- "Digital legacy – what happens to our digital assets when we die?": Astrid Waagstein, Denmark
- "Digital dead remains: exploring material and in-material legacies": Selina Ellis Gray and Maria Alejandra Lujan Escalante, UK
- "Facebook user profiles after death: digital inheritance or property of the network?": Damien McCallig, Ireland
This was a fascinating session, which is my solace for not being able to attend the other session which took place at the same time.
Astrid Waagstein
When Astrid finished her talk I wanted to get up on my feet and clap, or cheer, or better yet - hug her. Apart form obvious differences in style etc., I felt like I could have given Astrid's talk - and she could have given one of mine. Her perception of Digital Death issues is quite similar to mine and it was very gratifying for me to meet her.
In the following pictures she is showing an official booklet in Danish which is distributed to people in hospitals, hospices etc., with points worth thinking about and taking care of while still alive - including digital legacy, which I was very impressed by.
Here are some quotes from her abstract:
"Digital Legacy – What Happens to Our Digital Assets when We Die?
What happens to our digital assets such as photos, playlists, digitised letters, diaries and blogs when we die? Will our relatives be able to gain access to these digital heirlooms? And do we want them to?
This article presents the results of a study conducted in June 2013 examining the awareness of and sentiments on digital legacy. It also suggests a research design building on the study in question, and aiming towards the development of a solution that addresses legal, practical, technical and ethical challenges, and which handles and secures digital legacy appropriate.
Through interviews with death aware respondents – mainly hospice employees – respondents were (implicitly) asked if they could relate to their digital legacy and if so, how. They were also asked to what degree their digital legacy was important to them, and what artefacts they regarded as valuable and potential heirlooms.
The study showed that the respondents were not at all aware of having a digital legacy. Despite their death awareness and having experienced problems with inaccessible digital assets regarding family or friends they had not considered the same problem regarding their own legacy. However, the actions and statements of the interviewees make it clear that the respondents wish to preserve and safe-keep their digital effects as they have great emotional, practical and historical value to them - effects such as digital documents (personal letters, poetry, songs), digital photos, texts, blogs, digital music collections, e-Boks content, access to online banking and hardware, and the hardware and passwords itself.
Furthermore a revisit at the hospice after six months unveiled that the hospice employees had begun discussing digital legacy and the passing of access codes with patients".
Selina Ellis Gray and Maria Alejandra Lujan Escalante
Here are some quotes from their abstract:
"Digital Dead Remains: Exploring Material and In-material Legacies
Our material possessions continue on after our deaths. As remnants of lives lived and fractious identities, remains range from the places where the deceased once called home, the things they used to wear on their bodies and the ‘treasures’ which they held in high esteem. The dead leave us with these material legacies that appear ingrained with deep residues which become profoundly evocative to the memories of the living (Gibson, 2008; Davis, 2007).
In contemporary society, the dead are increasingly leaving behind a massive amount of ‘in-material’ remains, as data embedded within the material of the technological infrastructure and its network of hardware, software, interfaces and lines of code. While this suggests the material qualities of our legacies are undergoing a radical transformation, moving from traditional earthly possessions towards an inclusion of in-material data, embodied residues are seemingly managing to exist on.
The objective of this work is to discuss this changing nature of matter and meaning in the context of life and death, specifically in relation to digital memory and the notion of the memento. We aim to introducing a dynamic and ‘intra-active’ perspective which draws on the interdisciplinary work of New Materialist philosophy and in particular, Karen Barad.
We will outline how both material and in-material legacies have particular features, capacities and emergent practices, through presenting empirical data that illustrates how these can [dis]able social personas and [re]configure identities after death. We do this through recounting empirical observations made within a range of different online platforms. From ‘user generated’ through to intelligent forms of digital afterlife software as seen by ‘
Death Switch’, ‘
DeadSocial’, ‘
if i die’, ‘
Perpetu’ and ‘
LivesOn’. This work should prompt reflect upon how both material and in-material remains work to mediate and [re]negotiate relationships of loss within the sensitive context of bereavement".
Damien McCallig
I have been following Damien's (excellent) work for a while now so it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person.
You can read some of his work in the following links:
Here are some quotes from his abstract:
"Facebook User Profiles after Death: Digital Inheritance or Property of the Network?
