Dead Celebrities, Trolls and Grief Police: Mourning Online

As Halloween approaches, Forbes Magazine posts its roster of that year's top-earning dead celebrities. That's the jumping-off point for this discussion, which will probably teach you a few new phrases; cultural reincarnation, parasocial relationships, and grief policing.

Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, speaks with sociologist Professor Carla Sofka, of Siena College, New York. Carla has studied death and the digital almost since the birth of the Internet, so it's an honour to have her on the episode.

Par for the course with Still Spoken, we’ll be considering questions that were unimaginable a few decades ago. Since nearly everyone is confronting dilemmas with death online these days, after listening you might want to download Carla’s ‘Netiquette’ for dealing with death, tragedy and grief online. You can find that here.  She's also written Dying, Death and Grief in an Online Universe (2012).

As with all episodes of Still Spoken, this episode addresses death, loss, and grief, to include descriptions of difficult experiences bereaved people have had online. Please look after yourself while you're listening, and reach out to professionals, friends or family for support if you need to.

Written and produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy  podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

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Granular (Cobby Costa)
Liquid (Cobby Costa)
Unfriendly Users (Marten Moses)

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Transcript

Carla: Do you follow, every October,  Forbes magazine releases their list of top earning dead celebrities. They've been doing this for years, and it's my favorite part of October, other than Halloween, because I'm always like, okay who's knocking who off the list this year? And people come and go from that list based on what their families do with their estates, how their intellectual property, especially music, gets sold and passed around after someone dies. 

And then you've got the people who've been dead for a long time who stay on the list, like Dr. Seuss and Albert Einstein is always on the list because his picture’s on posters and mugs and t-shirts and people have been very savvy, especially Elvis Presley's family have been very savvy, with the legal rights to their images and their intellectual property or their creative products. And arnold Palmer is on the list now because of his tea.

And so, it's absolutely fascinating every year. I can't wait until that list comes out, and I show it to my students because I talk about this thing. I call cultural reincarnation and that's, what are the reasons why our society keeps people alive so long after they've died and I've actually done some really weird research to try and figure out, why does this happen? And so I've got four, four reasons or theories about why it happens, and it bears out almost every time. 

So the entrepreneurial value of someone's memory is on that list. And that's what the Forbes Top earning dead celebrities list every year illustrates for me is wow, people have made more money dead than alive in some cases. So it's just fascinating. All of this. There are so many layers to all of this that are fascinating.

I love that as Halloween approaches, Forbes publishes its graveyard rich list. Carla Sofka is a Professor of Social Work at Siena College in New York, and like many of us in the death-studies world, the things that excite her are things that most folks seldom think about. Carla was one of the first scholars of death and the digital, and the territory I’ll be covering with her is, to use one of her favourite adjectives, fascinating. 

I’m Elaine Kasket and this is Still Spoken, a podcast about the ways in which the dead live on, through us, our stories, and through technology. We’ve been on hiatus, but I’m happy to say that we’re kicking off 2022 with a new season of episodes guaranteed to make you think: not just about death, but about life, privacy, love, memory, relationships, and the power of big tech. 

I recorded this interview with Carla in 2021, so some of the people she’s about to refer to are 2020’s culturally reincarnated, financially solvent dead. 

To see who dematerialised off of or materialised into the list in 2021, you’ll have to read it yourself - the link is in the show notes. Before you do, see if you can guess the profession or even the identity of 2020’s top spot – a film star, a sportsperson, author, musician? 

I was curious about the methodology of calculating wealth for the purposes of this list, and there’s a note about in the article, explaining that the Dead Celebrity ranking includes pre-tax earnings from sales, streams, and licensing deals. It also lists the sources used to compile – which includes databases but also ‘industry insiders,’ and says that fees for agents, managers and lawyers are not deducted. For big celebrities, it seems, nothing in this world can be said to be certain, except death and taxes...and agents, managers and lawyers. 

Carla: It's easy to see why performers entertainers are on that list. Sometimes it's politicians, sometimes it's athletes, like for example, this past year Kobe Bryant made the list because he died in January. There are intellectuals, Albert Einstein is a good example of an intellectual, somebody who's very smart who's on the list because he looks great on a t-shirt. If you've made a significant contribution that puts you in the running. Then what happens is, people's emotional connections, this is where a parasocial mourning comes into play because sometimes people will form an incredible emotional attachment to someone that they've never met. And there are all kinds of reasons why that happens. 

