{"id":1346,"date":"2017-04-06T13:12:15","date_gmt":"2017-04-06T13:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2017-04-06T13:38:53","modified_gmt":"2017-04-06T13:38:53","slug":"impakt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/04\/06\/impakt\/","title":{"rendered":"Impakt"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t get as many tweets as I wanted, I struggled with remembering the syntax of JavaScript, the data wasn\u2019t 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<\/em> grounded in reality. We\u2019re 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\u2019t that<\/em> screwed up. Keeping this in mind, I adjusted my mindset and developed Impakt<\/a>, a macro-social media site that distills down a celebrity\u2019s death to handful of figures to deliver one final reading of the social climate surrounding him or her.<\/p>\n

The Impakt of Social Media Grief Competition<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201cbrand\u201d 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 \u201cgoal\u201d 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 \u201chere-and-now\u201d things, like the Internet and the media. Sherlock suggests that these media \u201cfacilitate a new type of ritualized, collective mourning that potentially serves to distract mourners from the physical reality of death\u201d (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, \u201cto control the corpse is to control death, disorder, and chaos\u201d, and so \u201ca culture that promotes the notion of a symbolic immortality\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Postmortem Digital Identity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet, what role should be assigned one\u2019s 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\u2019s protocol when handling the passing of a user consists of \u201cmemorializing\u201d a user\u2019s 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 \u201cprioritizes the needs of a now-dead individual over the grieving community that remains\u201d (161). The grieving community can post memories and content on the deceased\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Do\u2019s and Don\u2019ts<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201cdelicate social arrangements\u201d 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 (\u201cInsults\u201d) impact the algorithm just as much as positive tweets (\u201cCompliments\u201d) (see section\u00a0“The Tunes of Tweets”). This reflects Walter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>The Tunes of Tweets<\/strong><\/p>\n

The tweets posted in relation to a public figure\u2019s death run the gamut from insults to tweets of concern to impartial headlines. The categories used for Impakt\u2019s Popularity Breakdown were inspired by Cutrona and Suhr\u2019s (1992) five types of social support as described by in an analysis by Lee and Goh on Twitter\u2019s response to Michael Jackson\u2019s 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\u2019s five types of social support to seven tweet categories (names of the original types are denoted in brackets):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Info [informational support]<\/li>\n
  2. Emotions [emotional support]<\/li>\n
  3. Compliments [esteem support]<\/li>\n
  4. Connects [network support]<\/li>\n
  5. Rumors<\/li>\n
  6. Insults<\/li>\n
  7. Other<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The categories are explained on the Impakt FAQ page<\/a>. 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\u2019s death, Lee and Goh discovered \u201ccategories not normally associated with grieving, such as spreading of rumors, expressions of hatred, and spam, also occupied a large proportion of tweets\u201d – nearly 30% (rumors, insults, and other). The authors suggested that these contributors took advantage of the high Twitter traffic \u201cfor a variety of purposes such as spreading rumors, spamming, marketing, and advertising\u201d (473). I emulated these results in the Popularity Breakdown section of Impakt. For most the tweets, they \u201cseemed more like personal and social expressions of emotions and thoughts\u201d with no response necessary from other users, like a condolence book (Lee and Goh 473).<\/p>\n

    The Nature of the Bird<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Twitter\u2019s 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 \u201cinsight 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 \u201coften alter and modify the original intent of software to fulfill a need or desire\u201d (Patton et al. 229). Patton explains that the Internet can ease that need to commune with other mourners and \u201cstrengthen group bonds by allowing users to share experiences of mourning… and memorialize the deceased with the use of text, photographs, music…\u201d (Patton et al. 228). The online community also has the side effect of popularizing someone\u2019s 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 \u201cthe public may never have known about Gakirah\u2019s 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\u201d (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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    The takeaway <\/strong><\/p>\n

    Currently, grieving on social media is still weird, but so is mourning someone you never met. As we\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    Note: While the finished product didn\u2019t 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\u2019s results. The most favorited\/retweeted tweet, the top 5 words and hashtags, and the frequency graph were generated from actual tweets surrounding Chuck Berry\u2019s death (specifically the last 10,000 tweets returned from the query \u201cchuck berry\u201d taken during the 18 March – 19 March 2017 window).<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Brubaker, Jed R., et al. \u201cBeyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.\u201d Information Society<\/em>, vol. 29, no. 3, May\/June 2013, pp.152-163. EBSCOhost<\/em>, doi:10.1080\/01972243.2013.777300.<\/p>\n

    Lee, Chei Sian and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh. “Gone Too Soon: Did Twitter Grieve for Michael Jackson?.” Online Information Review<\/em>, vol. 37, no. 3, May 2013, pp. 462-478. EBSCOhost<\/em>, doi:10.1108\/OIR-05-2012-0082.<\/p>\n

    Patton, Desmond U., et al. “I Know God\u2019s Got a Day 4 Me.” Social Science Computer Review<\/em>, vol. 35, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 226-243. EBSCOhost<\/em>, doi:10.1177\/0894439315613319.<\/p>\n

    Sherlock, Alexandra. \u201cLarger Than LIfe: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society.\u201d The Information Society<\/em>, vol 29, no. 3, May\/June 2013, pp. 164-176. EBSCOhost<\/em>, doi:10.1080\/01972243.2013.777302.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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\u2019t get as many tweets as I wanted, … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “Impakt”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haunted-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1348,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions\/1348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}