Tamara Kohn

Gravesites and websites: a comparison of memorialisation

For centuries, gravesites have been utilised for memorialisation, and in recent time, websites are also used as memorials, and in this article, we compare these two different groups of artefacts. Through a careful consideration of the form, composition and content of physical and online memorial sites for the dead, we suggest contrasting modes of relations across these two groups in terms of collectives, time and space and the relationships with the deceased themselves. On the one hand, the gravesite memorial uses its carved stone, inscriptions and position in place to imply a mode of relations that is modern, structured, objectified, formal and intransient: the dead remain spatially sequestered, socially dead and bureaucratised. On the other hand, the Web memorial implies a mode of relations that is subtly different – a mode of relations that is neo-modern, networked, subjective, personal and fluid. The dead are desequestered spatially, socially alive and individualised. We also demonstrate a somewhat strange relationship to the dead that is supported via digital gravesites, given the public nature of the Internet: as a private but public performance embedded in a space of change and responsiveness, continuing interaction and emotion. This article also suggests, for memorialisation at least, a nuanced distinction between the online and the physical sites and variations within each type of site that are illuminated through attention to aesthetics.

Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media

Abstract This article identifies and outlines some of the more prominent ways that digital media can extend one’s personhood following death. We consider three examples: when the digital persona of the deceased continues to interact with the living through a human surrogate; the emergence of autonomous and semi-autonomous software enabling the dead to use social media to intervene in current events; and finally the operation of algorithmic presence services like Eterni.me, where artificial intelligence creates a re-enlivened form of the deceased. Situating these examples in relation to sociological, anthropological and cultural literature foundational to ideas of distributed personhood and posthumous symbolic immortality, we suggest that digital codes and computational texts stand as key sites for contemporary forms of ‘distributed personhood’, including posthumous personhood. We then extend this body of literature by examining how the discursive politics of social media contributes to a social and commercial context, which supports ongoing interactions with the dead online. Through this process, we suggest that the persona of the dead, which remains after bodily death, can continue to maintain meaningful posthumous relationships with the living, presenting a new perspective on how we interact with the dead through digital media.

Design considerations for after death: comparing the affordances of three online platforms

As more of our personal interactions are enacted online, designers of websites and social networks must respond through appropriate design. Interest within the HCI community surrounding death exists with a growing number of projects focused on innovative technologies and design considerations for online spaces particularly for the bereaved. Limited however, are empirical studies across different website architectures over a longer period of time rather than directly after death. In this study we look at the affordances of three online platforms and analyse the comments made on them in response to the murder of American teenager Anna Svidersky in 2006. The platforms include Annas MySpace page, a memorial video on YouTube and an online condolence book. We show how the affordances of online environments affect participation by not only friends and family, but also strangers. Based on our study we outline nine design considerations that address issues relating to death and memorialisation online.

Remembering Zyzz: Distributed Memories on Distributed Networks

Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, better known as ‘Zyzz’, died in 2011 at the age of 22 from a heart attack in a Bangkok sauna. Zyzz was a well- known figure among amateur bodybuilders — a subculture which seeks to achieve the ‘aesthetics’ of a highly muscular physique. Prior to his death, Zyzz had become a minor internet celebrity, actively self-promoting through social media to create a personal brand. He had a Facebook following of more than 60,000 ‘fans’ and regularly posted videos of himself on YouTube. Following his death, however, coverage of Zyzz exploded, with both social and traditional media discussing his death, his status as a role model and celebrity, and the growing use of steroids among amateur bodybuilders.

Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the Digitization of Grief

This article explores how innovations in the funeral industry borrow from the technological affordances, commercial logics, cultural norms, and affective registers of social media platforms. Based on ethnographic research of funeral industry conventions, we analyze examples of funeral planning tools, funeral service mediation, and digital memorialization products. We consider how these products aim to capture forms of data, affect, and value as part of the funeral industry’s efforts to shore up their historically intermediary relevance in the face of potential “disruption” from technological innovation, and threats of marginalization posed by shifting norms of networked grieving and commemoration in digital culture

Death and Digital Media

Death and Digital Media provides a critical overview of how people mourn, commemorate and interact with the dead through digital media. It maps the historical and shifting landscape of digital death, considering a wide range of social, commercial and institutional responses to technological innovations. The authors examine multiple digital platforms and offer a series of case studies drawn from North America, Europe and Australia. The book delivers fresh insight and analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and media studies. It is key reading for students and scholars in these disciplines, as well as for professionals working in bereavement support capacities.

Researching Death Online

Death now knocks in a digital age. When the time is nigh, whether from natural causes at a ripe age, or from accidents or illness when young, the word goes out through a range of technologies and then various communities gather offline and online. Digital ethnography in this “death” sphere has been growing in form and possibility over the past two decades as various platforms are designed and become occupied with the desires of the living and dying. Online funerals and commemorative activities are now often arranged alongside the perhaps more somber rites of burial or cremation (Boellstorff 2008, 128). Services such as LivesOn promise that we shall be able to “tweet” beyond the grave; members of online communities encounter each other on commemorative online sites where they grieve for a shared friend but never meet each other “in person”; and it is predicted that soon there will be more Facebook profiles of the dead than of the living.

Consumer Issues for Planning and Managing Digital Legacies [Leading Edge]

Growing use of software applications in the home, the workplace, and in public places has resulted in increased production and use of personal digital files. These digital files may take the form of emails sent to colleagues, photos of family and friends taken on a camera or smartphone, music downloaded from a number of different services, or videos taken at weddings or birthday parties. In this environment of increased data production and usage, unavoidable questions arise as to what happens to these files when a person dies. There is, in general, a lack of understanding about the rights consumers have over the digital files they buy or produce that has implications in the context of death. The purchaser of a physical product such as a book, a CD, or a DVD has certain “normalized” rights over the product, such as the right to give the item to another person. This is termed “the right of first sale.” This allows for gifting, lending libraries, secondary markets of copyrighted work (such as book stores and secondhand record shops), and for bequeathing a collection of books or CDs to relatives and friends. However, regarding digital products and services such as eBooks and music streaming services, a different set of distinct and separate relationships are in place, and it is not always clear what the consumer’s rights are in the context of death and the bequeathment of digital items. Consumers need to be made aware that when they press the “buy” button on an eBook or music file that they are not really buying anything at all. The appropriate term is “rent” or “loan” as there is usually no transfer of property in the transaction, only a limited right to use. In addition, the delivery methods of digital products are changing rapidly so increasingly there is no physical copy of the digital products, coupled with the inherent “right of first sale” licence embedded within the physical copy.