So for example, Elvis Presley is a fascinating one because he's been dead since 1977 and he's on that list every year. In 1993, the United States released a postage stamp in his honor. And I don't know, if I don't know if you were even old enough to know this was happening. This is where I have to... 

Elaine: I remember it! Because that year I went to Kmart in Jeffersonville, Indiana with my allowance, and I bought an LP of blue Hawaii. So yes, I do remember that postage stamp.

Carla: Okay. And so the postage stamp was fascinating because they had a contest, right? Is it the young Elvis or the old Elvis that shows up on the stamp? And so to do research, this is an embarrassing story for someone who considers themselves a fairly serious academic, but I did research in the strangest places too, to explore why we do this. And one of the places I did research in 1993 was at the post office because in January, on his birthday, they released the postage stamp. 

And I'm not sure if you're familiar with people who collect stamps, but one of the things that stamp collectors do is they get. What's called a first day cover. So on the first date that a postage stamp is available, you can get what's called a first day of issue cancellation and all over the United States. On that day that this stamp was released, stamp clubs were doing special promotions. So, in Troy, New York, which is right across the Hudson River from where I live, the stamp club was doing a special first day of issue first-day cover when the Elvis stamp was released. So I went, and I got permission to interview people standing in line to buy the stamp.

‘Why are you doing this?’And the stories were absolutely fascinating. And there was one woman in line whose mother shares a birthday with Elvis, so every year for her mother's birthday, she gives her something related to Elvis Presley. And this year it was going to be the first day cover. So that was her story. There were people who told stories about falling in love to his music, the high school dances,where they danced to his music and being at a certain point in their life where his music was part of their story. So, there's that emotional connection to the memories related to that person's music. Maybe it's a film that they, they have a special memory around somebody's film. So there's that emotional connection that way. 

I also interviewed people who went to visit Princess Diana's ancestral estate after she died. I got permission from the state to interview people in the car park. ‘Why are you here? Tell me why this is meaningful to you.’ And the stories that I learned about princess Diana a lot of people it was the fairytale. princess aspect, a kindergarten teacher can become a princess. So people were fascinated by her, and some people said lived vicariously through her stories and what happened to her. There were other people who had a parent die when they were a kid, so they were really empathizing with William and Harry that they lost their mom at such a young age. So it was triggering their grief, and they could, they wanted to support people because they understood how devastating this loss was for them.

There were people who related to princess Diana because she was very public about her humanity. Her humanness, her eating disorder, being in a loveless marriage, having problems with the in-laws, everyday people can relate to those challenges, and those were the kinds of stories that people told me.

So you form significant emotional attachments to a person you've never met, and when they die, you have to find some way to honor that. And for some people it's buying things, the kitsch, the t-shirts, the memorial stickers. Just go on eBay and look for memorial items. It's absolutely fascinating. all the things that you can find.

Elaine:  If there’s a well-known dead celebrity you have a strong parasocial attachment to, they probably have an official merchandise store online, ploughing ongoing funds into the estate. You wouldn’t really guess, looking at Tom Petty’s merch shop, that he’s dead. You really wouldn’t know it looking at Prince’s shop, since a new studio album, Welcome2America, was released not too long ago, five years after the singer’s death. 

On eBay, though, I didn’t come up with much using the keywords Carla suggested, so I tried ‘RIP tribute items’, without naming anybody. Meat Loaf T-shirts were big on the day I checked – he died two weeks ago. People who like George Michael must really into coffee, judging from the numberof mugs.  There were so many stickers and decals for Colin McRae, Scottish race car driver, all saying 1968-2007: If in doubt, flat out. T-shirts commemorate Muhammed Ali, Sean Connery, and Harambe, a gorilla who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 2016.

When I search ‘memorial items celebrity’ on eBay a couple of sets come up, both to do with Kobe. For just a hair under 700 US you can get a shirt, a memorial souvenir ticket and a celebration of life booklet. ‘Legit from the event’, the description says. I’m a little disappointed that I don’t find anything super weird.

