to be amorphous, adaptable yet thin and diluted? There’s no “correct” answer, but it does raise some interesting questions about the nature of fictional para-social relationships.

Another way comic-based para-social relationships are different is that, rather uniquely, the relationship actually goes two ways. Typically, a para-social interaction is “one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible of mutual development (Horton 215). However, comic heroes need their fans, in a very real and literal sense. After all, if nobody reads or buys the books, then the character dies the only true death that can be found in comics: cancellation. Comic characters need fans just as much, if not more, than the fans need the characters. Actors and actresses aren’t competing for our attention, they will have it no matter what.  Yet every dollar we spend on a Superman comic is a dollar we aren’t spending on a Fantastic Four comic.  Even in movies and TV shows, which are self-contained with an expected eventual end, the characters (and actors) don’t need our attention in quite the same way. Comics are expected to go on in perpetuity, there’s no anticipated “series finale.” Indeed, if such a finale does occur in comics, it’s usually not a good thing, meaning the book has been cancelled or the writers fired. When you look through the real-world tributes on the site, notice how many talk about “dropping” the book, or buying a death issue merely as a collector’s item. Money rules determines everything in the comic world, a fact of which readers are often uncomfortably aware.

This brings up my next point, the role of the willing suspension of disbelief. In her article “Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society,” Alexandra Sherlock states that “WSOD relies on a tacit understanding and cooperation between the author and the reader, or director and audience. The audience members let down their defenses and skepticism, and the director includes elements of reality in order that the imaginary parts seem more believable—all resulting in the increased enjoyment of the production” (173). We all know that being bitten by a radioactive spider most likely wouldn’t actually give someone spider powers, but isn’t it more fun to pretend it would? WSOD is more present in comics than perhaps any other medium, and requires a constant balancing by the writers to make sure they don’t stray too far in either direction, towards fiction, or towards reality. As a result, comic fans have become accustomed to separating the “reality” of comics from the “fun” of comics. However, the issue with WSOD is that, over time, people can build up a tolerance of sorts. Comics are always looking for greater and showier events, flashier and more complex heroes, anything to wow the fans (and get a leg up on their competitors in the process). Sherlock also writes about media consumers’ increased appetite for the spectacle” (174), about how we are always looking for something bigger and better than what came before.  So, when comic studios realized killing off a major character could be such a “spectacle”, they pounced on the opportunity.

While that worked at first, the fans soon built up their WSOD tolerance, to the point where no any death feels like a marketing ploy or a cash grab, no matter how it moves the plot or motivates characters. Comic deaths are events now, something for people to tweet and blog and post about, to anticipate feverishly before dissecting it in a myriad of ways. Sherlock’s article mentions how participation in online memorials or death rituals is motivated “less by the loss of the individual and more by the sense of social solidarity that generates around their death” (169). We react to comic deaths not just because they may or may not be affecting, but because we know others are reacting as well. We feel involved, part of something greater than ourselves. However, we are only able to react as such because of our knowledge that, eventually, things will return to normal. If DC announced that Batman would be dying in a few issues, it would of course be a big deal. Yet the only reason there wouldn’t be a torch and pitchfork mob storming the DC offices is because we know that it is only a matter of time before Bruce Wayne is alive and well again. Comics are an ongoing story, one where the status quo is king. Everything will reset. It has to.  Clark Kent will always be Superman, Peter Parker will always have Mary Jane, no matter what the comics might actually say. Comic characters belong to the readers as much as the writers, are part of the popular imagination as much as they are the intellectual property of the studio. When a superhero dies, that means something to people. What is happening in modern comics is that the constant cycle of death and resurrection is starting to drain those deaths of any meaning at all.

I realize I’ve said a lot here, and rambled on a bit more than I should have. I guess I just wanted to press upon you just how much comics and the worlds they give us mean to people. We forget just how many relationships and interactions we have with fictional creations, how much they can represent. I wanted to explore those relationships in a field that appeals to our innocence and allows our imaginations to run free, yet is also driven and informed by a materialistic culture that demands instant gratification.  They push us to be the best we can be, yet also shows us how low we can sink. They’re full of laughter and weeping, hope and despair, compassion and cruelty, life and death. In a word: they’re fun. We know they aren’t real. But that doesn’t stop us from looking up at the sky, seeing a shadow pass over a cloud, and thinking “Could be a bird. Probably a plane. But maybe,  just maybe…..”

