With a quick google search of my grandmother’s name, I can find her obituary memorial page.
With another search I can find a similar page on a different memorial site for my grandfather.
And finally, my sister’s
Memorial Platforms + Social Media
Online memorial pages like the ones above allow for certain interactions, like donating in the lost loved one's name, or adding an entry to the guest book in a loved's ones honor. These platform features build a particular infrastructure that supports a certain kind of interaction, much like more recognizable social media platforms, like Facebook.
This represents a restructuring and blending of real-life, reality based—and even religious based—mourning and memory practices with online practices, something that van Dijck (2013) suggests happens generally with the emergence of social networking sites. Online places of memorialization are attempting to mimic some practices of reality, but in effect, are influencing and even changing practices around death on a digital platform infrastructure.
This site's header image depicts a woman leaning over a beehive in a mourning practice called "Telling the bees" that faded out of practice by the 1860s. The image is an engraving of the same name by E.K. Johnson. With this image, I want to acknowledge that memory practices around death and experiences of grief are personal, and vary culturally and individually.
In my own life, I've experienced the way it feels to encounter materials circulating on Facebook, that bring with them nuanced emotions and affective experiences.
When my sister passed away in 2015, almost as soon as I learned what had happened, Facebook notifications were pouring in. I was being tagged in posts, images, videos, and in addition people were posting condolences on my sister's Facebook feed.
I remember having a range of feelings about this experience, from not caring at all, to wanting to tell people not to post anything because Jordan was MY sister, not their sister, to feeling joy at seeing pictures or videos I hadn't seen in years. This presented a very nuanced navigation for me, and many friends and family members.
Even today, 5 years later, my mom still sometimes experiences pain when she is alerted of Facebook memories of my sister.
Facebook as Complex Mediated Memory with Platform Power
Beginning in 2011, Facebook began offering the feature of Memorialization where, after a user has died and the death is confirmed (usually with an obituary verification sent to Facebook by a surviving family member or friend), the account of the deceased user will become “memorialized,” or converted into a flattened, simplified page that only allows one-way communication and can no longer be logged into.
This seemed like a good idea to maintain archival provenance and agency within the account, but, when it was first offered, the feature caused trusted family to lose access to any control of the account (Acker and Brubaker 2014).
In response, in 2015, Facebook released the capability of adding a “legacy contact,” which allows users to choose another Facebook user to manage their account upon death. This means that even after the profile of a dead user is memorialized, there’s still someone who can log in, control posts, delete posts, and generally manage the account.
My sister passed away before this feature was made available, and I didn't realize that in memorializing my sister's account by sending proof of her death ( a link to her obituary ) to a Facebook customer service member, I would be locking down my sister's account. And in my interactions with the Facebook team, there was no indication that this owuld be the case.
In 2019, Facebook advertised a new feature to promote and encourage users to interact with the memorialized pages of lost loved ones (Sandberg 2019). This feature is called the "Tributes" feature, that allows memorialized accounts to have a separate section for users to leave tributes to the lost loved one.
The introduction of Sheryl Sandberg's (2019) press release announcing the "Tributes" feature says: "People turn to Facebook to find community during life’s highs and lows. We know the loss of a friend or family member can be devastating — and we want Facebook to be a place where people can support each other while honoring the memory of their loved ones."
Facebook comes across in messages as somewhat well-intentioned, but promotes these features in order to keep people on the platform. This is a kind of sneaky, nasty rhetoric of commodification here. With these features, grief and loss is portrayed as a reason to post, which keeps users on Facebook, generates content, and supports Facebook as a capitalist platform. This is a platform power that facebook has. At the same time, these presents a complexity. For those who have experienced loss, it is sometimes nice to have these memories.
Facebook's power as a platform also comes through it's nature as a commodifed platform of surveillance, that profits and benefits from usage, interaction, and capturing of personal data. A recent update in Apple's iOS 14 now requires users to opt in to Facebook's capturing of personal data that is sold to advertisers to create personalized ads for users (Barrett 2021). In response, Facebook campaigned to users that because of ads, Facebook is free, admonishing users for not opting-in to personalized ads. The same happened on Facebook-owned Instagram. This recent example reveals the control and power a platform has, even with measures are put in place to limit their control.
