Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20 Automatic and automated mourning: messengers of death and messages from the dead Margaret Gibson To cite this article: Margaret Gibson (2015) Automatic and automated mourning: messengers of death and messages from the dead, Continuum, 29:3, 339-353, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1025369 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1025369 Published online: 24 Apr 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 154 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccon20 Download by: [Griffith University] Date: 17 May 2016, At: 04:15 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015 Vol. 29, No. 3, 339–353, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1025369 Automatic and automated mourning: messengers of death and messages from the dead Margaret Gibson* Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 School of Humanities, Griffith University, Nathan, Australia Death is one of the most significant human events and rites of passage, fundamentally shaping the life course of individuals, families and social networks. For this reason, recognizing that someone has died and ritualizing this loss requires forms of communication and mediation between individuals and families in relation to wider social networks. Media has always played a significant part in how people are informed of a death, enabling rituals to proceed such as death notices and obituaries in newspapers. Today, information communication technologies (ICTs) and social media are routinely part of how people are informed about death, and enact a range of socially shared mourning and remembrance processes. This paper explores the current deployment of ICTs and social networking within practices and rituals of mourning, applying media theory. It focuses on the temporality of mourning in a culture of speed and the activation of mourning from the announcement of death to the cycles of anniversaries via social networking culture and through technological forms of automation. The question of how the bereaved (those significantly effected by a death) take or lose control of when and how they mourn and remember the dead in a technologically networked culture is this paper’s central concern. Introduction Today news about individual or large-scale death travels fast, easily displacing traditional roles, authorities and protocols about how and who should inform the public (if at all), loved ones and other affected individuals or groups. Police, military organizations, families, religious authorities and professionally employed news journalists operate within a media landscape that destabilizes hierarchies of both information knowledge and release, and ‘hierarchies of grief’ (Robson and Walter 2012 – 2013). Randomness, the decentralization of media sources and 24-hour information flow have enabled strangers, acquaintances and friends to announce a death, offer condolence and set up memorial pages before official sources or more centrally bereaved persons are able to act or make decisions about their response mechanisms. Through mobile communication devices and the routineness of connective sociality, the digital age of mourning is produced and archived in the same moment. The ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins 2011), to which I would add the ‘biographical turn’ enabled by media convergence and portable communication devices, has created a ‘post-scarcity memorial media boom’ (Hoskins 2011, 270). This is not only because the immediacy of communications about disasters, celebrity deaths and other mortality stories automatically brings mourning into mass and social media circulation with little or no delay, but is also a question of the cycle of the return of the past and the dead into the future through a regenerative media archive. This ‘post-scarcity memorial media boom’ (2011, 270) nevertheless has its nodal points of concentrated narrative and emotional affect in terms of *Email: margaret.gibson@griffith.edu.au q 2015 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 340 M. Gibson whose deaths activate and reactivate information and emotional flows across gender, class, race, national and international relations. The question of which lives matter and for whom is a long-standing debate in the political economy of death and its representations in the news, popular culture, documentary television and film (Adams 1986; Campbell 2004; Hanusch 2010, 2007; Walter et al. 1995). When a death event of moderate scale occurs somewhere in the world, the capacity of the dead to gain significant streams of media1 ‘memory capital’ (Reading 2011, 299) for future remediation depends significantly on national citizenship of the dead in a transnational political economy of human value. While communication technologies speed up notifications of death, social networks and automations act as life supports keeping the dead socially incorporated within social networks and digital archives. The logic of speed in death notifications may usher in the ongoing presence of the dead in social media forums. This potential is particularly interesting when it is the deceased themselves seeking to secure their social presence via the release of automated messages into an open future. There is a growing body of research literature on online memorial culture and the place of the Internet and social networking sites in matters of death, dying and memorialization. In the 1990s, research on the Internet and death emerged with studies of online memorials, cyber-cemeteries (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Nager and de Vries 2004; Roberts and Vidal 2000; de Vries and Rutherford 2004; Jones 2004; Moss 2004; Roberts 2004a, 2004b; Gibson 2006) and the analysis of the religious projection and