Works Cited

Graham, Connor, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin R. Gibbs. “Gravesites and websites: a comparison of memorialisation.” Visual Studies 30.1 (2015): 37-53.

Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 19.3 (1956): 215-29.

Sherlock, Alexandra. “Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society.” The Information Society 29.3 (2013): 164-76

Link to project: kissinkatebarlow.webs.com/

I was inspired with the idea for my Haunted Media Project while on an old Western binge-watching session prompted by another class. Though I was mostly watching Clint Eastwood-type cowboys, I remembered another Wild West female character I had grown up watching from the movie Holes, based on the novel by Louis Sachar. She only played a minor role in the story, but I was always impressed and fascinated by the femme fatale outlaw Kissin’ Kate Barlow.

(Here’s a link to a montage of her scenes from the movie, if you don’t know the character:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qYFafNPbU)

I initially considered creating a regular online memorial page for the fictional character Katherine Barlow, but I did not find it very compelling. The idea of some sort of tribute website, almost like a fan site, seemed more appealing to me. I decided to base the website loosely around the idea of serial killer fan sites, which actually exist for real-life notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer – some of which are disturbingly popular. There is quite a modern-day fascination with serial killers as celebrities, especially among young female fans, and psychologists and social scientists have sought to explain this unsettling phenomenon. While portrayed in Holes as more of a misunderstood outlaw rather than a serial killer, Kate Barlow nevertheless killed multiple men throughout her robbery spree. I could see how if the Internet existed during the Wild West era, she could potentially gain an online following due to her femme fatale appeal. For my project, I imagined what a website in remembrance of Kissin’ Kate Barlow through the eyes of her fans would look like, and what function technology would bring to the table, as opposed to a traditional print tribute, for example.

One of the articles we read for class, “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” examines the modern trend of memorializing the dead on the Internet, and the implications of this method as opposed to traditional graveyards and memorials. The authors write, “Website memorials allow interaction with the dead to continue and for the continuing presence of the dead in both a private and public sphere. In this way, they remain strangely unincorporated and in a state of transition. Social interaction with the dead continues online and their identity is kept alive.” My project was a bit tricky in this regard, because while the website was in honor of Kate Barlow and her life story and legacy, it also featured brief obituary-like blurbs with an accompanying image for each of her victims. However, unlike the memorials discussed in the article, these were not in loving memory or praise of these men, but rather as a toast to Kate. The “Tributes” tab of the website gave her fans a platform to write messages as if they were speaking directly to her – her victims, on the other hand, are not given this honor, so their identities are not kept alive in the same way. The authors of the “Gravesites and Websites” article go on to acknowledge the increasingly different forms of memorializing death on the Internet, explaining how their studies have “suggested how such differences will no doubt be seen multiplying across online memorials: various Internet services and technologies such as Web documents, Facebook pages and gaming environments.”

Another article we read for class, Alexandra Sherlock’s “Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society,” expands on the idea of the Internet allowing the continuation of the presence of the dead, referring to the Internet as “a type of digital heaven.” Sherlock explains, “representational technologies in particular offer a life after death, a symbolic life in which the representation can act as a substitute for the person in the event of their physical absence – a symbolic immortality.” Much like how people often continue to write on a deceased person’s Facebook wall as if they were still alive, Kate Barlow’s fans still write messages to her as if she were. This is where the idea of para-social relationships comes into play. Sherlock writes, “One can identify with someone without ever meeting them, or even if the subject is dead, so forming a type of one-sided para-social relationship facilitated by representations.” This concept is particularly important when it comes to the fans of serial killers because virtually all of their vans have never met them, let alone known them personally. Nevertheless, for as long as serial killers have achieved widespread fame, they have obtained fan mail. Even before the birth of the Internet, in the 1980s, when the prevalence of serial killer “groupies” was thought to be at its peak, fans would often write handwritten letters to the killers in jail.

