Module 19 Reading Notes

Ghost in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Notes

Introduction

 Online communities had to find ways to deal with death

o From suicides streamed via webcam, to bloggers, and social network users faking
their deaths, from websites that send out pre-prepared emails in the event of a
user’s death to ensure their passwords, financial details, and darkest secrets do
not die with them
Anchored Identities and Mediated Presence

 How we present ourselves online is often very different from how we are in the ‘real’
world

 Unlike many forms of online communication, where the offline identities of the
participants are unknown or unverifiable to each other, social networks such as
Facebook and MySpace involve ‘nonymous’ online identities (i.e. the real names of the
participants are known to other users, even if not actually used), underpinned by the
extensive use of photos that represent the user's offline life visually.

 In the offline world, nonymous environments tend to produce ‘identity performances’

that conform more closely to social norms
 Social networking sites mostly extend existing offline relationships, making such fictional
presentations considerably harder
o Social network users thus stand in relationships that are ‘anchored’ via offline
friendships, which has a constraining effect on sort of identity claims users can
make
o Users are also anchored to their bodies
 Identities in social network environments aren’t wholly devoid of confabulation and
distortion though
o Users try to give particular impression of themselves, all profiles are necessarily
less than authentic
 Nonymous online environments involve a certain tension between the pressure to
present an authentic self and the imperative to manage others’ impressions of the user
o Same is true offline
 Online social networks offer more strategies for attempting to manage impressions of
others than are available on structured dating sites and the like
 Social network users create an online identity, composed of narrative and visual
components, that is anchored in their offline relationships, distinctively tied to their
corporeality and linked to a self-conception that is reflective and aspirational
 A profile identity is a (self) conscious construction
  Social network behaviour largely gives (through language or gesture) a presentation of
the self rather than giving out (involuntarily) such a presentation
 Identities are also mediated through a technology that itself imposes limitations and
distortions
o E.g. friend/not friend and have to choose tastes and interests from pre-set
categories
Memorialisation and Ontological Ambiguity

 Most social network sites now allow relatives of deceased user to choose to keep their
profiles online as a memorial
o In effect, a profile site is converted into a tribute site
 The online identity created when the user was alive has become unresponsive, but it
remains extant in a very similar form to before
 Evidence suggests that memorialised profiles can be helpful for those in grief

o For one engaged in the act of remembrance, these visual and textual resources
can provoke Proustian rushes of rich involuntary memory, or affirm, reinforce or
correct existing memories.
 Memorialised profiles can give a sense of continued presence after death

 What the Facebook profiles of the dead seem to suggest is that our social identities are
not necessarily coextensive with the biological life of the individual human organism
with which they are associated, and thus it is not the memory of the dead person that is
being honoured and sustained through this form of memorialisation, but some
dimension or extension of the dead person themselves
 Competing metaphysical theories of personal identity fix the boundaries of life and
death in different ways
 In every culture corpses have a status far beyond that of mere lifeless matter
o Outrages done to corpses strike us as an attack on the dead person, not simply
an attack on a piece of inanimate matter that is bad solely because it upsets the
living

 How can it be that corpses, monuments and Facebook profiles embody the
phenomenality of a real subject of the sort of moral duties we would typically direct
towards persons, who is nonetheless ‘no more’?

Extended Phenomenality and Moral Survival

 The dead are beneficiaries of moral duties and recipients of harms

 Online social networks provide a sort of ‘extended phenomenality’ that allows the living
individual to project their identity—including, to a certain extent, their corporeality and
 the more intangible elements of their being in the world—allowing for mediated
presence across physical distance
 Continued online presence helps preserve the individual particularity of the deceased
self from the corrosive effects of time and the decay of memory
 Virtualeternity.com allows you to upload a photograph which becomes an avatar and
provide it a script so essentially even after you’re dead people could talk to you, you are
leaving behind a version of yourself
 AI may potentially be able to keep an extension of a person alive even when they are
gone

Survival, Anticipation, and Perspective

 We do try to leave effective traces of our agency in the world after we die—we write
wills, for instance—and we have some interests that are not contingent on our living to
see them carried out and which can therefore be frustrated even after our deaths

 But the carrying out of those wishes, even if it does represent some extension of our
agency beyond our death, doesn't seem to satisfy even part of what we're looking for in
our own survival. When it comes to our own survival, the intuitive bar for satisfaction is
set rather high