transference of immortality into the virtual (Wertheim 1999; Sconce 2000). The most recent and expansive analysis of the Internet in relation to death ritual and social culture has been done (Walter et al. 201112). Facebook has had considerable qualitative research attention particularly in terms of how youth use social media for mourning and remembering friends. In research on Facebook and Myspace, the social networks of the biologically deceased often remain electronically active as young people continue communication with the dead, keeping them socially incorporated and valued, via message posts (Brubaker and Vertesi 2010; Dobler 2009; Kasket 2009, 2012; Carroll and Landry 2010; DeGroot 2012). The paradigms of making sense of death have shifted through socially connective, mobile media, and Pantti and Sumiala suggest the dead do not so much depart from living but remain joined to the living via social media (2009). This paper focuses on online news journalism’s reporting of how death notifications are done via text or social media messages. These stories of mostly road accidents and homicides have been selected from online news media within the context of Australia and the USA. These nation state contexts delimit a geographic frame in which to examine what is a transnational cultural phenomenon of media information speed, sharing and open access via the Internet. My own geographic location in Australia constitutes a temporalspatial location of mediated access in a differentiated global time zone. In addition to these stories, the Boston Marathon Bombing is also analysed in terms of the speed of mourning and the adaptation of social media icons such as ‘Like’ in death and grief contexts. These are media stories of immanent critique as media critiques itself from within and participants in online news commentary pages do the same. Mark Deuze’s concept of ‘media life’ (2011) – the idea that we are living a media life as an ontological given – conceptually situates this cultural condition of immanent critique. Through the terms automatic and automation, this paper raises questions about who speaks for the dead and bereaved in a multi-media, high-speed world of communication (Tomlinson 2007). Automation as programmed acts of communication is discussed as both a technological development and behavioural feature of social media’s personalizing, self-centring (auto-centring) and transnational mourning culture. When a death or death Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 341 event occurs, it is now second nature or automatic to respond with email, social media and texts, and to expect that people will generate fairly quickly memorial pages and message responses for information sharing, remembering, emotional support and condolence across a range of networks and platforms. Furthermore, automated mourning captures the rise of user-generated applications that enable individuals to announce their own death to others and set up automated messages for future communications. The dead are thus able to electronically re-insert themselves into communication processes and digital archives, activating in others (on their own behalf) the timing of their own future remembrance. Automated mourning thus refers to the way in which the dead via new automated message services can posthumously reanimate their presence in the lives of loved ones repositioning themselves not just as the remembered dead but the dead who, by a strange reversal, are remembering the living. I am arguing that these forms of automation and automatic mourning transform ‘the role relationship’ between the living and the dead, bereaved and non-bereaved, by opening up and re-patterning expectations about how death is announced, who announces a death and the ways in which the dead might be remembered or indeed move through stages of grieving, forgetting and, perhaps, oblivion. Automated mourning expresses the idea of the self-propelling logic of user-generated media as people respond not just to events themselves but responses of responses. Passing through multiple channels of hyperlinked social media posts expressing condolence, sadness, memories or any combination of these builds upon the foundation of previous messages, which, in turn, act as psychological mobilizations to join in. The question of how the bereaved (those significantly affected by a death) exercise, lose or share control of when they learn of their bereavement and how they mourn and remember their dead in a networked social culture is this paper’s central concern. Strangers mourning strangers In the city of Melbourne, Australia, in 2012, a young girl died after being hit by a truck as she walked home from school. While I remember seeing this news story on television, I was reminded of it later when a colleague emailed me to say how she had read a Facebook post by a Melbourne friend whose child also went to the school of the deceased girl (personal communication, March 29, 2013). In this email, my colleague noted her friend’s hyperlink to the Facebook memorial page set up by a stranger via her mobile phone on the same day as the young girl’s death. The email also contained the cut and pasted Facebook memorial and has been preserved as a document in my email files: (Figure 1). This Facebook memorial has some of the standard tropes of online memorial posts – the theme of remembering and of never being forgotten. Its creator acknowledges openly that she did not know the deceased girl. In her memorial text, she empathetically identifies with a tragic accident positioning herself as an outsider who ‘cannot begin to imagine what her family are going through right this second’. A hierarchy of loss is acknowledged through this temporal frame. Created on the same day as the death, the timing of the memorial is a spontaneous way of