{"id":17789,"date":"2013-12-30T15:31:22","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T19:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17789"},"modified":"2013-12-30T16:03:49","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T20:03:49","slug":"death-and-mediation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/12\/30\/death-and-mediation\/","title":{"rendered":"Death and Mediation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"death-and-facebook\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hello, Cyborgology<\/em>…it\u2019s been a while. I\u2019ve missed you, but I haven\u2019t quite known what to say. Which is weird, right? Strangely enough, I\u2019ve got half a dozen half-finished posts on my computer\u2014twenty-thousand someodd words of awkward silence waiting to be wrapped up and brought into the world.<\/p>\n

Writer\u2019s block happens to the best of us, or so I\u2019m told. What\u2019s been strange for me is looking back and realizing that the last thing I posted was\u00a0my piece<\/a> from the beginning of #ir14, the 14th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers<\/a>. I say \u201cstrange\u201d because I had an amazing experience at #ir14, and left it feeling so excited<\/i> about my field and my work and what I imagine to be possible. And yet, in the two months since, something\u2019s been off. I\u2019ve managed to submit to a couple of important abstracts, and I continued sitting in on a really cool seminar, and I\u2019ve plunged into the work of helping to organize this year\u2019s Theorizing the Web<\/a> (a conference about which I\u2019m passionate, to say the least). But my words went somewhere, have been gone.<\/p>\n

I realized recently, however, that it\u2019s not about some kind of post-#ir14 crash. It\u2019s actually about what happened after.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned previously<\/a>, I\u2019m not great about keeping up with all of my digital communication media (though I am ever-aspiring to do better). As I\u2019ve at least insinuated previously, Facebook is pretty low on my personal Prioritized List of Digital Communication Media. It\u2019s almost a fluke, then, that\u2014back in Cambridge, in the week following #ir14\u2014I happened to check Facebook, and to see a brand new post at the top of my feed that ended up being pretty important.<\/p>\n

The post was from an old friend of mine (we\u2019ll call him John), someone I hadn\u2019t seen in probably a decade and with whom I\u2019d only recently gotten back in touch. John was from one of the last batches of friends I made in the pre-\u201cWeb 2.0\u201d era, before \u201csocial media\u201d had become a widespread thing, before people moved or changed jobs and maintained at least basic \u201cI know where to find you and have a general sense of what you\u2019re up to\u201d connections by default, rather than through deliberate effort. How we came to be back in touch via Facebook is a long and convoluted story, but it ends with rumors of his demise being greatly exaggerated and with me being greatly relieved, and happy, to see that he was alive and doing quite well.<\/p>\n

John was posting, however, to ask if anyone had details about a memorial for another friend of ours, someone with whom he\u2019d been quite close during the time that I\u2019d known them both\u2014someone with whom I too had been close, in a weird way, for a time. My first thought was no<\/em>, it can’t be true; my first gut sense was that it probably was true. I tried to convince myself that, well, maybe this was like when the Cambridge grapevine thought John was dead; John would later say he\u2019d thought the same thing. But I did the thing that one does in 2013 when one hears that perhaps someone has died, which is Google Compulsively. Inside of ten minutes, I was almost certain that our friend\u2019s death was real, neither a misunderstanding nor a misguided joke. One person posting on the Internet about a death could be wrong; two people posting on the Internet about a death could be a prank. A whole community posting about a death is more real than an obituary.<\/p>\n

I then did the thing that one does (or at least, that I do) in 2013, when one is alone in one’s apartment and hears that someone has definitely died, which is pour grief into one’s (private) personal Twitter account. It turns out there\u2019s a big difference between when someone important drifts out of your life and when they actually, permanently, biologically die. It turns out that even when you’re used to not seeing someone around anymore, when you’re long-accustomed to knowing them only through second- or third-hand stories, that even knowing there will be no more stories rips you open, creates brand new wounds all its own.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I found so many stories in my online searching\u2014old stories, but stories that were new to me. Way back when, in one of the last extended conversations we had so very long ago, my friend had told me about how he\u2019d just then gotten his first email address\u2014and only reluctantly, only because others had made him, only because he was going so far away. He was proud of himself for having held out as long as he did\u2014but in the intervening years, he\u2019d apparently changed his mind about digital communication media. He\u2019d found Twitter, and wow<\/i> had he been on Twitter. He was on a podcast, one that people listen to, one that did a long tribute to him after he died. I sat at my desk and I listened to that tribute and I laughed, and cried, and cried and cried. His voice sounded the same. He was, in many ways, the way I remembered him; he also said a lot of the same things about Twitter and community that I say about Twitter and community, which I never would have imagined becoming true back in 2002. He told stories I hadn\u2019t heard before, and stories that hadn\u2019t happened then. And the community he left behind told stories, too.<\/p>\n