Carla: And someday I'm going to open a pop culture morning museum with all the stuff that I've either bought or people give me because they know I'm interested in this. So I have the strangest things in my office. If you could see my office right now, I can turn around and there's a Day of the Dead little wooden box that has a skeletal Marilyn Monroe in the white dress blowing up.

And so, there's JFK memorials. There's JFK Jr. kitsch that started being sold after he died, so sometimes it's intergenerational, which is also fascinating. So you've got the entrepreneurial value of someone's memory, you have the contributions that they made to society, which kind of puts them in the race in the first place, then you've got the emotional attachments that people form. 

And then another thing that's fascinating is sometimes there are conspiracy theories about why they died. And so that just keeps people in the public eye, and when new evidence comes out, or other people start to talk about, this is why I think, for example, there were rumors for the longest time that Andy Kaufman faked his death.

And you've got the conspiracy theories about Marilyn Monroe, and just about anybody you can think of, and that keeps people's names in the public eye and in the news. So, it's just fascinating to watch what happens. 

Elaine: This context that you're giving and talking about, the stamps back in 1993 and the princess Diana's death, it's really important to underscore the fact that these parasocial relationships with celebrities or with people of note, where you have an emotional attachment to them, but they don't know you from Adam, they weren't created by the internet. People sometimes tend to talk about social media or the internet as though they have created the phenomenon of parasocial attachments to celebrities, or grief for those celebrities when they die, and that's not the case, it goes back forever. But the internet does exaggerate, all the things you just mentioned, the entrepreneurial potential, the flourishing of conspiracy theories, the maintenance of people's emotional connections. All of those are things that can get amplified by the digital presence of these celebrities, ongoing, on the internet. 

Carla:  Social media has made it so much more visible and so much more accessible. 

Elaine: And of course it was a really different internet back then, for sure. When I was at university, there wasn't any such thing as a website. And in 1997 you were talking about message boards and very different kinds of structures than that which we have now. So, sometimes I have a hard time remembering, how did I get into this, how did you get into this? Because this is something you've been looking at for a very long time. 

Carla: When I was a student back in the eighties, we didn't have the internet, we didn't have email. We didn't have any of the technology that we have now, and I remember when I took my first death and dying course, we talked about how taboo death was and how unusual it was for these conversations and the topic to just come up in conversation or on a daily basis. And I remember when the internet was brand new and I saw the World Wide Cemetery. I'm like, Oh my goodness. There is a place where people are publicly mourning and commemorating people's deaths on a computer. This is unheard of! 

And then the chat rooms started popping up, where you could go to an online support group for grief. So, I started noticing how much more prominent the topics were in public, and that all of a sudden this is changing almost the social acceptability of talking about death and dealing with grief. And I was absolutely intrigued and fascinated and said, I’d better pay attention to this because this is going to change everything. 

And so I started trying to figure out, all right, who's described or written about this? I couldn't find anything. And so that's why I had to invent a word to describe it, because I couldn't find anything that anybody else had written talking about how this technology was changing the way we deal with death, how death education is so much more accessible, because you could go onto the computer and look up a website that taught you about what grief is. And so people could be educated about what's a normal reaction to grief and loss. And then I started discovering, oh wow. There's some really good information out there, and then every once in a while you find something...hh my gosh, I can't believe somebody put that this on there, it's not true. 

So the pros and cons and although it's great that it's more visible and accessible, it also comes with some downsides. And so the academic and the researcher in me, and the educator in me, all those different roles that I had, it's okay, I need to pay attention and learn about this so that I can teach my students to pay attention to this.

How can you wisely use the resources that are out there, but how much you also need to caution the people that you work with that sometimes what's out there isn't helpful. And then when social media came along, it changed the game again, because there were so many new ways that the technology was being used and all of this, whether you're a death professional or whether you're a lay person, you have to figure out, all right, is this going to be helpful to me?