In order to gain better understanding of the phenomenon of serial killer idolization, I read some of David Schmid’s book, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. I was particularly interested in the intersection of this fascination with serial killers and the age of the Internet, which Schmid addresses. He writes, “The introduction of each new media technology therefore represents a decisive shift in both the types of fame available in a culture and the ability of that culture to disseminate fame” (12). For instance, the rise of American mass media explains the rise of widespread attention surrounding serial killers in the 1980s. Likewise, with the rise of the Internet, serial killer fans have transitioned from handwritten letters to online forums dedicated to their killer of interest.

Schmid also discusses the market for death in his book, writing that “Online shopping is all the rage these days, and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming” (1). He continues, “In order to understand why there is such a vibrant market in contemporary America for representations of death in general and of serial murder in particular, we have to appreciate that the famous serial killer effectively and economically satisfies a double need, both halves of which have grown over the course of the twentieth century: the need for representations of death and the need for celebrities” (17). While I had no idea that serial killer artifacts were in such demand, this segment rang true in relation to the literature we have read in class surrounding celebrity deaths and the commercialization of death. In fact, this ties all the way back to our class discussion about commercialization and the Internet, and how much our online data is worth to the companies that profit off it. I tried to embody this concept in my project with the addition of the “Lipstick” tab of Kate Barlow’s website. Thinly disguised under the veil of commemoration, the fan site seeks to profit off Kate Barlow’s fans through the sale of collectible replica lipsticks. My goal for this addition of the site was to give the illusion of authenticity to gullible fans who sought to emulate Kissin’ Kate’s iconic look, but remain transparent enough for non-fans to realize this was merely a scheme for the site’s creators to make money. I wanted to capture the ever-presence of online marketing, which permeates virtually every sphere of space on the Internet nowadays.

Works Cited

Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies. 2015.

Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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

My Video:

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHSPNVoLZVw&w=560&h=315%5D

     While creating this project my goal was to cause the viewer to ask themselves the question: “what really happens to Mario when you lose?” I feel that video game characters are seldom assigned the same level of humanity or approached with nearly as much empathy as characters in movies and novels (although a Psychology Today study argues that video games create empathy based on some pretty questionable sounding research (Psychology Today)). making me want to bring the viewer/player/consumer to potentially think from Mario’s perspective  To do this, I initially was exploring the potential of creating a hacked Mario ROM that would be an exact port of Super Mario World on the SNES except that when the player “died” they would be sent to a sort of “afterlife” level populated by wandering NPC versions of every Mario the player had previously killed in action. These post-mortem Marios would haunt the game in the same ghostly way that a video recording of a person who is now dead might – creating a “ghost-like” type of haunting which was one of the two options for this project. After some research I was confronted with the conclusion that hacking my own ROM would require more coding skill and experience than I personally have, so I instead decided to instead create a fake play-through of this game using After Effects-based animation and commentary in the style of a Let’s Play. I wanted to utilize the commentary generally present in a Let’s Play/review/game walkthrough video to create a sense of normalcy and represent the expectations that would likely be carried by many stereotypical gamers going into playing such a ROM (especially given that it’s probably fair to say that those who make reviews and LP’s are generally more likely to approach games in a way stereotypical of frequent gamers).

     The expectations carried by many gamers when entering into gameplay of an 8-bit side-scrolling platformer, especially the famed and ubiquitous Mario series, is that they will inevitably die at some point. Because of this the Player Character, usually also serving as the game’s protagonist, becomes a victim of the player in the same way that the NPC enemies do. Because Mario is a victim in Super Mario World, Carly Kocurek’s notion of alternative blood applies to his “death” mechanic in the game quite well (Kocurek 2015). Mario’s deaths are substituted in two ways: the first is with the inclusion of multiple “lives” that the player has before harming Mario results in the Game Over screen. The other way Mario’s death is substituted with alternative mechanics is the animation – where does he go when he bounces off the screen looking like someone pricked his butt with a cattle prod? This was a question I wanted to provide one potential answer to with my video – perhaps Mario is buried by his digital friends and family at a lavish memorial service and Luigi wears nothing but black for the rest of his life. I’m not sure that I think the cultural violence Kocurek outlines as being a combined product and goal of alternative blood is necessarily as present in Mario as it is in some of the games she describes, but the dehumanization and resulting deemphasis of empathy created by Mario’s “alternative” death was something I wanted to explore in my Haunted Media Project. With the player repeatedly bringing Mario to a series of untimely and often immensely painful-looking ends it only seemed fair to question whether Mario – however digital he may be – appreciates being killed over and over or not.