There was so much about that whole experience that I wanted to write about, that I wanted to try to make sense of in a \u201csocial media theorist\u201d sort of way. There was how I found out about his death, and how I convinced myself that his death was real; there was how I began to process my grief through long-form Twitter posting, and how digital media had given me a posthumous glimpse of the person he\u2019d become. There was the double context-collapse of his informal memorial: I went with John, a close friend of theirs, and a couple of other people, all of whom had first known my deceased friend from far longer ago than I had; then, at the memorial, we met people our friend had been friends with in the present, many of whom he\u2019d gotten to know through Twitter. One of his present-day close friends even Skyped in to the memorial for a toast. I imagine memorials and funerals are always context-collapsey, that it\u2019s always strange to hear new friends use a new name to toast to someone you’ve loved\u2014but for the friends I was with, the mediation difference seemed to sharpen the pain. The person being talked about was not, in all respects, the person they had known years ago; while part of this was undoubtedly due to time and to context, what my friends kept coming back to was the how<\/i> of their knowing: that they had gotten to know him exclusively in person[i]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And yet, I didn\u2019t (and still don\u2019t) know how<\/i> to write about this. Before social media, and especially before I began to study social media in earnest, I would have named my deceased friend\u2014because I believe it is important to honor the dead, and because my friend had such a profound impact on my life (one that I would only realize fully years later, and one which I\u2019m certain he never realized himself). At the same time, I\u2019m too much a social media theorist to write about death in the way that I would as an ordinary person. Social media run on attention economies<\/a>. To an extent, we all know that; especially as someone who also studies quantification, I can\u2019t un-know that. And so I can\u2019t shake the feeling that, here in 2013, it would be dishonorable to name my friend, to link to his tribute podcast, or even to point to the charitable organization his girlfriend and friends suggested for donations. To link might be to bring more attention to a person who was worth knowing and to a cause that is worth supporting, but to do so could also divert preexisting attention from those things to this blog, to this post, to me. Regardless of my intentions, it would feel opportunistic.<\/p>\n

It feels as though there is a certain degree of Very Close that one should be with someone before one steps anywhere near the limelight of their passing, and while I don\u2019t know where the shadows stop and the light begins, I am certain that in that attention is not my place. In a way, new attention is like thermal energy: It flows from where there is more of it to where there is less of it. Were I quite a bit more well known than my friend, then linking would seem appropriate (even though we had long been out of contact): Here, pay attention. Here, help. In 2013, donations of social capital can be made in memoriam<\/em>, too. Under the circumstances, however, I\u2019ve been at an awkward loss\u2014and unlike when I don\u2019t know whether to send flowers or what to wear to a funeral, I can\u2019t call my mom up to ask about this one. I don\u2019t think any of us know yet. And the questions aren\u2019t going away.<\/p>\n

\"death-representation\"<\/a>I\u2019m (finally) writing about this, I think, because it\u2019s happening again. A few hours after my post-holiday flight landed in Boston, I sat down at my desk and just happened to catch a Gchat message from a close friend back in the Bay Area (where I lived for the first four-and-a-half years of grad school). \u201cI\u2019m sorry to tell you this through such an impersonal medium,\u201d she said, meaning not face-to-face. \u201cBut I wanted to let you know before you found out through another, even more impersonal medium.\u201d She was telling me that a mutual friend of ours, one of only a handful of people I saw socially during the last months before I moved back to Cambridge, had taken his life sometime that morning.<\/p>\n

I have been learning these last few months what it is to express grief-in-the-moment through text. A decade ago, my distant third-person memory of that moment might have been a strange sound that came out of my mouth; now, it is the sound and feeling of my fingers pounding out \u201cWHAT?\u201d and \u201cFUCK\u201d and \u201cno no no no no no no\u201d all in quick succession, <send> as punctuation. And the questions, and their answers. And then even though I knew it must be true if this particular friend said it was true, I checked the Internet to see if it was true. And it was true.<\/p>\n