And are there, how do you help prepare people who have no experience with these resources for the possible heartaches and stress and downright pain that it can cause sometimes the things that happen online aren't all good. And so I realized I needed to teach my students if somebody comes to them and says, I've heard my friends talk about using social media to cope with loss, is this a good idea? And that's where a lot of the things that I've written are to educate people, all right, this is good, the bad and the ugly about using digital and social media resources to cope with death and loss 

Elaine: And sort it out for me into the good and bad and downright ugly. Obviously it's an evolving picture and who would ever would have thought that social media for-profit companies would be so heavily involved in shaping our grief spaces or dictating this is the form and the format that technologically mediated morning takes place through. But let's in terms of the good, because people historically have had kind of a knee jerk reaction to it as they do to any new stuff or any new changes, like how can this be good, mourning using social media or other online sort of spaces, but what have you found in your body of research that is really beneficial aspects of this?

Carla: So many times, I guess I'll use the expression in the olden days. I used to laugh when my parents or my grandparents would talk about in the olden days. And now I use that expression to describe pre social media and post social media in the olden days. And still to some extent, it's hard to find resources for support in the real world.

Sometimes after a certain amount of time passes and that amount of time will change depending on the tolerance and the patience of the people in your life. Sometimes it's hard to find an outlet for your grief and social media provides that weather. The real people in your life can tolerate your grief or not.

You can go on a website, you can go on Facebook, you can go on any of your social media and post stories, thoughts, feelings, reactions, and you have the right to do that with. If that's something that helps you. The other thing that happens is sometimes the people in your real life aren't comfortable.

They don't know what to say. They don't know how to help you, but sometimes people in an online community can do that. So the amount of social support that people find 24 hours a day, seven days a week, It's there. And that's something that you don't often have the gift of finding in the real world.

So there's this and that. And that's why in the title of that article, I wrote in 1997, it said social support inner networks, because that's what it was creating. It was a place where you could go and find support for your loss. So I think that's really important and. The flip side of that though, is sometimes the things that happen online are not helpful.

You've got Memorial trolls who don't necessarily think that expressing your grief in public is okay because it's this public versus private grief. People have very different. Comfort levels and tendencies practices what's comfortable for you to do. And unfortunately, there are some people who don't believe it's appropriate, who take that to an extreme we'll seek out Memorial sites and harass harangue people who were choosing to express their grief in a public forum.

So that's one of those things on my list of potential negatives. If you have to be prepared for that to happen. And one of the people that taught me about her experiences with using online resources, to cope with grief, she described it as you have to have a thick skin, because if it's helpful for you and you need to do it, that's your right.

But there are some people who won't approve of it or appreciate it. And you have to be prepared for them to publicly criticize you publicly. Humiliate you, and now we're learning about cyber bullying and cyber bullying does happen on Memorial webs or Twitter. 

Elaine: Absolutely. And I think there's a gamut.

Isn't there, there's a range because you mentioned criticism, people opining about what's appropriate and not appropriate. And you actually see that quite a lot. In parasocial grieving as well. So people expressing their sadness on a celebrity's Twitter feed or whatever site and people saying you didn't know them and this ridiculous and all that stuff.

So people who grief police who think that it's not appropriate to more in a particular person, people who think it's not appropriate to express themselves a particular way. And then at the really ugly end of the whole spectrum, you do have that deliberate trolling where people go out and seek out memorial sites with the express purpose of, and in many cases that rises to the level of a criminal offense. There have been convictions here in the United Kingdom for people who engaged in that kind of trolling online. And I don't know what the state of the law is - it probably varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in the United States - but it's something that can have a criminal consequence criminals can be a criminal activity that has a consequence. 

Carla: And I think there have been some cases in the United States where someone was not necessarily grieving online, but they were cyber bullied to the extent that they ended their life. And those cases have been prosecuted here. I'm not sure what the state of the law is, but I know people are being more increasingly held accountable for those actions when it when it happens. 

