Brief aside
and
Statement of intent
If you are processing a recent loss, or helping someone close to you, this may not be the site you’re looking for just now.
The internet has changed how we grieve and there is room to talk about how- and why- and how we can make it better.
Denial
de·ni·al
/dəˈnīəl/
noun
noun: denial
the action of declaring something to be untrue.
A topical search about the negative impact of the internet and related technologies can turn out more hot-takes than you could read in a lifetime, with the through line of questioning the baseline validity of online connection. Conspicuously absent from your one-billion-plus listed results are meditations on bereavement and loss. Or, rather, absent are assaults on the validity of turning to technology to contend with death. Rejecting the viability of the internet for “real” compassion, catharsis, and related aspects of human connection is a damaging and thin denial that prevents us having meaningful ownership of our online presences, and is particularly destructive to the bereaved.
To further outline what one can find in a typical hot-take on online interaction, and why it’s absence in the realm of death and grief matters, we need to disrupt the structureless mire that the argument against valid connection online has become. It would also behoove us to briefly review concepts of grief and mourning, and how this universal human experience has been mitigated across cultures, religions, ages, and more- in the interest of understanding how people found and created comparable assets within the affordances of the net.
Technological Determinism
A Short History of Death
Anger
an·ger
/ˈaNGɡər/
noun
noun: anger plural noun: angers
a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility.
verb
fill (someone) with anger; provoke anger in.
Mourning and the internet do not have a perfect union as it stands. Far from it- there are complications when elements of your online experience are dictated by algorithmic events and subject to public gawking and deeply imperfect policy. The platforms, (meaning those well meaning people that create them,) often lack design principles that factor in death. There are countless, troubling, examples that outline how insensitive and traumatic certain experiences can be.
Regarding the Year In Review automatic feature on Facebook selecting his deceased daughter as the cover photo:
Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.
And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.
But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.
Source
In 2017, Lisa Menzo Santoro was murdered by her live-in boyfriend. After Facebook was made aware of her death, her account became a perfectly preserved memorial — which became problematic for her family, SJTV News reported in April.
Pictures of Santoro and the boyfriend who murdered her were still uploaded onto her account. Her family tried reporting the photos as offensive and reached out to Facebook directly to have the photos removed, but the pictures have remained on Santoro's page despite all efforts.
Mashable reporting on SJTV News
In the Facebook case, the mother of a 15-year-old who was hit and killed by a subway train in Berlin in 2012 had sought access to her daughter’s account to search for clues as to whether the girl had committed suicide.
Facebook had refused access to the account, which had been memorialized, meaning it was effectively locked and served as a message board for friends and family to share memories.-
The appeals court said on Wednesday that the right to private telecommunications outweighed the right to inheritance, and that the parents’ obligation to protect their daughter’s rights expired with her death.
Source
If we are being kind- and we should try to be- there is an explanation for this, and it is insipid but not intentional. The internet as we know it, was born in the 90s- with social media on the scene closer to the aughts (Source). Simply put: we have never had to deal with data at this scale before, and enough time has finally passed that we see what being out of touch with mortality means for your average user (Source). It doesn’t make the stomach-dropping dread any easier when design flukes steer someone into an experience they don’t want to have, but it is something we can try to make right for future generations.
Make no mistake- When it comes to social media, the battle to implement significant change on a structural level is business models vs ethics. Denying validity of online interaction prevents, delays, and complicates critical conversations about accountability and improvement. The process to changing this derisive climate begins by acknowledging that how we conduct ourselves online is real, it impacts people, it is important, and we are responsible for it.
One day, every single person who has a piece of themselves online, or interacts with other people online, will be rendered vulnerable in this exact context.
Bargaining
bar·gain
/ˈbärɡən/
verb
gerund or present participle: bargaining
negotiate the terms and conditions of a transaction.
In spite of an atmosphere that undermines the validity of potential catharsis online, or otherwise finds companies ham-handedly adjusting design and policy around the inevitable death of its users, people are forging ahead.