I stayed on Gchat with my friend for a while. I cried. I texted with two people close to me, one of them another friend of the deceased. I poured grief into my (private) personal Twitter account\u2014but this time I did so in context, because half the people that account follows had just lost the same friend. I watched news of his death spread through my stream, watched the shock and anger and sadness and anguish each come rolling as surging waves of words. I fail at keeping up regularly with my social media accounts, and especially at keeping up with my personal Twitter account, so I had to go back and read the last few months of my friend’s partner\u2019s timeline. And then my friend’s timeline. And then, after that, I had a somewhat different picture than I\u2019d gotten over the last 11 months of sporadic when-I-have-time Twitter-checking. And then I realized that the reason he no longer responded when I responded to his tweets was because he had no idea I was talking to him, because he\u2019d stopped following that (private) account[ii]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And then I really, really regretted not sending out an actual text message or email when I visited SF last October, because he and his partner were high on the list of people I\u2019d wanted to see\u2014and I didn\u2019t get to see them. The thing was that I\u2019d felt awkward: I\u2019d moved far away, and had been out of touch but for the occasional @-response or \u201cLike.\u201d Because I\u2019m just Like That, I wasn\u2019t sure if most of my Bay Area friends would want to see me anyway. Yet as I tweeted about how kind my friend and his partner had both always been to me, how they had made me feel welcome and safe at a time and in a place where I rarely felt either (and how much that had meant to me), I suddenly realized how stupid I\u2019d been in not getting in contact with either of them directly when I was in town. And I went back to reading my Twitter stream, where everyone else who\u2019d missed a chance to spend time with him was feeling some version of the same thing. For once it was really hard not to be in the Bay Area, as so many of his other friends gathered to mourn him together, in person. At the same time, being able to gather in the nebulous, intangible living room that is Twitter has been invaluable to me. As I quipped wryly via text yesterday, \u201cIf there were gold stars for staring at the wall, petting the cat, and being caught up on Grief Twitter, I\u2019d be downright spangled.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a few days now, and my media theorist self is starting to murmur observations. I\u2019m dimly fascinated by the way Twitter has come to figure not just in how I experience some of my communities and personal connections, but how I process my very experiences themselves. I\u2019m fascinated by the unspoken social norms: how none of us named my friend at first (even though many of us have private accounts), and how carefully I weighed saying anything publicly (and did so only after other friends<\/a> began to do so). I\u2019m remembering that odd moment Friday night when I thought, \u201cWait, am I doing it wrong?” My initial response was to speak (unidentifiably) of my friend, of his kindness and generosity toward me, and of my shock and sadness that he had died. A large portion of the affected people I follow on that account, however, were speaking in a generalized way to a\/the (?) community, messages like, \u201cHugs to you all.\u201d I wondered if I\u2019d violated a separate social protocol, one of which I hadn\u2019t been aware; I wondered what boundaries the speakers might imagine for the communities they addressed, and whether those boundaries included me or not, whether I was supposed to adopt those norms in the first place. I thought again, too, about a sort of unspoken hierarchy of communication media: While a number of us convened in overlapping, Tweeted parlors, the two members of my inner circle who experienced the same loss got in touch with me though other means (SMS and Gchat), even though we were also<\/i> talking to each other on Twitter. Even locked-down Personal Twitter has its \u201cfront stage\u201d and \u201cback stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Somewhere in the background of my head, I\u2019m wishing now that I\u2019d been to more (any) of the panels at #ir14 on death and grief. I\u2019m sure most of my observations aren\u2019t new, and far more importantly, I wish I had any external sense of what the etiquette norms for Grieving in the Digital Age might be. I know that there are no hard and fast answers, no fail-safe rules; I know that the \u201crules\u201d will continue to evolve, even on a case-by-case basis. Just over the last four days, I\u2019ve watched a series of stages wash through my personal Twitter stream: Generalized community support and\/or declarations of disbelief; Stating that someone has died; Stating who has died, and how; Speaking about my friend, and determining times\/places for collective, in-person grieving; Speaking about being at these events, individual requests for assistance, and some affected friends beginning to tweet about other topics; Beginning to organize collective memorial projects and collective support for his family; Beginning to speak publicly\u2014and with new language\u2014about my friend, his life, and his passing.<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t know what to do about attention economies and naming the dead. On the one hand, some of our friends have pulled together to collect donations of both time and funds to help my friend\u2019s partner and infant daughter get through the next few weeks (and in 18 years, college); on the other hand, what belongs front and center is my friend and the family he left behind, not my tangential struggle with what to do in response and what it all means. I\u2019ve ended up helping to collect photos and videos of my friend for his daughter to have as she grows up, because that\u2019s something I can do from 3,000 miles away\u2014and yet, I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s my place even to do that. I don\u2019t know what the right thing to do is, though I\u2019ll tell you that you can find a link to that website and a link to submit photos of him in my recent (main, public account) tweets (which, since I\u2019ve been quiet lately, will be an unusually straightforward process).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what to do, and there is little comfort in knowing that this will be far from my\u2014or anyone’s\u2014 last chance to figure it out.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel is on Twitter twice, primarily as @weboesel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Images from here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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[i]<\/a> What do you know: It turns out there are actually are contexts in which I have absolutely no desire to start arguing with people about digital dualism. As Sarah Wanenchak<\/a> in particular<\/a> has written<\/a>, sometimes feelings are digital dualist\u2014and that\u2019s just how it is; being based (in part) on a false ideological premise doesn\u2019t make feelings themselves any less real. I believe it is possible to get to know someone closely through digital media, but I also very much understand what my friends were experiencing that afternoon.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> I don\u2019t blame my friend in the least for unfollowing that account; it\u2019s a lot of navel-gazing, and I’m kind of amazed that anyone does follow it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello, Cyborgology…it\u2019s been a while. I\u2019ve missed you, but I haven\u2019t quite known what to say. Which is weird, right? Strangely enough, I\u2019ve got half a dozen half-finished posts on my computer\u2014twenty-thousand someodd words of awkward silence waiting to be wrapped up and brought into the world. Writer\u2019s block happens to the best of us, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,892,22846],"tags":[1598,233,26526,2603,2690,942,8988,106,26522,26523,26521,3072,26527,732,26524,184,544],"class_list":["post-17789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay","category-experimental-format","tag-community","tag-death","tag-deceased","tag-digital","tag-etiquette","tag-facebook","tag-friends","tag-friendship","tag-grief","tag-grieving","tag-mediation","tag-memorial","tag-mourning","tag-social-media","tag-social-norms","tag-twitter","tag-weak-ties"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17789"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17819,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789\/revisions\/17819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}