And then of course you've got the other part where sometimes people it's fascinating because. There's there was a concept that was coined by a communications professor, and I'll probably mispronounce her name, and my apologies in advance, Jocelyn DeGroote from Southern Illinois University, wrote an article about emotional rubbernecking. Because the other thing that's fascinating is how people who did not know the person who died will get involved in the social media, and she described that in a way of, it's hard to understand why people would do that. So part of what I've done with my research is to try and give people a chance to teach me why they do. And I've, I think, chosen to call it experiential empathy. Why people who don't know the person who died or don't know anyone in their support system get involved in those conversations. Because when you give those people a chance to teach you why they've gotten involved, they will often tell you that they have had a similar, personal experience. And they know what it's like, for example, to lose a son in a drunk driving crash, or to have a child die, or to have a parent die. And they know how hard it is to get support from the people in your life, so they want to reach out and support those people because they've been there. The other thing that they've also told me is that it vicariously helps them to help someone else. It gives them a socially acceptable place to talk about their grief because in their own personal life, it's either been ‘too long’ or people don't know how to help them as it's gotten farther out, because unfortunately, most people don't take a death and dying class and they don't have an opportunity to learn, okay, what do grieving people find helpful? And what are some of the things that you shouldn't do because they typically aren't helpful to someone who's grieving?

And sometimes they will tell me that they get involved in those sites because they know someone who knew the person who died and by watching the memorial site and the conversations online, it's helping them to be supportive to their friend who is actively grieving. So they're using it as a death education resource to provide support to somebody in their life who is hurting.

Elaine: Yeah, and it, I think the really sad stories are when there is something that's lost in translation where the intent, maybe something like what you describe, and then it lands differently. That intention isn't somehow conveyed, or I remember one particular story, you may remember the details of this, it was quite a few years ago now where there was a young boy who had died of some terminal illness, and soon after his death, there started being these messages on social media, purportedly from him beyond the grave, as it were, some sort of expression of how he was okay, and how he was feeling and how he was in a better place and all of these kinds of things.

And I believe when they tracked down the person who is doing these messages, the intent was not to troll, but actually was allegedly an attempt to do something that might be comforting or helpful, again, from a person who'd been in a similar situation or related in some kind of way. But, of course, it landed like a lead balloon.

Carla: And it's just another illustration of how different people cope with grief in such different ways. What one person finds comforting is absolutely unhelpful for someone else. And I think social media use after a death or a loss is very similar. Some people find it incredibly helpful, and other people, it's just not. And where it gets really fascinating is when people in the same family have very different needs, and you've got this tug of war with what's okay and what's not okay to do, and that can create some challenges and some stress as well. 

Elaine: Oh, for sure. Especially if there's a particular, let's call it a digital artefact, like somebody's memorialized Facebook or Instagram account, and within the same family there may very well not be agreement on whether that account should even stay. And it can be just like a lot of times offline and nothing to do with data, people can clash within families because of the different ways, the idiosyncratic ways, that they approach or experience their grief. It just, I dunno, it plays out. You can see it. It's more visible, it can be very visible online, these clashes. 

Carla: Yeah. Sometimes they show up, but sometimes they happen behind the scenes. And it's also fascinating that social media, in addition to being used as a resource for social support is a tool for death notification and just letting people know that something has happened. So I'll go back to my comparing and contrasting in the olden days when I was a kid, we had one telephone on the kitchen wall, that was the only way that the outside world could let us know that something bad had happened. The phone would ring, someone would answer it. And the person who was on the phone would get the news and then be responsible for sharing it with other people.

And then the family had a lot of control over how that news spread. Now with social media, the minute something is publicly known, it can be out there in a heartbeat. And so one, one story that I think is really powerful to illustrate the good, the bad and the ugly of social media and the internet:

There was a family who experienced a death, and the two kids in the family had very different beliefs about whether the news should be made public on social media. One didn't want it on social media. The other one would have been okay. So the person who wasn't comfortable with social media impressed upon the sibling, we're not going to put mom's obituary online. We're just not going to do it. And that person agreed. So fast forward about 12 hours, and the sibling who agreed not to put it on social media, [her] cell phone rings and the sibling is screaming at her because all of a sudden mom's obituary is on her Facebook feed.

And she's so confused because she didn't put it there. She didn't even know it was there. So she had to go on her phone and pull up her Facebook feed and sure enough, a high school friend who also knew their mother, the minute it hit the funeral home’s webpage, posted it on her, the daughter's, social media site and said sorry, your mom was really sweet. But she didn't know it was there!