showing that a stranger can care and signify this in a public, external form. But its purpose is to also mobilize signs of care from whoever these may come, and in whatever direction they come. Without these external recorded acts of signifying sympathy, bereaved people faced with a personal loss in a public way might never know how their own deeply felt sadness registers in the psyche (however fleeting) of unknown others. Social media propels a culture of participatory mourning as well as more dubious practices of grief tourism as people search for sites to share their own story, vent Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 342 M. Gibson Figure 1. Facebook memorial to Jessalyn Leong, 28 March 2013. negative emotion or engage in abuse. Despite the abuse culture of trolling, the value of social media is that it provides the connective tissue between an inner thought becoming an outer written response that reaches out to the bereaved. While the Facebook memorial for Jessalyn Leong no longer exists as an active page, its deleted trace does with the memorial page in a Google search crossed through and a over 12,000 likes remain visible. It is not uncommon for strangers to set up memorials as noted in Marwick and Ellison’s (2012) research on Facebook memorials. In their research, family and friends of the deceased often contested the motivations of the stranger who created the memorial. Marwick and Ellison focus on the example of a 12-year-old boy setting up a memorial page for a person whose murder was highly publicized and thus ripe for what Cottle calls ‘mediatized ritual’ (2006). There is a sense in which this young man got in ‘first’, before family and friends, and was then able to generate social media traffic linked to him. While the 12-year-old identified his own motivation to those questioning him as empathetic – he used the phrase ‘so sad’ – his very active encouragement of people to ‘Like’ his memorial page suggested status motivation on social media was a key psychological driver (2012, 389). The fiction of self-transparency is a critical question one should bring to any self claims to know one’s motivations. At the same time, as suggested earlier, one cannot overlook the potential comfort of strangers who bother to post messages of respect or kind words and thus enable the bereaved to know that their loss has registered in the minds and activated emotion in others. These forms of visibility that come from active and socially activating online mourning rituals should not be dismissed as lacking comfort value for the bereaved. Indeed, while automatic mourning can generate a mass volume of social media posts in a very short space of time, how these temporally condensed messages are experienced by the bereaved in the long term may involve other temporalities altogether. For example, bereaved families and individuals may choose to take their time over social media posts, visiting and revisiting at a pace that is not reflected by the initial speed in which they were accumulated. Social media is a tool for externalizing and recording sympathy or empathy across geographical, cultural, social and inter-personal divisions. At the same time, repetitious Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 343 lists of RIPs, gone too soon, miss you, sorry for your loss and so on record the standardization of online social media rituals of mourning. The platform of social media is also standardizing in the organization and presentation of data, and this is sometimes reflexively acknowledged in posts. Nevertheless, bereavement culture is already a culture of standardization as sympathy cards, condolence books and death notices in newspapers are formulaic, socially codified ways for conveying information and expressing sympathy to others. The difference perhaps in the case of social media is the mass production of standardization that becomes obvious and highly visible as repetitious posts gather apace in real time and reading through archives of posts also reveals the amassing of repetitious comments. The social media icon ‘Like’ is part of this standardization and is translated to have particular meanings according to context. On memorial pages, and in the Boston Marathon bombing ‘Like’ was most often translated to mean ‘Prayer’ and the icon ‘Share’ translated as equalling ( ¼ ) ‘Respect’. In other Facebook memorial posts to the bombing, the icon Share was interpreted as equivalent to ‘Well Wishes’, sometimes with a single or double sad face –: These acts of translation elevate an ordinary word with no or even negative gravitas into a sacred or religious interpretive frame. But this very action also exposes how non-generalizable and even vacuous the social media icon ‘Like’ is in the context of traumatic events. The sad face icon: (c after Like) ¼ Prayer also creates a morality ordering people on the side of the good and well intentioned by framing them within a religious discourse. It is common for some users to make it their role to position others and themselves on this side of the good. Many commentaries will also call out what they see as ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ or other signs of parasitic opportunism to promote self-image and self-interest. In an automatic culture of mourning, those most affected by a death – those who are personally bereaved – can find themselves caught up in social media as willing or unwilling recipients and participants. At the same time, a random order of messaging occurs according to who just happens to be accessing email, Facebook and who is not – thus an acquaintance of someone who has died can post a message before a close friend on a social media page. Social protocols about the authority to inform, and the timing and ordering of the announcements of death and messages of condolence are difficult to contain when smartphones are always ready to hand at the scenes of death and tragedy or when some people just happen to be online, checking their phones to find out what has happened before others. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a social media event I monitored in the context of Australia. The bombs exploded in Boston at approximately 2:49 pm on 15 April. I became aware of the bombing at approximately 7 am on 16 April while listening to public radio (the East coast of Australia is 14 hours ahead of Boston). I began to monitor this event on television and social media regularly checking Facebook and Twitter over a period of weeks. Once the bombers had been caught (one was killed), the news story in the context of Australia wound down in television and local radio broadcasts. Of interest to this research was the emergence of the first Facebook memorial page of which dozens were created over a period of days. The Facebook page, in contrast to the television news images, presented access to highly graphic images of body destruction and trauma uploaded by those at the scene or receiving and accessing existing publications of the ‘mobile witnessing’ taking place (Reading 2011). The first memorial titled ‘Remember Boston’ came within 24 hours of the event and thus framed the act of remembering within a short space of time. As soon as a social media memorial appears, it calls forth the act of remembrance even as a tragic event is arguably still in media circulation and manifestly front and centre for those at the core of its psychological impact. This speed of news media mourning is not Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 344 M. Gibson commensurate with the shock and temporal complexity of those within trauma. Yet, there is no single temporality or uniformity to the social and psychological impact of death and grief and social media provides space for open-ended engagement with traumatic events that have moved beyond the here and now of television, radio and newspaper news media cycles. In her analysis of the London underground bombings on 7 July 2005, Anna Reading argues that while event and its memory seem to collapse into each other, via the speed of social media, other temporalities open up over time (2011, 299) as remediations of the event move into different representational, investigative and narrative forms such as testimony at public enquiries, documentary films, public and media commemorative rituals on the anniversary day. On 27 August 2013, a recent post on the Remember Boston site (discussed above) became a remediated call for remembering with viewers asked to click an icon as an act both signifying and enacting that remembering. By clicking an icon, individual acts of remembrance are collected as aggregated signs of remembrance by numbers. As I monitored Twitter feeds, there was also the presence of social media competition as people claimed ‘firsts’ in their content delivery: (Figure 2). There were also examples of the speed monitoring of different media sources by those people participating social media. For example, tweets such as ‘Cable news incredibly slow on apparent Boston Marathon bombing – still nothing on @CNN @MSNBC @Fox News’ (Tom Watson@twitter). The ranking of trending news stories also serves to reveal where concentrations of information flows are moving while also directing interest towards these high-ranking flows and thus creating a form of crowd sourcing. In the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing Google Trends, top 5 on 19 April at 6:03 am (Australian time) included Figure 2. Claim of first pictures of Marathon Bombing. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 345 the following ranking order: Boston marathon Bombing; cbs.com/vote, Oklahoma city bombing, ACM award winners and Patriots day. In debates about the accelerations of modernity, the question of speed has been recalibrated by Tomlinson to one of the cultural demands for immediacy (2007). The expectation of immediacy is an orientation towards the world where individuals expect to be agents in the unfolding of real-time events as distributors and receivers of information from multiple sources. Military deaths: breaching protocols Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 The use of social media in restrictive cultures of death information control such as the military has been an issue in the US military with its deployment of forces in Afghanistan since 2001. The military social media site spousebuzz.com has numerous blogs and posts about specific breaches of military protocol via Facebook and text message. The blog titled ‘Military Spouse Notified of Death via Text’ by Jacey Eckhart begins with a narrative about how military spouses expect to be notified of death: Watch enough TV and you know exactly how the messenger of death arrives for military families. A dark sedan is supposed to slow on your street and park in front of your house. At least two guys in uniform are supposed to step out of the car. You are supposed to open your door and fall to your knees when one of them says, ‘We regret to inform you . . . ’. That is the way death is supposed to happen in military life. The messenger of death is not supposed to come by text. The messenger of death is not supposed to show up on Facebook. (Read more: http://spousebuzz.com/blog/2012/02/ military-spouse-notified-of-death-by-text.html#ixzz2cTHF2Ao3) In Cottle’s concept of ‘mediatized ritual’, discussed earlier, media is a performative space of social ritual indivisible from everyday social life (2006). In other words, media doesn’t report on ritual as if there is some prior unmediatized social space of ritual but is itself performative of social ritual (see also Cottle discussed in Pantti and Sumiala 2009). Taking this idea