Facebook is currently the most popular social networking service. It hosts more than 1.26 billion user profiles with almost 750 million daily active users. Many of the inactive user profiles relate to deceased account holders. Dealing with the digital remains of these deceased users creates significant policy and procedural difficulties for service providers, such as Facebook. The digital remains issue also raises interesting questions regarding what it is a decedent leaves behind, in digital media when they die, and whether a public policy response is warranted to deal with the issue.
This paper questions whether a deceased user’s profile should be classified as a form of digital inheritance, to be distributed as part of a decedent’s estate, or should the profiles of the dead remain the property of the network. It further asks, what useful impact, if any, can legal or public policy interventions have on the regulation of the digital remains issue. In answering these questions the factors which have shaped Facebook’s evolving deceased user policies are identified and examined. The early impact of internal factors, in particular, pressure from other users of the social network, who were bound together by technical and contractual rules, set many of the parameters for later changes to Facebook’s deceased user policy. External factors driven by the surviving families of the deceased, the media, privacy laws and regulators, the estate planning industry, court cases and legislators eventually became more impactful on Facebook’s policy decisions and these are also analysed.
This analysis also draws out gaps in Facebook’s current policies and helps test the impact of proposed legislative and public policy changes. The proposed legislation, emerging in the United States, in relation to fiduciary access to a decedent’s digital assets, may not have too great an impact on service providers, such as Facebook, and may need to be broadened in application and scope. Ultimately, this paper looks to the future and makes recommendations which will be useful for social network service providers, including Facebook, and legislators with respect to digital inheritance and future heritage access to the digital remains of deceased persons".
- Paper Session 4-2: Social Media Practices of MourningSession chair: Stine Gotved
- "“I didn’t know her, but…” : affected strangers’ mourning practices on Facebook R.I.P pages": Lisbeth Klastrup, Denmark
- "Entextualizing moments of mourning on Facebook: narrative performances of grief in computer-mediated communication": Korina Giaxoglou, UK
- "Socially shared mourning: construction and consumption of collective memory": Anu Harju, Finland
Since sessions 4-1 and 4-2 took place at the same time and I attended 4-1, I'm afraid all I can offer about this session is quotes from abstracts:
Lisbeth Klastrup
"”I Didn’t know her, but...”: Affected Strangers’ Mourning Practices on Facebook R.I.P. Pages
“Death [in the media] is not a taboo... But rather a narrative force and image system used to inform, shock and entertain” (Gibson 2007, 416)
While sociologists of death consistently argue, that in modern western society the death of those close to us has become an individual and private matter, death researchers have also pointed out that the death of others or the death of celebrities are regularly made into public stories by the news media (see f.i. Field and Walter 2003, Gibson 2007).
This paper will present and discuss findings from an in-depth study of “R.I.P” pages on Facebook. It takes its point of departure in the fact that Facebook R.I.P. pages seem to attract many people who do and did not know the person who is commemorated on the pages in question. The author has previously referred to this practice as “R.I.P’ing” and “affective mourning”. This paper will further explore why these “strangers” post on RIP-pages, and what they do when they are there? In the cases, which will be discussed in this paper, the people who are remembered on these pages, have a “history of death” which have circulated in the press, and furthermore the same press will often explicitly have pointed to the R.I.P page as part of their coverage of the story. The study therefore includes unpacking and tracking the relation between news media and the Facebook page in question. They are all pages which have gotten around 5000 likes or more, and therefore contain several posts by alledged “strangers”. An earlier pilot study by the author of “R.I.P’ing” practices (sample: 600 posts) revealed that three most common forms of posts to these pages were conventional formal expressions of mourning (like writing “R.I.P), expressions of sympathy with the family of the bereaved, and expressions of the affect and emotions of the poster. This study will seek to confirm whether this is a recurrent pattern, and try to outline a tentative typology of “mourning strangers”".
Korina Giaxoglou
"Entextualizing Moments of Mourning on Facebook: Narrative Performances of Grief in Computer-mediated Communication
Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday self and share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions by variously combining the affordances and constraints of different media.
(see Barton and Lee 2013, Georgakopoulou 2006, Jones and Hafner 2012). The use of digital environments as ‘new’ sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning has been increasingly receiving scholarly attention addressing the issues that emanate from such ‘new’ uses (Brubaker and Hayes 2011, Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish, 2012). And yet, there is much scope for developing a systematic and interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of social practices and meanings emerging (or re-emerging) in digital spaces for mourning. The present paper seeks to offer a sociolinguistic perspective to the study of mourning and grieving online with the aim to foreground links between linguistic-discursive practices in digital environments and broader aspects of social life.
