Gisela Gil-Egui

R.I.P.: Remain in perpetuity. Facebook memorial pages

Facebook is not only a virtual space to commune with the living, it is also a place to honor, memorialize, and engage in dialogs with the deceased. This study examines 550 memorial pages on Facebook for age, gender, race, and cause of death of the memorialized, as well as to whom the communication is addressed. Where ritualistic memorials and mourning practices usually occur in cemeteries or at the sites of accidents, memorial sites on Facebook offer an alternative space to mourn that is public, collective, and with archival capabilities. Individual dialogs and memories in this alternative space are not private, and often involve direct communications with the deceased. In this way, the dead never really die; rather perpetually remain in a digital state of dialogic limbo.

Framing the digital divide: a comparison of US and EU policy approaches:

This article explores key US and European Union policy documents to identify the similarities and differences in the way that the digital divide has been defined in both contexts in recent years. To that purpose, a computer-assisted text analysis was conducted, which identified not only the most frequent relevant terms in each document, but also patterns of semantic association among them. While significant differences related to the political specificities of each context were found, both sets of documents revealed a tendency over time to frame access in economic and market-based terms. The article argues that these results provide useful insights into the study of the globalization and homogenization of telecommunications policymaking.

The City Park as a Public Good Reference for Internet Policy Making

Extensive literature has provided evidence of the organic nature of the Internet as a domain for different sorts of activities. Most policy making regarding the Internet, however, has focused on its economic dimensions (e.g. e-commerce, copyrights, privacy) while taking timid steps when it comes to its cultural and social dimensions. We propose a more comprehensive approach for global policy making on the Internet by looking retrospectively at processes that led to the creation of urban parks, and examining those processes in light of public goods theory. We conducted historical and theoretical analyses to show that, in the same way urban parks define spaces that mediate between different functions of the city, it is possible to define buffer spaces within the Internet that mediate between competing spheres of activity. As a complex phenomenon involving infrastructure, applications, and content, the Internet possesses features that can be located at different points between purely private and purely public goods. This fact parallels the growing attention that public goods theorists are paying to non-economic factors to explain the provisions of goods under circumstances that do not easily fit supply/demand laws. We argue that urban parks, as hybrid public goods, offer a reference for the design of policies that harmonize competing interests because they are spaces justified by manifold rationales (economic, political, social and cultural). As parks offer possibilities for spontaneous re-appropriations of the city as a cohesive entity (i.e. something beyond a disconnected collection of populations), defining similar multi-purpose spaces on the Internet would facilitate coexistence of competing and complementary behaviours by allowing users to re-appropriate this technology as a comprehensive entity beyond a mere aggregation of transactions and interests.

Till death do us part? Conversations with deceased celebrities through memorial pages on Facebook

ABSTRACT Within the considerable body of research that the notion of parasocial interaction (PSI) has generated since the late 1950s, one aspect has been largely overlooked: the maintenance of one-sided relationships between fans and celebrities after the death of the latter. The present study focuses on this particular form of PSI, as reflected by memorial pages on Facebook dedicated to deceased public figures. Through a combination of content and theme analyses, we explored expressions of intimacy, role modelling, and identification by visitors of these pages and the subjects for whom these virtual shrines are designed. Corroborating findings from previous studies, our data revealed that a large number of postings serve a pseudo-dialogical function, allowing visitors to engage in public, unilateral ‘conversations’ with dead celebrities. Moreover, our analyses identified three recurrent themes underlying these pages: expansion of fans’ communicating capabilities across different dimensions of reality; legitimisation of a traditionally disenfranchised form of social engagement through grief; and tacit expansion of the economies of attention that sustain the culture of celebrities. These themes have important implications for future explorations of PSI in connection with broader institutional and social factors.

Women behaving badly: negative posts on Facebook memorial pages

ABSTRACT This study explores negative posts in Facebook pages dedicated to dead subjects. As with places for mourning in offline environments, memorial pages in Facebook appear to exude a sacred character as objects to both celebrate the life of the deceased and grieve their departure with others. Through a two-step content analysis of an initial sample of 600 pages containing the ‘R.I.P.’ acronym in their title, we found, however, a number of posts violating conventional expectations of respect for these mourning spaces. Negative posts in memorial pages take the form of flames (i.e., insults directed at the subject of the page, its administrator, or other visitors), venting (e.g., violent language against the victimizers of the subject of a memorial page), or ‘spam’ (i.e., advertisement and content not related to the subject and purpose of the page). Moreover, while results show that most memorial pages in Facebook are created and maintained by women (even thought the subject in the majority of those pages are young males who died an untimely death), they also reveal that women post the majority of negative posts in those pages as well. In other words, whereas women seem to perpetuate traditional offline roles in connection to mourning and grieving rituals, in the online world, they are also the first ones challenging the socially sanctioned sacral attributes of those practices in social networking sites.

Applying the Public Trust Doctrine to the Governance of Content-Related Internet Resources

This article explores the feasibility of applying the public trust doctrine (PTD) to the management of portals and search engines and discusses these tools’ crucial role for the materialization of the e-commons. The PTD establishes that certain resources are to be publicly owned and preserved because they are deemed essential for society. Through a theoretical and historical analysis of the doctrine, the authors contend that it is also possible to extend its application to cyberspace as a way to protect users’ right to navigate the Internet’s main gateways and roadways without ‘pay-per-placement’, targeted categorizations and other obstructions imposed by commercial web resources to access content.

Wikipedia as a space for discursive constructions of globalization

The notion of globalization has yielded a rich literature, both scholarly and popular, that reveals the highly contested nature of the meaning of the term. This article focuses on Wikipedia as one of the most popular reference sites worldwide, and compares, through computer-assisted text analysis and qualitative reading, entries for the word ‘globalization’ in six major Western languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Given Wikipedia’s model of open editing and open contribution, it would be logical to expect that definitions of globalization across different languages reflect variations related to diverse cultural contexts and collective writing. Results show, however, more similarities than differences across languages, demonstrated by an overall pattern of economic framing of the term, and an overreliance on English language sources. Our findings support some scholars’ arguments about the inherent ambiguity of the idea of globalization, and highlight broader questions of linguistic, technological, and cultural hegemony.

Political communication in the Cuban blogosphere: A case study of Generation Y

Blogs have become a communicative alternative for Cuban civil society in recent years. Cuban communities, inside and outside the island, are characterized by substantial ideological differences and economic gaps that highlight the challenges for consensus building and collective action in the country’s politics. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), however, are gradually facilitating the creation of spaces outside the control of the state for the exchange of ideas about the present and future of the nation. Through content analysis and qualitative interpretation, we undertake a case study of the most renowned Cuban blog, ‘Generación Y’, to evaluate users’ participation, the content they generate for the site, and the nature of debates taking place within it. Our findings show that while this blog opens an unprecedented opportunity for Cubans to engage in relatively unrestricted political dialogue, its users tend to favour expressive participation and antagonistic exchanges over the rational deliberations associated with traditional conceptualizations of the notion of the public sphere.