one step further, Deuze’s ontology of a media life recognizes that media is integral to our psychic and social life: ‘Our life is lived in, rather than with, media – we are living a media life’ (2011, 242). The narrative of the blog above both reflects and produces this ontology as a cinematic television image of the messenger of death is used to explain what the proper military ritual process is. In other words, one imagines the ‘real life’ experience of receiving a military death notice from within a televisual image/frame. It is against the cinematic-televisual image that the less legitimate and undramatic form of a text message death notice is juxtaposed. The ontology of a media life is further underscored by this example (and others to follow) of immanent critique of media culture from within social media culture. This blog generated 135 message posts with 97% expressing outrage at the breach of military death notification protocols and only three posts said that bad news is bad news however it comes and that they would prefer to get the information earlier rather than later despite military rules. The use of text and Facebook in breaches of military death notification procedures is a common story. And the frequency of this problem is acknowledged in headlines such as ‘Yes, AGAIN: Spouse Notified of KIA [killed in action] Via Facebook’ April 14, 2012, in Spouse & Family News, SurvivorBUZZ, Videos by Amy Bushatz. This example generated 138 posts, and all but two expressed outrage mixed with condolence: This is insane! I am a female soldier myself, and YES we have rules to follow and I can’t believe this female soldier was stupid enough to do something like that. I feel horrible for what this poor woman is going through, I couldn’t imagine anyone finding out that their spouse is gone that way. I can only hope that the idiot that was so thoughtless in her actions gets her ass 346 M. Gibson reamed! No one should EVER EVER find out about the passing of their loved one in such a way! I know how important facebook and all the other ways to talk to people back home are for us when we are away. But it really takes a very ignorant person to do what this soldier has done to this wife of a fallen hero!!!!!! While the military operates as a zone of exclusion from free flowing information (mostly from the inside out), it is difficult to maintain this line when social media and mobile technology normalizes unbounded flow everywhere else. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Social media death notices In the context of mainstream social media in 2009, the technology news section of the Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the social media reporting of the death of a 16-year-old girl in Perth, Australia: ‘Girl’s death posted on Facebook before family informed’ (http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/girlsdeath-posted-on-facebook-before-family-informed-20091009-gq5x.htm#ixzz1uI2BD6Sr). The newspaper story was about how the deceased girl’s family went to the scene of the fatal car crash after reading about her death on Facebook. Another Australian daily newspaper, The Daily Telegraph on February 8, 2013 had the headline report: ‘Death on Facebook first: teen twins find out online their brother killed in triple-fatal crash’ (http:// www.dailytelegraph.com.au/death-on-facebook-first-teen-twins-online-find-out-theirbrother-killed-in-triple-fatal-crash/story-e6freuy9-122582763483420). The ambiguity or multiplicity of the meanings of the headline should not overlooked – ‘Death on Facebook first’. The story speaks of the twin siblings logging on to Facebook to find RIP messages to their brother and the shock they felt as their brother’s death started to sink in. This news report received 50 comments in the online comment section with many debating the issue of receiving information about a death and one’s bereavement on Facebook before police disclosure, and others simply lamenting the loss of life and offering condolence. The loss of ordering of information flows was conveyed in one post on this site: jack johns of avalon beach POSTED AT 1:58 PM FEBRUARY 8, 2010 No one is going to hear news in the appropriate order anymore. Comment 48 of 50. Another news headline on this same fatal crash where a number of young men died, reads: ‘Bobby Vourlis dies in Sydney car crash, death posted on Facebook first’ (http:// www.news.com.au/national-news/teengagers-death-posted-on-facebook-first/storye6frfkvr-1225827675170). This post received 168 comments, many of which engaged with the problems of fast social media in relation to the slower pace of police informing immediate family. Getting in ‘first’ via social media and criticisms of the competition to release news first was a consistent theme. The fact that these are road accidents already places the death and the dead in a media news category and serves to legitimize and normalize the role of any media source to report first. All 168 comments were posted on the same day – February 8, 2010 with the first post at 9:09 am and the last 4:55 pm. The majority of the posts were within 1 –3 seconds of each other. Approximately 94 of the 168 messages were concerned with the temporal misfit between police information processes (observing protocols of identification, dealing with scenes of accidents, etc.) and social media. The majority of these posts spoke in support of police work where the speed of their protocols cannot compete with the speed of social media where no formal protocols apply. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 347 Skaramoosh Posted at 10:25 AM February 8, 2010 The police didn’t fail to do anything in this case. They simply followed correct protocol. Could you imagine the uproar if they incorrectly identified someone? It’s people’s blase use of social networking sites, and feeling the need to be the first to ‘spread news’ that is the problem. Comment 54 of 168 Mick of Sydney Posted at 10:26 AM February 8, 2010 This is not the police’s fault, they had to get positive confirmation that the person in the crash was the right person. This is not the first case of a death reported on facebook and won’t be the last. It’s modern technology and the speed which communications is delivered. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Comment 58 of 168 Rob of Sydney Posted at 10:32 AM February 8, 2010 If someone [sic ] kid is aware of the news and blabs it on Facebook in a bid ‘to be first’, rather than respecting the family’s right to be told first, that is NOT, repeat NOT, a failure by the police. Facebook and other social media tools make it too easy for people with news like this to break it to the world ahead of the people who should know first. Blame technology, if you must blame anyone. Comment 65 of 168 Many posts discussed the importance of individuals using social media to announce death acting in sensitive and respectful ways by considering the impact on family. Judy of Canberra Posted at 11:30 AM February 8, 2010 It seems so tasteless when people on Facebook are able to inform of friends’ deaths before the family have even been notified. People seem determined to be the first to notify everyone of these very sad events without any thought of the families and the shock that awaits them on these sites. Maybe Facebook should set guidelines about this. Comment 95 of 168 While there were many examples of this kind of message, quite a few others said people need to adjust their expectations about how information, good or bad, travels in decentralized, open sourced ways: HT Posted at 9:34 AM February 8, 2010 This is the way things will be from now on... At the end of the day, receiving bad news over facebook is like receiving bad news through any means. The person is still dead, hearing it through facebook changes nothing. Comment 11 of 168 Mixter of BrisVegas Posted at 9:36 AM February 8, 2010 Get used to it folks. It must be heartbreaking for the family, but this is what information technology is all about. People FB and Tweet to get info at their fingertips at lightning speed – but 348 M. Gibson as a society, we just don’t consider the consequences of receiving such personal bad news in this way. Comment 13 of 168 Lissa Posted at 11:50 AM February 8, 2010 it’s just young people giving support the best way they know how in an age of technology... those poor families my thoughts go out to you, what a terrible waste. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Comment 103 of 168 In a similar fashion in the USA, an ABC news channel ran a story about a Pueblo mother finding out 12 hours after her son’s shooting death at a party via her other son who read condolences messages to his brother on Facebook (http://www.krdo.com/news/pueblofamily-finds-out-about-sons-death-through-facebook/-/417220/20968886/-/7p1nu9/-/ index.html). The identification of the mother through her Native American culture no doubt aims to signify something while remaining non-explicit. It was via Facebook and through her other son that this mother came to know about her son’s death. The disenfranchisement of those most affected by a death can clearly have many factors not least of which is socioeconomic inequalities in the context of intergenerational digital divides. When these stories emerge in news journalism television and their component online story, part of the moral motivation for the story is to expose the problems of open-source, decentralized social media. Media convergence (Jenkins 2006) involves processes not just of replication and scale of the same story (Boyd 2010) but cannibalization as different media feed off each other’s stories with moral failure becoming the story that justifies repeating the story. Social media is useful for those who want to find out as quickly as possible if a loved one has been involved in a tragedy or died – ‘Family used social media to learn of Fort Worth woman’s death’ (http://blogs.star-telegram.com/crime_time/2013/05/family-usedsocial-medial-to-learn-of-fort-worth-womans-death.html). Potentially, it empowers individuals and families to access information that might otherwise be suppressed or excluded from police or military sources. The informal narrative style of social media and the ability to post, upload and access photos could be valuable to personally affected individuals seeking to know in ways not governed by the narrative styles and information controls of police, military and social welfare services. This paper has discussed how the affordances of mobile communication and its connective sociality have opened up messengers of death in competition with state official sources, mainstream news journalism and other traditional role authorities. The key recipients of information about death – the bereaved – are not always the first to know that a loved one has died and they may discover such information from messengers they do not know or whose relationship to them is informal or non-existent. The final section of this paper focuses on the opportunity for individuals to centre themselves in death notification messaging. Automation services have enabled the self to be messenger of their own death. This technological affordance displaces the role of the other – usually the significant other or official messenger – as speaking on behalf of the newly deceased. Automated death notices Through DIY computer programming and the emergence of automated death service industries, the living can now organize to posthumously announce their death thereby displacing the role of others speaking for and on their behalf. Automated message services Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 