The focus of the paper lies on practices of sharing, understood as ‘the entextualization of significant moments for a networked audience’ (Androutsopoulos, 2013) with an emphasis on practices of moments of mourning on Facebook pages and group sites. It is argued that genres of mourning and performances of grief help transform the unspeakable into reportable and shareable moments embedded in multimodal texts. Furthermore, such genres and performances offer a unique window to the enactment and negotiation of contemporary Western regimes of individualized emotion (cf. Wilce, 2009).
Analysing Facebook logs as narratives in computer-mediated interaction, the paper explores the way informal spaces for mourning encourage the weaving of grief into everyday life through different types of narrative activity, lending coherence and affective power to individual articulations of grief".
Anu Harju
"Socially Shared Mourning: Construction and Consumption of Collective Memory
The death of Steve Jobs in 2011 shocked the fan community and hurled them into creative action. Not only did the fans flood Apple stores around the world, digital commemorative artefacts soon emerged online. Social media sites rendered personal acts of remembrance into public property, into memorial sites. This paper looks at the collective construction of the memory of Jobs as an object of fandom in these sites after his death and how this memory is subsequently consumed, and what instrumental role(s) technological devices and digital artefacts have in these practices. Drawing on Eliade’s (1959) account of sociology of religion and his notions of the duality of modes of existence regarding time and space, namely the sacred and the profane modes, this paper seeks to examine the spiritual aspects of the fans’ practices of mourning in the wider context of consumer culture theory (Belk et al., 1989; Bonsu and Belk 2003; Belk and Tumbat, 2005; Muñiz et al., 2005).
Data is collected from social media site YouTube, where remembrance videos dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs abound. One fan-produced commemorative video, called ‘
In dedication – Thank you, Steve’ is chosen for more careful analysis. While the video is also examined, the user comments posted on the video site, both by fans and anti-fans, as well as the ensuing conversations, are analysed in more detail.
The study shows that the fans consumption has spiritual elements, of experiencing the sacred. Just as devices may act as threshold into sacred space, so may digital commemorative artefacts on social media sites. As death marks a separation, revisiting these sites offer continuation, access to symbolic eternity. In the process of bereavement, the object of fandom becomes increasingly an object of consumption and undergoes a signification process whereby new meanings are constructed, contested and negotiated.
Social practices of mourning are changing: social media is transforming what used to be private into a public, networked, and social practice. New forms of spirituality are emerging and experienced in the everyday. Digitality offers eternal existence, even if symbolic, and allows continued consumption of what once was".
- Paper Session 5: Digital Memorials and MemoriesSession chair: Tim Hutchings
- "The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community of the Netherlands and the Jewish Monument Community: ritual commemorative practices and meaning": Laurie M.C. Faro, The Netherlands
- "Digital eternities: post-mortem digital identities and new memorial uses of the web from a gender perspective": Fanny Georges, Hélène Bourdeloie and Lucien Castex, France
- "The netlore of the infinite: death (and beyond) in the new digital memory ecology": Amanda Lagerkvist, Sweden
As the end of the day and the symposium were approaching, kudos to the participants of the last session who managed to keep us engaged.
Laurie M.C. Faro
As I'm both Jewish and from a family with Hollocaust background (my Hungarian paternal grandparents survived the camps, to make some long stories short), I was fascinated by this unique project which I was unaware of till that point.
Here are some quotes from her abstract:
"The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community of the Netherlands and the Jewish Monument Community: Ritual Commemorative Practices and Meaning
In April 2005, the
Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands went on line. This monument is an Internet monument dedicated to preserving the memory of more than 100,000 men, women and children, Dutch Jewish victims of the Shoah. The digital monument is at first sight a page on the internet and the home page is intended as monument: a screen with thousands of little colored bars which are grouped together in blocks. Each block represents a family and each little bar within a block represents a victim. Clicking on a bar will direct you to the separate pages of all victims.
Main objective is to reconstruct the picture of the Jewish community in the Netherlands at the eve of their destruction by means of ‘returning’ to each individual victim his or her identity.
As of September 2010, the Jewish Monument Community website has been linked to the website of the Digital Monument. The
Community is an interactive website where so called ‘users’ may contribute and exchange information about the persons remembered in the monument. More than 6,000 user profiles have been registered at the Community website.
With this monument and accompanying community, a new approach to commemoration is introduced while new concepts in design, memorial space and communication are applied.