     Mario’s alternative death is further dehumanized by the serialized and repetitive nature of player character death in side-scrolling platform style games such as Super Mario World. As Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux write in “Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making and Breaking Video Games”: “Each moment of domestic play, in Sartre’s (2004, 262) words, is ‘lived separately as identical instances of the same act.’ The work of game designers, however, often obscures the explicitly repetitive aspects of computational media.” (Boluk and Lemieux, 2017) The obscuring of repetition and serialization of death in Super Mario World has something of a synergistic effect on the desensitization present in the alternative death of Mario. Because the only reminder of Mario’s past “lives” in Super Mario World is the counter on the top left side of the screen (and even that is erased when the player depletes their lives and triggers a game over), the player is separated from the parallel Mario’s that have existed in the past, both during the individual player’s accumulated Super Mario playing time and more generally during the time spent by everyone who’s ever played Mario in the history of the series. Even for Super Mario World alone the number of deaths Mario has endured since his 1990 birth is unfathomable. I know that I am personally responsible for at least a couple hundred – if not a couple thousand – of Mario’s untimely ends. Despite the timeless nature of the Mario series and enduring popularity of even the older games in the series such as Super Mario World, Mario has already died millions if not billions of times over. Does each individual Mario matter? Are they the same character or slightly different each time? These are questions I wanted to bring viewers of my video to ask. I am reminded by a concept present in the recent anime, Ajin.

     In the series the humanoid species of Ajin cannot die and will regrow any limb or heal any injury – even regrow the ajin’s head should it be removed; however, when an
Ajin has their head cut off they regrow it, including the brain, from the body instead of the body growing from the severed head. This means that they have an entirely new brain, but does this make them the same person or are they a new person/Ajin entirely? The protagonist believes in the existence of the soul and feels that he will permanently actually “die” should he regrow his head and lives in extreme fear of decapitation. Far from a digression, I think the above description of death and the fear of losing ones soul is very relevant to Mario’s apparent immortality despite having numerous torturous game-ending mishaps. It reminds me a bit of Jonathan Sterne’s idea of a resonant tomb (Sterne 2003). Whereas the human body/throat is analogous to a resonator of life (not sure he would word it as such) in Sterne’s idea of recorded audio as a resonant tomb, Mario’s initial character could be seen as analogous to the initial life with his subsequent manifestations merely being replications of the original. Does Mario have a soul? If he did, does he still have one? Both are additional questions I wanted to bring up with my Haunted Media Project.

     The feeling of invincibility brought to players by the repetitive life-based mechanic present in many video games allows players a respite from the feeling of vulnerability created by  a perceived permanent death (I say perceived because, although some claim to know the answer, nobody knows objectively that the death of our corporeal body is in fact the death of us permanently. Brendan Keogh writes about the effect of instituting ‘perma-death’ restrictions on games such as Minecraft, describing how he used self-imposed perma-death through refusal to use the in-game sleeping mechanic (which serves as a save function) and promise to delete the game should he die. Minecraft is a survival game so the nature of the game creates more opportunity for vulnerability, but a similar mechanic in Mario would still definitely make a player’s relationship with Mario much different.

     My fake mod’s inclusion of a visual reminder of Mario’s death alongside heavy-handed implications that Mario is experiencing pain lift the veil of false invincibility that the player (the wonderfully named Sheik the Freak in this case) has over their perception going into the game. My inclusion of the commentary was both to add to the sense that my artifact could be a real video one might find online as well as to represent this veil of invincibility and how many gamers would probably be very disturbed to find that they were actually causing someone tangible pain through their recreation. Hopefully serving as somewhat comic relief, the final clip of someone setting fire to their computer also serves to represent the feeling of deep disturbance I would probably have should someone inform me that I have actually been brutally torturing and murdering a growth-stunted Italian-American vigilante plumber all these years. My hope is that, to quote a proverb, “it’s not that deep”. But while thinking about the idea of a pain-feeling vulnerable Mario quite a bit during the creation of my video I realized that I would probably have the “burn it with fire” reaction to such a game, whether because of its clear position somewhere far beyond the uncanny valley or because perhaps, deep down inside all of us, we’ve all wondered if Mario feels pain.