349 are part of a wider death industry culture (Wills, funeral insurance, life insurance) making people aware of their mortality and encouraging them to prepare in the interests of loved ones. There is an industry of automated message services with Dead Switch founded in 2006, the first self-generated automation service to emerge.2 The site operates through an automated email service to the account holder whose response to a link electronically verifies that they are alive. What is interesting about the site is its soundscape of electronic noise which, to my ears, generated the association that one is being booted up – brought to life electronically. The email prompts can be set for frequency (once a week) or infrequency (once a year). These services do not so much aid forgetting (in the way that data programming often does) but rather an active remembering of one’s mortality. Could such services programme melancholic moods in some subscribers as they anticipate these emails which are checking if they are alive? Like most of these services, the cost is free for a very basic service of one recipient and one email. Beyond this, the cost is yearly for up to 30 messages to 10 nominated recipients. Once prompted, the subscriber can update their postmortem messages, their recipients and email addresses. The site has a number of suggested categories that subscribers may use this service for: computer passwords, financial advice/ bank accounts, final wishes, unspeakable secrets, love notes, last word in an argument, funeral instructions (http://deathswitch.com). Another similar service Dead Man’s Switch emerging in 2008, provides free automation to two recipients, while a premium account allows for 100 recipients of an email with more custom service provisions in terms of automation check-in frequency to the account holder. There are many other companies offering posthumous services such as My last email, ghostmemo and If I die, to name only a few. By choosing to pre-programme one’s death notice, the agency of the self or speaking subject reaches into the very event of its own biological death to symbolically announce via email automation: ‘I am dead’. While a pre-recorded or annotated document created by someone before they die to be delivered after their death is not new (The Will and Testament is a long standing example), the difference is the way emails are dispersed in real time across social networks. Whether or not a programmed automated death message successfully works in reality is not necessarily the key question. One can imagine failures to deliver and bad timing happening so that the subscriber or the receiver finds them inconvenient and unnecessary. But at a conceptual level – the very idea of automating one’s death announcement – represents a cultural shift as it displaces the idea that it is only the other who can speak for the dead not the dead speaking for themselves. In order to prepare for this possibility of announcing one’s death notice, the individual must already have stored in a database the futurity of their death. The death of the self is thus already in the digital archive – latent for digital manifestation. The very idea of witnessing a death is circumscribed as an image (not necessarily a contextual reality) through automation. It is ‘as if’ one is going to die without witness, to be alone, so that informing must have another means. However, an automated announcement of death is also a response to conditions of geographically fragmented national and transnational relationships in late modernity. More than ever in affluent countries, people die in hospitals and nursing homes without the witnessing presence of loved ones. Automation enables everyone in the email network, whoever they may be, to know through a single distributive release. Additionally to these death notices via email automations are services which enable people to programme emails for release long after their death. The company, Eternity Message, established in 2009, provides a free service of messages for up to one year after one’s death with the premium account option offering 60 years of posthumous messaging. Launching its 350 M. Gibson service through Twitter in the same year it quickly had up to 2,000 followers. The site’s main target group is parents and it markets itself as a mechanism for writing to one’s children and creating an online journal of advice, emotional support, birthday messages – any range of communications that can be posthumously received. Some of its twitter messages include: Eternity Message@eternitymessage 16 Apr 09 http://www.eternitymessage.com – New parents: register a free email like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail for your newborn and start writing to them Eternity Message@eternitymessage Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 22 May 09 http://www.EternityMessage.com – Father’s Day right around the corner – look for Eternity Gift coming soon! The service is also marketed to parents facing an earlier than expected death and they are advised to set up messages to their children. Biological absence is thus supplemented by discursive presence. The service promotes a culture of posthumous parenting that may or may not be welcomed by children growing into or living their adult lives. There are inherent assumptions about continuities of self as the deceased’s messages can only ever reflect who they were and indeed who their children are before they died with all the memories, values and expectations of that particular time frame. Even if a parent writes messages through projecting themselves into a future by imagining their child as adult, this is still an imagined future and a projection upon the child in their future becoming. Messages from deceased parents to children who may be adults at the time