http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160313-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-facebook-dead?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook
In this BBC article entitled "Facebook is an growing and unstoppable digital graveyard," the author, Ambrosino, tells the story of his aunt who recently passed away, but is still seemingly digitally alive on Facebook. Other users continue to interact with her active account, meaning that it's still an active node in the Facebook network. While some users who have passed away have "memorialised" profiles, many more remain active. Ambrosino notes that by 2012, an estimated "30 million users with Facebook accounts had died. That number has only gone up since. Some estimates claim more than 8,000 users die each day."
Ambrosino explores the idea of being digitally immortalized and the effects that it has on those who are left behind. At the risk of seeming callous (and because I'm a student in CS640) I must admit that several other questions also came to mind when reading this article; questions such as:
How does having millions of "dead active" users (yes, it's an oxymoron - I think ...) with accounts that living active users are able to still interact with affect Facebook's algorithms?
According to actor network theory, both human actors and material artifacts (actants) are nodes in the network (Lievrouw, p. 29). Are these "dead active" users now material artifacts, or are they digital node-ghosts who possess agency and continue to exist beyond the material life of the original physical actor? What happens when nodes in the network change from being actors to actants, or is this even possible?
Will millions of "dead active" user accounts that are no longer generating original content alter the overall quality or quantity of the data generated by Facebook?
One of the designed affordances of Facebook is its present focus, where the past and the future don't really exist and we are compelled to continually create content that is "present tense" oriented. This present focus doesn't afford users a way to deal with (or become part of) the past. As Ambrosino notes, "In Facebook, all places are present, all times are now. My Aunt Jackie exists in this medium just as I do. In a way, there is no moving on without her." He suggests the idea that being able to forget is an important part of life, and Wise agrees, stating that "we need to incorporate forgetting into the assemblage" of what he calls the Clickable World (228). How can forgetting be incorporated into Facebook?
I realize that I've asked more questions than I've provided answers, but I'm very interested in how you might approach or answer some of these questions!
Very interesting post! Something I have recently noticed on my friend Matt’s Facebook (who recently passed) is that other people keep him active. For example, he was on the men’s hockey team at Geneseo. Geneseo just won the SUNYAC championship and are on their way to the national tournament. Various members of the team tagged Matt in pictures of themselves holding the trophy, saying “this one’s for you” and variations of that sentiment. Although Matt is not posting about the event, Facebook still knows that his team won a major tournament.
ReplyDeleteI think Facebook interaction helps those who are left behind. The members of the team were so proud they had won the championship in honor of Hutch, so this was their way of telling him. Also, friends and family members post on his wall a lot keeping him updated on goings on.
Although Matt is not producing new information on Facebook, people are producing information as a result of him. Therefore, I think his profile still has financial use to Facebook. Furthermore, people interacting with his profile are monitored as liking or commenting on things that are placed on his wall.
Jo-Dee you raise a very interesting point that I had not given much thought. Sami you already picked up on this in your reply but my immediate concern is the monetization of the deceased. As many of the Marxist authors that we have read asserted is the affective interaction of the network itself that is the lynchpin of monetization. This means that profit is produced by affective interaction between nodes on a wide scale as information comes to a node, flows through it, or is produced by it. While it is certainly more profitable if each node is both bridging connections and actively contributing to the network, once established the active production from a node is no longer necessary as long as other actors are producing value including the node. All of this suggests what we likely already are keenly aware of: that the dead are being monetized in a sense. I find this to be very concerning. Interestingly this might not be so problematic if users were being paid a fair wage by social media owners. I would actually be in favour of passing on wages posthumously earned to family members (or other people specified by the deceased prior to death). I am just speculating but I imagine that this could be accomplished fairly easily by amending end user license agreements and allowing users to specify who should benefit from their accounts if something were to happen to them.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, as per our in class discussions yesterday, I wonder if these monetized spaces become locative after a user has passed away. Again, as both of you pointed out, friends and family of the deceased often gather in the spaces that social media provide. Do these spaces ever get connected to the locations surrounding the deceased in the material world (such as their grave site)? Might there be any compounding implications as a result of the social media spaces being exploitative?
My apologies for adding more questions to the conversation but I think that you two are on to a very interesting topic… Perhaps this might be something worth bringing up in class?