And so she gets an angry phone call from her brother saying, what the, why'd you do this? It's wait a minute, I didn't do this. So there's immediate confusion. And then you realize what happened And so now I've been including in my teaching, Netiquette. Because now we have all these rules that are evolving, and norms about how to use these resources in a responsible way.

And so one of the categories on my six page, it's now six pages long of netiquette, about how to deal with all of this is related to sharing bad news. And I think it was Tony Walter actually that in 2015, talked about the concept of a mourning hierarchy, that there are, depending on the closeness of your relationship to the person who died, is it your story to tell? And in this case, it was not the high school friend's story to tell. And the family had made a conscious choice not to put anything on social media, but this person took it upon herself to post it there and broke this rule, that if it's not your story to tell you should wait until somebody in, a primary mourner is another way to describe it, hat somebody in that immediate circle of the person who's died, if they choose to go public on social media, then it's okay for you to chime in. But until you see something posted by that immediate family, you shouldn't do anything on, definitely not on their social media feed, and maybe not even on your own, because families often need time to tell the people who deserve to find out in a personal way about this death. And sometimes that right is taken away. If people post things on social media too quickly. 

Elaine: I think often it's taken away. And if you think about it, actually, it's really understandable how that could happen because it's an extension of our practices in life and a kind of laissez-faire way of telling other people's stories, you’re not really defining it as telling other people's stories, but we often, if not, most of the time, when we make a post on social media, think how little of the time that post involves just us and us alone or that picture that we put up involves just us and us alone. As we go through our lives, we're taking decisions all the time that reveal things about other people that add to those persons, digital footprints, but partly because we're nudged to do it and post stuff that has to do with our social connections on social media, this is what's become conventional. 

So that line between, oh, my information and somebody else's information, it gets all blurred all the time. One of the exercises that I do when I speak or do certain workshops is called Eulogy for a Digital Stranger and the nub of the exercise is that a volunteer gives some kind of entree into their social media profile, like a Facebook account or whatever else it is, and then people have only 15 or 20 minutes to construct a eulogy as though they knew the person personally from whatever they can find online.

And then the volunteer is here because they're being eulogized. And feeds back. And what are the things that the volunteer always says is I had no idea that I put this or that out there about myself and most of the time it's because they didn't! Somebody else did. It could have been the employer that it could have been some sort of write-up in, in a newsletter at work that they didn't know about, or remember, it could be there’s some listing of their address over here that they didn't realize was there, or their sister stated they were a family contact on some social media. 

So a lot of the time we have no idea. So much of our digital footprint has come from information that other people have disclosed about us. And I feel like that. ‘our story to tell’, ‘your story to tell’, I can understand how that confusion process, even into this very tricky and tender time after a death. 

Carla: And I've got another story that kind of illustrates, sometimes people make conscious choices not to do things, and you have to be very careful that you don't take it upon yourself to do that for them.

One of the sources that has helped me learn so much about this, there was a car crash in 2012 in the capital region that involved four local high school students. And I've gotten explicit permission to share what learned from them. So I'm not violating any trust by telling these stories. I think that's one of the reasons they spoke with me is they wanted their experiences to be helpful to other people. And she, her son was killed in this car crash and she had made a conscious choice not to go out to the cemetery yet after the headstone was erected because she just didn't feel ready to do it.

And someone else was in the cemetery, passed by her son's grave site, took a picture of the headstone and posted it on social media. And that went through his mom's Facebook feed. So inadvertently she saw it. She wasn't expecting it that day. She had no idea that it was coming. And so there are a couple layers to this.

She saw something she wasn't ready to see, and it wasn't by her choice when she saw it. So I think sometimes you have to be sensitive to how what you post is going to affect someone else, if it is an indirect story, to tell. And I think that's a really powerful example of how somebody else's actions can dramatically affect somebody else's coping with a loss in ways that you wouldn't necessarily be able to predict. 

Elaine: Yeah there's one memorialized Facebook profile that I'm familiar with just because it involves a relative of a friend and you see the death notification or the notification in a way, at least initially, of the death having been suspected of something bad, having happened, you see the parents of this young woman posing questions and trying to figure out what's going on, different people giving different accounts: Yes she's okay, no she's not okay, I'm sorry. You know, you see the actual trying to work out if something has happened, in real time, and of course that's the form in which this is now memorialized, that's frozen there.