of receipt may have inherent mismatched assumptions about their lives, identities and value systems. These services de-historicize the self as an evolving being in relation to others who are also in processes of becoming. Yet, like the poignant gesture of a time capsule, this is another technique for burying messages for deferred release. The use of message automations by the deceased into programmed futures reverses the notion that it is the role of living to let go of the dead as part of moving through stages of grief. Through automation, the dead are holding on to a connection to the living by activating agency beyond the grave. Without drawing significantly on grief stages, it is certainly clear in clinical and social research that grieving involves complex psychic processes of decathexis, that is, the withdrawal of emotional energy from the lost object. The bereaved undergo experiences of reality testing where the inner world of desire and emotion for the return of the dead is tested against their ongoing physical and communicative absence. In his seminal essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud ([1917] 1960) argued that biological death is just one stage in a process in which the bereaved must symbolically kill the dead, before they can proceed to mourn the dead as dead. In other words, it is not enough for the bereaved to see or know of biological death – this external reality has to be matched by an internal act of ‘killing off’ so that the painful work of mourning can begin (Leader 2008). But do the bereaved want the ghosts of the dead to haunt them into the future via automations? Should the living have their grief processing with all its complexity mediated, even interrupted, by the projection of the dead into the future as automated message presences? And what of messages coming 10, 20 or more years into the future? The dead can never return as the flesh and blood consciousness they once were and automation is both signifier of and substitution for this lack. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 351 Conclusion Messengers of death are now diverse, multi-sourced and less formally sanctioned through institutional systems and their informational processes. In the social media forums discussed in this paper, this is both problematized as a failure of personal judgement and lack of social media etiquette but also recognized as a reality of ‘mobile witnessing’ (Reading 2011) communication speed, requiring people to adjust expectations about when, how and from who they may receive emotionally painful information. While bereaved families and friends inevitably remain at the emotional centre of tragedies that have a public, media profile, they can find that deceased loved ones are appropriated for personal attention seeking, and for discourse that they have not sanctioned and may not wish or be able to participate in. At the same time, the speed of communication about death can bring those most affected, the bereaved themselves, into forms of communal recognition and shared grief across space and time divisions as never before. This kind of support via mobile connectedness and social media is an empowering resource for individuals, families and friends. In a ‘post-scarcity memorial boom’ (Hoskins 2011), the dead can return into media spotlights through the online digital archive. The culture of automatic mourning recycles well-worn tropes of mourning in an endless succession of memorial culture as new human tragedies on large and small scales continuously enter news and social media. At the same time, the dead can automate their future presence in the lives of loved ones, thereby refusing to go away or handover the onus of remembering as the legacy and psychological reality of the living. While mobile social media decentralizes and potentially threatens ‘hierarchies of grief’ (Robson and Walter 2013), automated death notices and future messages from the dead, re-centres the speaking subject beyond the limit of their consciousness, living speech and living memory. The dead, seeking to speak for themselves, displaces a tradition in which it is a task of others to find the words and utter the truth of a death, however difficult. Something of the social, of self-other responsibility, is lost in the appropriation of the space of non-existence, of non-living speech by the dead themselves. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes 1. 2. Streams of media include, but is not limited to, mainstream television broadcast media headlines or reportage as newsworthy; social media pages and discussion threads; online and offline newspaper headlines; or reportage. Asset Lock established in 2006 offers a wider set of services in terms of storing digital data, passwords, messages but it requires the account holders death be verified by nominated friends or family who have to log in to access the site. Notes on contributor Margaret Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia and member of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. She is author of numerous publications on death, mourning and material culture, including Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life (MUP, 2008). Her current research focuses on digital materiality and the transnational, social interface of online mourning and memorialisation practices. 352 M. Gibson Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 04:15 17 May 2016 References Adams, W. C. 1986. “Whose Lives Count? TV Coverage of Natural Disasters.” Journal of Communication 36 (2): 113– 122. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1986.tb01429.x. Boyd, David. 2010. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Z. Papacharissi, 39 – 58. New York: Routledge. Brubaker, Jed R., and Gillian R. 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