In 1998 Geser feared that commemoration practices at a virtual memorial would be limited to ‘behavior extremely short in time and extremely unrelated to any other social involvements. It becomes a small ‘intermezzo’, during surfing activities […]’. The results of my research show that, although practices are mostly limited in time, they do not have the character of an ‘intermezzo’ in between other internet activities. Within all groups of informants practices evoke deeply felt emotions raised by the enormous amount of names, the ages and the stories behind the victims.
My research also shows that the proposed characteristics of ‘co – production’ of memory and ‘voice’ of web – based memorializing by Foot et al, have been defined as distinguishing features of the Digital Monument and Community. By sharing their own personal remembrances, stories, pictures or other digitalized objects which they consider relevant on the Community, users co – produce the remembrance of the Shoah.
Each individual may decide what they consider important to ‘voice’ at the community and as a result the memorial refrains from taking sides and imposing closure upon the audience’s interpretation of the memory of the Shoah.
In line with Casey and Savage (who launched the term ‘therapeutic’ monument) there seems to be a ‘healing’ effect in expressing oneself in a public, in this case a virtual, environment.
In conclusion: the Digital Monument and Community s are valuable contributions to commemoration practices of the Shoah, a place 24/7 accessible for commemoration from all over the world where each one can contribute at one’s own place and time. In this respect they form a ‘living monument’, not closed but open, and which will continue to grow in future".
Fanny Georges, Hélène Bourdeloie and Lucien Castex
Here are some quotes from their abstract:
"Digital Eternities: Post-mortem Digital Identities and New Memorial Uses of the Web From a Gender Perspective
As a privileged site for individual identity building, the web and its uses have reorganized social relationships. The lasting of digital data, after the death of its users, raise nowadays several questions. What become of the identity data of web users after their death? Do they care about them when they are still alive? How do relatives deal with these data? How do major actors of the web, such as Facebook and Google, manage them? As any other digital and funeral practices, those post mortem digital practices are gendered. This project wants to shed a light on the gender dimension of these practices. How does the gender of the dead person and of those who pay tribute to him/her structure the memorial uses and the construction of post mortem identities? Such questions seem crucial when taking into account the multiplication of digital programs dedicated to memorial practices and the dramatic importance of social networks in relation to the aging of web users.
For a few years, international research has explored the social issues raised by profiles of dead users, as well as the changes in the mourning practices on the web, but has paid little attention to gender issues. In France, only a few research projects have been conducted on the thematic. Even more, if works articulate digital practices and death or question the gender dimension of mourning, none develop a specific gender perspective on digital practices related to death".
Amanda Lagerkvist
You can read some of Amanda's work in the following link:
Here are some quotes from her abstract:
"The Netlore of the Infinite: Death (and Beyond) in the New Digital Memory Ecology
Our late modern digital age raises a number of important concerns as regards the fundamentals of our existence. Through shifts in the digital memory ecology that affect our sense of time, space, community and identity, our life world seems to be assuming a new, and quite vulnerable form (Bauman 2008). Yet, while our age celebrates instantaneity, and makes compulsions of hyper connectivity and networked individualism co-exist with technological obsolescence, the result is more than the all-pervasive tension between remembering and forgetting (Hoskins 2013, Garde Hansen et al 2009). This paper argues, in addition, that in our era of absolute presence, the infinite has simultaneously made an important return through digital memory practices that both defer and de-sequester death (author 2013). This is visible in the ubiquitous meaning making practices of personal digital archiving through the urges for self-perpetuation; it is evident at sites where the self may be saved for posterity (
www.Itomb); it is discernible in the practices of directly speaking to the dead on digital memorials (Roberts 2004, Walter et. al 2011/12), and in the tendency among some users to regard the internet itself as a manifestation of eternity, ‘heaven’ and the sacred (Jacobi 2012). The paper shows that by approaching digital memory cultures existentially – inspired by the debate on media and religion and its emphasis on new uncharted forms of existential meaning making in our media age (Hoover & Lundby 1997; Woodhead & Heelas 2001; Lövheim 2008, Hutchings 2012; Moncur forthcoming) – we may move beyond the binary between technological determinism and technological affordances. At this juncture, we may examine what may be termed a ‘netlore’ of the infinite, and gain insights into how people navigate and create meaning, through establishing a sense existential security, in the digital memory ecology.
The End
All in all, it was a very rewarding experience, and I thank all the people who have made this possible: from the organizers to the participants to the people who made this trip possible for me via crowdfunding.
Astrid Waagstein and me
Picture by Deborah Whitehead