The person didn't leave behind a legacy contact, which is the person you can nominate on Facebook that now has greater editorial power to perhaps fix some of that. But it's a really heart-wrenching. Record of the death notification and the dawning of what has occurred in real time. And now that's part of the permanent digital legacy. I say permanent, and we can talk about that in a minute, but that is part of what is there now. 

Carla: it's part of the story. It's part of the record and it's now an electronic record that's there. And it's also interesting that sometimes, you hinted at, there's misinformation that can get perpetuated there. And I know that was something that had a tremendous impact on this family, because a stranger who really didn't know what had happened, got involved in the story because it was widely publicized, especially in this area, but part of it also went national because the high school students who knew the kids who survived the crash started a Twitter campaign to get their favorite athletes to call them in the hospital, to cheer them up. And the Twitter campaign actually went viral. 

So a lot of people in the United States found out about this crash. And then what happened was some people got on the kids' memorial sites and they were talking about what caused the crash to occur. And someone had the misinformation that, that the young man who was killed in the crash had been drinking. And that was totally false. And so that, that was really hurtful to the family because it implied that their son had a responsibility in causing his own death. And that was not true. 

So I think it's fascinating how all of these different interactions have the potential to be incredibly helpful. But if things don't go well, or if there's misinformation, it can also be incredibly harmful. 

Elaine: I have to ask, what is your opinion? Thinking about everything that you've researched and learned and studied over the years with this, about memorialization, the idea of memorialization over the longer term on social media sites, specifically the preservation and the continuation of people's Facebook profiles, Instagram profiles. What's your take on that? Because my opinion on it has really evolved a lot over the last couple of years. And I'm curious about yours. 

Carla: guess, I guess I have mixed feelings about this, because on one hand, my opinion might not be what somebody else needs. So I, I try to step back and think about, okay this might be what I want to have happened, but there might be people who have really different thoughts. It's still very hard for me to anticipate how these resources might be used over time by people who were a different age when the event happened.

So for example if I'm trying to think if there's been anybody in my life. Yeah, I've had some deaths in my family. So for example, I wonder now how long I'm going to need to keep going back to a relative who passed in July to her Facebook. Feed. And I'm also wondering, I'm not sure what her family has decided to do with it in the long run.

So for example, right now, I go back to it every once in a while to, to reminisce and to think about her because I still miss her tremendously. And I find comfort in looking at the photos that she posted. The places that she would go, because certain times of the year she and her husband would travel and they would go to these really warm, sunny, beautiful places, and in the middle of winter in Albany, New York, I like to see pictures like that because that's not what I see when I look out my window. And so, there's a part of me that wonders if her family ever decides to take that down, am I going to be okay with that? Because it's part of my coping ritual right now, but I also realized that might be hard for them to see.

So if they need to take it down, they need to take it down. So part of me is thinking, all right, maybe I should reach out and say, have you downloaded the feed? And would that be something that you'd be comfortable sharing with me? Because I find it comforting. So I have to decide if it's appropriate for me to ‘impose’ on her immediate family and ask those questions because of my needs.

So I think that story kind of illustrates how hard it can be sometimes to know what's right and what's appropriate. And then I think too, if her sons have kids 20 years from now, will they want to know what their grandma was like? And that's a resource, I think, for people, if they were younger when a loss occurred, sometimes those digital legacies, those digital resources can help people keep someone's memory alive, or to introduce someone who died before they were born to a significant person in their family's story.

 It to me it's just this big mixed bag of different answers depending on what you need to do to cope with grief. 

Elaine: And I think that therein lies the rub for me, because I believe that is a really good and potentially positive thing too, at least if people want to connect with their ancestors in that kind of way, to have this really rich font of information is fantastic.

My skepticism comes in about how likely it is that record is going to be accessible to those stakeholders in the future who might wish to access it because as the data of the dead mounts up on these sites that were initially intended for live social networking, and that derive all of their income from ads, and this is how they make their profits, the more dead people that are on there, the more the nature of the site changes, and the more it's going to be likely that perhaps those, that data isn't there or isn't accessible to the people that it needs to be accessible to.