References:

Carly A. Kocurek (2015) Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death,

violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games, Visual Studies, 30:1, 79-89

Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming: playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking videogames. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2017. Print.

Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past – Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Duke University Press 2003

Artist’s Statement

In discussing death and its relationship with technology, we devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to discussing how technology can expand the ways in which we both encounter and engage with death—be they via memorialized accounts, digital wills, or even cyber cemeteries. What we have not spent as much time or effort considering is whether technology can trivialize real-world death.

We have certainly talked about technology’s desensitizing aspects in discussing video games; it almost seems like an unavoidable pairing—violent video games and claims about desensitization. In fact, we read an article by Carly A. Kocurek (“Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games”) in which she focuses primarily on violence and attempts to mitigate that violence through dehumanization and the monstrous.  Kocurek finds that a common side effect of these attempts, however, is desensitization to violence that echoes “long-standing propaganda strategies…used to justify real-world violence against marginialised groups [sic]” (Kocurek, 88). With her article, Kocurek cautions against the unquestioning acceptance of video games’ treatment of violence, especially as it relates to the finality of death.

In addition to the dehumanization that she points out, video games also exemplify the manner in which technology warps the impact and consequences of death. In most games today, death is not permanent (games that do have “permanent” or more consequential deaths or often marketed on those aspects themselves). Rather, it is a temporary setback, often even designed as a hook to get the player to keep playing rather than discourage him or her to quit. Some games even attempt to make death entertaining—coming in the form of everything from a simple fall in a Mario game or the graphic disembowelment of Mortal Kombat. A host of games even let the player re-watch or re-experience their own death like the Kill Cam in Call of Duty or the Super Meat Boy deaths replays, crafting that enjoyment of mortality into the core element of their games.

Other evidence applies similar arguments to other forms of media. With her article “Media Exposure and Sensitivity to Violence in News Reports: Evidence of Desensitization,” Erica Scharrer suggests that video games are certainly not the only desensitizing agents in our lives; television and films also do their part to desensitize us to violence, and, as relatedly, to death. She actually goes on to say that “extreme” forms of violent media—like horror movies or violent video games—are not the only contributors to our desensitization; rather, even “daily exposure…” to commonplace depictions of violence and death as seen in places like “ordinary news media outlets” can weaken our emotional responses to and perceptions of violence and death (Scharrer, 301-302).

Still, most news outlets tend to treat these subjects with professional respect and reverence. Newspaper and local news affiliates, especially, seem to honor their material by reporting appropriately concerning the topics of death or violence—as they usually intend to foster ties with the community and also only have a limited amount of time or space to which they can devote their coverage. Essentially, there are limits imposed by these means of “daily exposure[s]” on their coverage.

The “daily exposures” that are cable news networks are a whole different manner. These businesses unabashedly milk tragedies for all their worth, relying on them for steady income and viewership. Networks liked CNN or Fox News or MSNBC trivialize death by covering it on repeat and rehashing the same sad looks, phrases, and statistics to maximize their viewership.

But cable news networks are nothing new, and clearly not what one would call technological innovation. Instead, the digital successor to the “daily exposure’ of cable news would be social media. After all, what else besides social media and could devalue everything it hosts through sheer overexposure in the manner that cable news does. With social media, death again takes on the familiar form of entertainment as it did with video games or network news, also stemming from similar reasons. Like video games, death on social media is means of temporary form of amusement, whether it comes as a silly Darwin Awards-esque video or an article to get incensed about briefly, we always end going back to back to browsing through friends’ profile pictures. It is only on social media that an article concerning a group of students dying in a fire is essentially giving the same weight as cute puppy gif.