This was a great post and it is quite similar to what I am discussing in my final reading response; however, I would like to draw out one comment you made about the collapse of past and present time on Facebook. This is an important process on social media. I believe the future also collapses here as well. People on Facebok write posts about both past and future events and indicate their pent up frustration, anxiety, or excitement. It is expected that older events are listed on facebook or intagram as “throwbacks” to make these posts known to their network that the user is reflecting on something that happened before. It is an assumption that a repost be deemed as a throwback to become an “authentic post”. If a user puts an old picture up of themselves on Facebook, it becomes an inauthentic picture of what the person actually looks like now. Kim K was burned for this a few weeks ago when she posted a nude picture of herself to show off her body, but it turns out this picture was taken before her pregnancy. This sort of deception becomes unacceptable on social media. I believe the purpose of this is to encourage users to create more post more and continually update their lives. The process becomes not to just capture and bank photos to be evenly distributed and posted in consecutive days, but to capture and post immediately, for real-time effect.
ReplyDeleteWith that being said, users would often post on my friend’s wall (who passed away in high school) immediate posts about reminders they had of her when a song came on or when they found something they had of hers. This real-time effect has somehow become an authentic way to reflect on past memories in present time. The purpose of these Facebook pages of those who have passed, allow a sort of connection between users and their deceased friend, to keep them motivated to continually communicate with these people through this MEDIUM. Haha bad joke. But I definitely see how producers can continue to achieve this big data and still reflect it back to users, based on what they post on the deceased person’s page. The big data is still as relevant as any other real time post, and even when posting “Throwback” photos of past events with the deceased person on their profile, these shared memories allows big data collectors to hone in on users’ values. I believe that ethically this seems wrong, but when thrown into the pool of all other posts that could also be quite intrusive and personal, it is all left up to the user to share this information and it becomes ‘fair-game’ for producers to collect it.
Interesting points Jo-Dee. I was reminded of the reading where Mark Andrejevic points out the potential wealth of stored personal information (trove) that Facebook maintains. What happens to the value of such data when a user dies? Does that data finally get deleted? It would be a bit ghoulish for Facebook to use a deceased person's information to target other (living) users.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting post, Jo-Dee!
ReplyDeleteThis is something I've put a bit of thought into myself. The summer before I started high school, a friend of mine passed away in a car accident - almost 9 years ago. This was also around the time I made a Facebook account, and had him on my friends list. After the accident, I saw friends and family members using the space of his profile to memorialize him, and this made sense to me for a while, but as time went on, began to make me a bit uncomfortable. As I was myself moving on from his death, I was watching other people grieving very publicly. After a bit of going back and forth, I decided to remove his profile from my network, and haven't visited his profile since... visiting the grave site has always felt more appropriate to me, though I can sympathize with wanting a way to feel connected and see how Facebook could perhaps provide that space.
When reading your post, I thought back to these feelings of unease surrounding his passing and how our mutual friends dealt with their grief on Facebook. I became curious to see if anyone had since found his password and deactivated the account or changed it to a page of remembrance rather than it still being a seemingly "active" account. There are still 37 people on his friends list. A number of those people still seem to be using the space of his profile to communicate regularly, whether it be wishing a happy birthday, sharing a memory, or just quickly saying that he was in their thoughts on a given day. It does seem that this doesn't really allow for forgetting, when users can still choose to share their thoughts with the friends on social media, whether they are physically present or not. His profile now holds 9 years worth of friends' grief and love for him, all of which has been exploited by Facebook - a fact that makes me much more uncomfortable than seeing these public displays of grief in the first place.
It also seems interesting to note that his profile was only created about 3 months before his passing, and only contained a couple of photos and posts from a few friends saying hi. This particular profile has only really existed as a place for memorialization, despite being in existence as a profile of a living person for a very brief time.
DeleteThis is a very interesting topic, one that sparked my interest at the beginning of the course with Slack’s notion of the cyborg. This theory becomes complex when interacting with the Facebook profiles of deceased friends. As I have witnessed the conversing with someone’s profile as if it were their actual body and presence, this becomes even more troubling when Facebook users continue this practice even after a person has died. It has now become common (or even expected) for Facebook friends to show sympathy for family members and even speak to those who have passed away through their profiles. It seems as though these practices show a deeper relationship beyond communication, as these profiles no longer seem to be representations of people but stand in for an immortal version of ourselves.
ReplyDeleteThanks all for your insights and comments! It's almost as if a cyber ghost of a person who has passed on continues to haunt Facebook, a ghost that has an identity no longer shaped by the individual but by the memories of the individual that others share on their wall. This ghost seems to have a type of agency of its own that moves away from the individual's original FB identity, evolving into something/someone else. No wonder it makes us uncomfortable!
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