In addition to the complexities brought in by the commodification of user data, platforms like Facebook also present a lot of unknowns for the user, because many functions, like algorithims and other platform features are hidden and proprietary. van Dijck et al. (2018) argue that “online activities hide a system whose logic and logistics are about more than facilitating: they actually shape the way we live and how society is organized” (p. 9).
Artifact Discovery
I decided it might be interesting to experiment with curating/collecting my own artifiact discovery from social media sites, related to my sister, that were posted by people around and after her death.
Scanning back through posts, one of the first things I noticed was a somewhat embarrassing video I had been tagged in with my sister from a wedding that we were flower girls in at the age of 7.
I had never seen this particular video, so it was actually a memory I was really grateful to be reminded of through this video. I remember laughing and recalling how nervous my sister and I were walking down the aisle.
In the hours, days, and weeks after my sister's death, people who knew her were posting and sharing images. Looking back, it's really heartwarming to see this interaction, but in the moment, some of these posts brought on complex feelings. Some posts allowed me in an unexpected way to discover a side of my sister that I wasn't as aware of. My sister had a chronic illness, Gastroparesis, and a bone tumor. Through her own initiative, she had connected with people around the world via social media, mostly Instagram and Facebook, and really formed a community, that I didn't understand the breadth of until her death.
The post below was posted by a friend of my sister's I didn't know. Reading this now, I feel a lot of care and gratitude for my sister's friends in the chronic illness community who knew what she was going through. I feel so much respect for the level of support the friend describes in the post below, and realize how much this community meant to my sister and how much she meant to them. At the time of my sister's death though, posts like this could be a challenge to read.
The post below is another example of a post that was shared by a friend of my sister's in her chronic illness community. Seeing the impact my sister had on this community is a memory I'm glad to have.
The following posts are also from friends in the same community. I remember seeing posts like this and feeling like it wasn't the place of some of these individuals who I had never met to feel like my sister's death was their loss. Now, i appreciate it.
This post also stood out to me as I looked back over my sister's facebook page.
Looking back at these posts now brings both sadness and joy. In the moment of reading some of them 5 years ago, I remember feeling overwhelmed, wondering who some of these people were, and feeling like it truly wasn't their loss. Now, I feel proud of my sister's impact on this community, but in the moment, I felt strange about the sudden influx of condolences from people I had never met.
Platformed Spaces + Archives
Sometimes I like knowing I can locate these pieces of information, these pseudo-archival artifacts. I can access images that I don’t even own, that were uploaded by other family members or friends.
But sometimes I feel like I don’t want others to have access to all of this personal, private information. With platforms, comes a blurring of boundaries between private and public.
This is also the case with traditional archives, when creatorship is complex, and many creators may not even know or have consented to their materials being included.
Aligning platforms and archives allows for questioning the boundaries of the archive. Archives collect materials, and hold a particular power that shapes cultural memory. In a related way, platforms also have a power to build features that commodify usage. As such, images, text, videos, and other artificants are collected and made viewable, and contribute to memory.
Rodney G.S. Carter (2006) says “[t]he power to exclude is a fundamental aspect of the archive. Inevitably, there are distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences in the archive. Not every story is told” (p. 216). Archives are not neutral places, and decisions are continually made in archival practices that shape what materials are accessible, and hence, what becomes remembered as part of the cultural record. This is akin to the platform power social media platforms like Facebook have to create certain affordances that allow certain kinds of interaction and memory formation, along with proprietery algorithims that control what users see.
Benjamin Jacobsen (2021) discusses the way facebook is “sculpting digital voids,” governing the way we access information related to social life, memory, and forgetting. Jacobsen (2021) tells the story of Eric Meyer, who was confronted via Facebook’s “Year in Review” feature with an image of his recently deceased daughter. As a result, Facebook responded by creating algorithms that filter out potentially painful memories, like images of lost loved ones. Jacobsen points out that this complicates memory. Jacobsen links platforms with archives and suggest that platforms illustrate the complexities of archiving in a digital world where there is an abundance of data. Jacobsen says: “[t]he challenge for platforms such as Facebook, and features such as Year in Review, is what past data to render useful and meaningful in the present” (363). Facebook’s features, like “Year in Review” or the various memorialization features like “Tributes” are platform affordances that contribute to memory formation. Like more traditional archives, Facebook is asserting a particular power when they decide what users see and don’t see on their platform.