This devaluing of death was actually the motivating idea for my Haunted Media Project. At first, I intended to tell a story about death via social media—specifically a mystery about the death of a group of students solvable through hints dropped on social media platforms. I was hoping to represent the entertainment value of death, essentially seeking to amuse the reader with a story of death in commentary on the relationship between that media, the story, and the audience.

However, I encountered several problems with that approach. First and foremost was one of logistics. It was admittedly quite difficult to juggle all the accounts that I had intended to use—hard keeping track of everything, but even more difficult registering them,  as most websites, especially Facebook and Reddit, require numerous identity verification steps  all throughout the process. As such, I re-evaluated my goals, and instead strove to represent the desensitization to death that I have described above, creating a subreddit, two websites, and about twenty-four accounts to populate these digital spaces.

Rather than tell the mystery that I first set out to do, I intended to model the devaluation of death into a fleeting form entertainment via social media. I still kept elements of my first project idea, keeping the budding fictional metropolis of Springfield, North Carolina. I made a subreddit for it (r/SpringfieldNC), drawing inspiration from the subreddits of other cities (and other subreddits in general), and proceeded to populate that subreddit with a host of fairly vacuous posts, ranging from a post about an annual Police barbecue to an unanswered request for gym recommendations. The one relevant post (and fairly meaningful one outside of the protesting picture) is the one concerning the fire at the local university, sandwiched between a post about a hot dog stand called Wonder Wieners and a question looking for a reptile guy for a kid’s party. If one were not specifically told what to look for, one would likely miss that post completely, as there is nothing besides title that sets it apart from the other posts.

Clicking on the fire post leads the reader to a barebones local newspaper article that goes over the details of the fire in brief without really saying much requiring much attention. This is meant to parallel the kinds of articles that are often linked via social media sites like Reddit. Rather than read a detailed article, many users might read the headline or post title and go directly to the comments, where the article will often be summarized (either by another user or a bot) in a single line starting with the acronym TL;DR (standing for “too long, didn’t read). Or, even more helpful than the summaries, is the user that gives live updates in the comments about culled from Police Scanners, Tweets, live broadcasts—a user overeager to get involved in the gritty details of the events depicted in my project.

Here, the over-helpful user gives a link to the site of the university where the accident happened. This site is intended to poke fun at institutional responses to tragedy—especially those that happen via the Internet. Here the university offers up a relatively cold, formulaic response to tragedy that echoes the detached nature of its online medium—complete with a flickering candle gif for people that died in a fire. The help they offer is not quite helpful at all, and the site constantly links to error pages as the University site was not prepared to handle the traffic at the magnitude it was. Additionally they talk of hosting and moderating a group memory page for the deceased individuals, but there is very little headway made there at all, suggesting an overall disinterest in the grief of others.

Of course, along with the gung-ho white knights, there come trolls. We have seen the damage trolls can do with articles like Whitney Phillips’s “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online,” but, with the general devaluing of and detachment from death that is propagated by technology and social media, we also see can see a change in the trolls. As a result of that detachment, there’s less personal involvement (both from trolls and normal users) within the comments section of a post about death; in fact, sometimes even the users that are involved in the constructive (or at least non-trolling) discussion in the comments might still end up making a tasteless joke. Yet the divorce of the users from the subject matter and serious tone allow for those kinds of jokes, which are often received well with numerous up-votes on the site. Together, these elements are intended to model the devaluing and detaching nature of social media as it related to death and technology.

Works Cited:

Kocurek, Carly A. “Who Hearkens to the Monster’s Scream? Death, Violence and the Veil of the Monstrous in Video Games.” Visual Studies 30.1 (2015): 79–89. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16.12 (2011): n. pag. firstmonday.org. Web. 6 Apr. 2017.

Rogers, Katie. “What Is a Constant Cycle of Violent News Doing to Us?” The New York Times 15 July 2016. NYTimes.com. Web. 6 Apr. 2017.

Scharrer, Erica. “Media Exposure and Sensitivity to Violence in News Reports: Evidence of Desensitization?” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85.2 (2008): 291–310. Print.

Instructions

1. Go to subreddit
2. Click around
3. Eventually make your way to Fire post
4. Check the comments!
5. Follow the links! (eventually take you to here and here)