Because right now there's no legacy contact with a legacy contact. There's no handover mechanism that at least that I know about. So it's..I feel we are keeping so much of our memorabilia on social networking sites for whom long-term preservation and ensuring accessibility of that to future generations is by no means a foregone conclusion.

I worry a little bit about our reliance on its remaining there. And I personally don't really understand why a download archive option for memorialized profiles isn't available to anybody that might wish to download it, that already has access to it. I don't really understand why that ability to download an archive sits only, for example, with the legacy contact.

I don't really get that.

Carla: And I think based on what I learned at the Digital Legacy Conference a couple of years ago, some people from Facebook presented there and it was fascinating to listen to the dilemmas that they face in trying to balance the privacy rights of the person who created the material and the rights of people in their life who want to access it. And their policies have always leaned towards protecting the privacy rights of the deceased. And I think that might be part of the answer and because there's no way of knowing how that information is going to be used. And I think they're really cautious about opening themselves up to challenges or problems because it could potentially be used in a way that the deceased never intended.

Elaine: But I suppose that there's a danger of that, whether you're dealing with a downloaded archive or something that is sitting on their site, I don't really see the difference, and it's a very interesting stance and I'm familiar with the stance because it's been described to me as well by one of the people who presented. And I think that post-mortem privacy, especially as we build up so much digital flesh, that there's almost a kind of ongoing humanity in that, is a really interesting consideration. Some people are arguing philosophically that we should consider this material to have an element of ongoing humanity that deserves our protection and our moral and ethical consideration, not just our practical management. 

Carla: It's been fascinating ever since this, all this was brand new, I've always said that the ethical and legal implications of what is being created, they're never fully considered until it's too late. It's, people have these great ideas and then all of a sudden it's out there and all of these cChallenges, whether they're ethical, legal, or moral, kind of arise and we’re slapped in the face with them after it's out there for us to deal with. So I have a feeling that these kinds of debates aren't going to end. They're just going to get more and more complex. 

Elaine: The difficulty part of it is the short-term thinking that exists, I think, amongst Silicon Valley folks, that create something to a particular purpose in a moment, and they don't necessarily roll it 10 or 15 or 20 years in the future and think about the unintended consequences or the things they're... almost nothing, and maybe this is the part of a particular breed of death denial that goes on in Silicon Valley, but so little is designed with the end in mind. 

Carla: And I think it's fascinating now that some of these companies are more aware of this, maybe how they develop things in the future will change. I don't know. But certainly since these discussions are out there, I would like to believe or hope that people who are creating these things might have more of that in mind. But I guess that's to be seen. 

Elaine: I think it only really makes a huge difference if it hits them where they live, which is in the wallet. So if there are consequences to their business or to their business model of not having taken these things into consideration because cynically, I'm not sure that they're ever going to take it too seriously if it's only ethics and morals that are at issue, it’s only if they experience a different kind of consequence, that they might do something different with more forward thinking It’s really nice to talk to you about this. You and I, given our commentaries, or it could go on into gazillion different directions. And that's the thing about this topic, isn't it? That's, what's perennially fascinated me, since starting to look at death and dying in the digital for slightly shorter time than you have, but getting up there, is that the number of different directions in which it goes, and the number of realms of our existence that it connects to or touches upon, is really extraordinary. There's just so many fascinating angles that you can explore it from. And no matter which way you look, there's these knotty, incredibly interesting dilemmas. It’s quite something to try to unpick.

Carla: And my students have a wonderful time in class kind of thinking about all right, if they were taking this class 20 years from now, what will they be talking about? And they might be having conversations with their digital avatars so they can have a debate with themselves with the way technology and artificial intelligence is involving.

So I think you're absolutely right. It's just going to keep changing and evolving in ways that I don't think anyone can even imagine. 

Elaine: I’m Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine, the Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data, and you’ve been listening to Still Spoken. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences of grief online. You can follow and comment on Twitter on my feed, elainekasket, and at spoken underscore still. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, please do review, like, and share, it helps a lot. Huge thanks go out to my guest, Professor Carla Sofka of Siena College. There are so many fascinating episodes to come in the weeks ahead, so I hope you’ll be out there, listening in.