Affect and "Grief Work"
Platforms and archives are spaces that affect memory and that are curated in particular, and often hidden ways. These are spaces where we encounter and navigate various feelings and experiences, positive and negative, good and bad.
Speaking in an archival contenct, Marika Cifor describes affect as a “force” that is “unruly,” and is “deeply implicated in how we live, form subjectivities, connect and disconnect, desire, take action, and practice difference, identity, and community” (Cifor 2021, para. 1). The experiences users have navigating platforms can be affective and varied. Encountering materials related to a lost loved one brings on emotions, especially when these encounters are unexpected.
“Grief work” is a term coined by Douglas, Alisausjas, and Mordell (2019) in reference to archival work. The authors call for a lens of "grief work" as a way to transform the way archival work is performed and understood. Douglas references her own research in online grief communities, where she argues that grieving parents in online communities construct personal archives for their lost children in a way that shapes and creates a particular memory and perception of their lost child (Douglas, Alisausjas, and Mordell, 2019). The authors add that online communities also provide a way to construct an online afterlife with the lost loved one, forming an ongoing relationship and continuing the bond with their lost loved one (Douglas, Alisausjas, and Mordell, 2019).
Memory and Archival Influence
Because of the nature of both Facebook and archives as places of interwoven power and complex navigation and user agency, memory becomes mediated, shaped, and modified. This brings up more questions regarding what becomes part of the archive, who controls it, and who has the right to make these decisions.
Is this project part of a larger archive? The artifacts above that I curated from Facebook posts have now been removed from their context, and are more publicly accessible off of Facebook. In this space, are they part of an archive? What does it mean that this site is controlled by GitHub, a platformed space with its own affordances? How does this movement and circulation in and out of Facebook change the archive? But, from the beginning, Facebook's impositions of power and creation of certain affordances and features along with algorithms that control what users see and interact with, carries a role in how memory and grieving processes play out.
Jacobsen (2021) says that "since the amount of data archived on various social media is bound to grow over time, it is conceivable that platforms will take on an increasingly active role in the remembering of the past" (p. 368). Going forward, as we continue to interact in a world mediated by platforms, the power and control these platforms have changes and increases. And in addition to impacting memories, these experiences are affective and impact our identities and emotions. Having an awareness of this power platforms have in our personal and private memories is important as we navigate these spaces.
References
Acker, Amelia, and Jed R. Brubaker. (2014) Death, Memorialization, and Social Media: A Platform Perspective for Personal Archives. p. 23. Retrieved from: https://archivaria.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/viewFile/13469/14791
Barrett, Brian. (2021). Don’t Buy Into Facebook’s Ad-Tracking Pressure on iOS 14.5. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ad-tracking-pressure-ios-14-5/
boyd, d. (2010). “Social network sites as networked publics.” In Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu
Carter, R. G. S. (2006). Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence. Archivaria, 215–233.
Cifor, M. (2021). Affect. In N.B. Thylstrup, D. Agostinho, A. Ring, & K. Veel (Eds.), Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data. MIT Press.
Jacobsen, B. N. (2021). Sculpting digital voids: The politics of forgetting on Facebook. Convergence, 27(2), 357–370. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520907390
Lagerkvist, Amanda. (2017). Existential media: toward a theorization of digital thrownness. New Media & Society, vol. 19, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 96–110. Crossref, doi:10.1177/1461444816649921.
Sandberg, S. (2019, April 9). Making it easier to honor a loved one on facebook after they pass away. Retrieved from https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/04/updates-to-memorialization/
van Dijck, J. (2013). (Ed.), The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press, Retrieved 8 Apr. 2019, from http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780199970773.001.0001/acprof-9780199970773.
van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society (Vol. 1). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001