 Dying with an effective will is not-quite-as-bad-as-death-plus-dying- intestate, but it not

not-quite-as-bad-as-death, neither for me nor for my survivors.
 Living on through Facebook profile might be better for me than dying and having my
Facebook profile shut down- maybe I want people to continue to be able to see my
interminable albums of holiday snaps- but it’s not not-quite-as-bad-as-death
 While living on via Facebook profile does not count as me-surviving for me, for others it
may assist in what counts as me-surviving to at least some small degree

Selves and Persons

 Our practical identities, from our name and family through our friendships, occupations,
history, nationalities, responsibilities and moral liabilities, are all formed within the
context of a social and intersubjective world.

o My practical identity—the identity on the basis of which I work for future goals,
make and keep promises, carry out or reject responsibilities, accept
punishments, and so forth—is thus in very large measure a public identity.

 Many features of practical identity do cease to function after death

 We can call the self as opposed to the human being or person

Selves and Survival

  The identity of persons can be scalar in one or more of its dimensions, which is why it
makes sense to say things like ‘she’s changed so much she’s no longer the same person’
while continuing to insist she pay her old parking fines

 Self identity, the identity that guarantees the continuation of one's immediately
available arena of presence over time, is more basic in its importance than personal
identity, the identity over time of the public person who happens now to be at the
centre of one's arena of presence’

Conclusion

 Persons can, in some dimensions of their identity, survive their deaths in ways that
selves cannot

 Selves are rooted in first-personal, present-tense experience in ways that are quite
different to persons, and this allows persons to persist in circumstances where the
associated self has dropped out of existence

 So while from my perspective the people I've lost to death survive in some tragically
reduced and ontologically ambiguous form, from their own perspective they do not
survive their death at all—because their death is precisely the loss of the self that
constitutes their own perspective

 Selves have no diachronic extension: they're always a feature of the present moment,
albeit one that then appropriates the person's past or future.

Facebook Follies Film Notes

 Millions are sharing really personal information of Facebook

 All of sharing comes with personal risk

 “You’re not anyone if you’re not on Facebook”

 Girl accidentally posted on Facebook for her birthday and she didn’t check her privacy
settings, so a lot of people showed up with her invitation

o Led to a lifetime of notoriety

 Sometimes it takes years for consequences of Facebook to be realized

 Facebook ended Rae’s political campaign because of his Facebook posts being leaked by
a liberal party member
 o News stopped talking about NDP policy anymore, they were talking about the
Facebook pictures

o Political career dashed to pieces

 Facebook makes social forgetting impossible, makes it impossible to move on from

things in the past

 One guard for Prince Williams marriage called the wife bad things and he was removed
from royal wedding duty, and potentially ruined his military career

 Paul Chambers accountant gave airport a warning and airport staff were alerted to it
and took it seriously, he was prosecuted under the terrorist act and fired from his job

 Charity carwash, a police officer got in trouble for going to the ladies car wash and
reflected badly on the force leading to him being fired because somebody posted a
photo

 Congressman Weiner was forced to resign for taking inappropriate photo and sharing ut

 Many people do not think before they post on twitter or Facebook, you never really
know who your friends are

 Facebook is not being done for free, its being done for data because they can sell that
data to others

 Facebook is dangerous because if a hacker gets a hold of it they can be malicious

because they could get so much information about you (your spouse, friends, etc)

 Facebook is fastest growing hotbed of cybercrime on the internet, it is the cybercrime

hub

 Burglar posted picture on Facebook and they found the suspect

 Posts about Vancouver riots were used against people because people made a page to
identify rioters doing illegal things

o Everyone is connected

 Manulife took away Natalie’s benefits because of their misinterpretations of what they
saw from Natalie’s vacation pictures in Florida

o She posted to hide her depression, but Manulife saw it as if she was committing
fraud
 Facebook can lead to relationships and connect people who were strangers to each
other

 “A stranger is a friend I haven’t met yet”

 Facebook led to guys wife cheating on him because she was able to connect with old
boyfriends

 Facebook has led to unexpected family connections, find people that you couldn’t find
before

 After Wilma died and her page stayed up and people started leaving posts on her wall
for people to see

o Continuing to communicate with someone on Facebook feels like the most real
connected kind of way that they can speak to somebody and feel like they are
being heard

 Facebook has such a vivid representation of the person who was lost right on computer
screen