Lisbeth Klastrup

Between control and creativity: challenging co-creation and social media use in a museum context

Abstract This article addresses the challenges and limitations of co-creation processes in museums based on an exemplary case of the design of a Danish museum-related campaign on Facebook. The article adds to the ongoing discussion on the paradigm shift in the museum by analysing potential problematical issues of including multiple agents in creative processes in museums. It concludes that it is arduous to establish a truly creative co-creative process, when the design team needs to accommodate to a well-established artistic vision as well as to the limited resources of the museum and the other participants. We argue that one cannot in advance predict or ascertain that social media users will find a campaign compelling and want to participate and engage with the content, even if substantial resources have gone into its creation. Furthermore, the complexity of many art projects is likely to make their dissemination on social media difficult.

“I didn't know her, but...”: parasocial mourning of mediated deaths on Facebook RIP pages

This article examines the use of six Danish “Rest in Peace” or (RIP) memorial pages. The article focuses on the relation between news media and RIP page use, in relation to general communicative practices on these pages. Based on an analysis of press coverage of the deaths of six young people and a close analysis of 1,015 comments extracted from the RIP pages created to memorialize them, it is shown that their deaths attracted considerable media attention, as did the RIP pages themselves. Comment activity seem to reflect the news stories in the way the commenters refer to the context of death and the emotional distress they experience, but mainly comments on the RIP pages are conventional expressions of sympathy and “RIP” wishes. The article concludes that public RIP pages might be understood as virtual spontaneous shrines, affording an emerging practice of “RIP-ing.”

Understanding Online (Game)worlds

With gameworlds as the prime example, this article discusses online worlds as new forms of cultural entertainment systems and presents a framework with which to analyse them. The framework takes its point of departure in a discussion of what online gameworlds are, which genres of worlds exist and how they can be understood as a new form of engaging experience similar to the type of experience we have when we are captivated by the fictional universes of novels, films and tabletop roleplaying games. The proposed framework is grounded in an aesthetic, communicative and sociological approach to online worlds as digital phenomena, with the primary objective of describing how online gameworlds are systems that create meaning through the production of the experience of “worldness”.

Death and Communal Mass-Mourning: Vin Diesel and the Remembrance of Paul Walker:

This article examines Vin Diesel’s use of his public Facebook Page to mourn the loss of his friend and co-actor Paul Walker in the period from 2013-2015. It discusses how Vin Diesel performed his grief and how his mourning process was communally reflected and repeated by both Vin Diesel and Walker fans, who used Vin Diesel’s page to share and verbalise their own feelings of loss in a both public and safe space. An analysis of Vin Diesel’s own status updates and 1800 comments reacting to three popular status updates related to the death of Paul Walk posted over the course of more than a year show that commentary was used to make condolences to both Vin Diesel and Walker’s familes and to affectively express the users’ immediate feelings, both verbally and through the use of emojis. However, over time, both the form and intensity of expression of both Vin Diesel and his followers changed, pointing to the need to further study celebrity mourning processes on social media over extended periods of time.