Processing loss is a deeply personal experience, and without knowing the specific desires of the deceased, people have found unique ways of synthesizing connections, rewriting or amending their trauma, and connecting with others over the nuances of loss at their most isolated. Written through all of these experiences, and so many more, is a determination to negotiate the terms of their loss.
Bots and Synthesizing Life after Death
Death and Games
Depression
de·pres·sion
/dəˈpreSH(ə)n/
noun
noun: depression
feelings of severe despondency and dejection.
If I may break tone for a moment- My loose framing for this site hit something of a wall with depression. In the interest of full transparency, and understanding the context for the paths I’ve selected below, I’d first like to present a truncated understanding of Depression as it explicitly relates to mourning:
If Denial is detachment from the reality of a given situation- a departure from composure and logic, and each stage is coming closer to comprehensible structure and reality, Depression is when one re-greets the world at present and finds it diminished. It is a stage that, among other things, tends to be inward focused and riddled with questions and hard truths.
404 Data Not Found
Ameliorating the Inevitable
Acceptance
ac·cept·ance
/əkˈseptəns/
noun
noun: acceptance plural noun: acceptances
the action of consenting to receive or undertake something offered.
the action or process of being received as adequate or suitable, typically to be admitted into a group.
agreement with or belief in an idea, opinion, or explanation.
Rejecting the viability of the internet for human connection has the unintended consequence of further hurting those who have been hurt. Death is a realm in which jostling policy to amend the grievances is explicit and relatively easy to track- but the solution to the problem is less clear. Approaching these issues from the technological deterministic view (that the technology and our dependence on it is compelling an interaction that hurts us, and thus the solution is to use it less) does nothing to alleviate the issue.
While online existence feels ephemeral, and there is truth to its fragility, it is also a tether to humanity for many and we shouldn’t abandon it. We should not abandon the conversation about making this better.
Continued from Eric A. who saw the face of his dead daughter as the cover photo for his Year in Review on Facebook:
Just to pick two obvious fixes: first, don’t pre-fill a picture until you’re sure the user actually wants to see pictures from their year. And second, instead of pushing the app at people, maybe ask them if they’d like to try a preview—just a simple yes or no. If they say no, ask if they want to be asked again later, or never again. And then, of course, honor their choices.
It may not be possible to reliably pre-detect whether a person wants to see their year in review, but it’s not at all hard to ask politely—empathetically—if it’s something they want. That’s an easily-solvable problem. Had the app been designed with worst-case scenarios in mind, it probably would have been.
Source
Continued from Caroline Sinders who spent 6 months planning her online death:
Facebook recently gave us the ability to be marked safe during an emergency, what about marking, 'I don’t feel fine'? A way to signal to others that it might be a good idea to reach out and check in on me would have been ideal .
As a designer, confronting digital death is a mixture of the mechanical and the emotional, a struggle between what fits the company and what is empathetic for the user. Ultimately, grief is an incredibly personal thing and thus incredibly hard to address with one-size-fits-all features.
Thanatosensitivity is at least part of the answer. If your Greek Mythology is a little rusty, Thanatos is the god of non-violent death- and this design principle is basically death considerate. It is building with the inevitability of death in mind. Most likely, the death of your users- but there are a number of ways this philosophy could sculpt your- and our- online world.
Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise wrote an excellent and properly urgent paper on the subject in 2009- Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI that ends with a series of critical questions that, 10 years later, still need answers.
User-centered design: Are users considering about their own deaths when they respond to questions about how they would like software designed? Are they concerned about the mortality of others? What insight can they offer into thanatosensitive issues? How do we design for groups of people who will outlive one another or be at different stages of life?
Privacy: Death changes what constitutes “private” information. What constitutes “inheritable” data? What types of devices/data are considered private in the event of death, and which are not? To whom should responsibility fall for maintaining privacy past death? What kinds of technology-centric work is required in order for people to maintain privacy posthumously?
There are no clean answers here. We created the internet, and it has changed every single thing it has come into contact with- it has deepened our understanding of many things, given a new dimension on which to consider the self, presented us with tools, and afforded us space to create our own.
If you find yourself responding to this material- having had an experience of your own in this realm, or working up answers to these hard questions, the path forward is one of transparency, empathy, and action.