Is Social Media changing our relationship with Death?

Is Social Media changing our relationship with Death?(puntofisso.net)

16 points by micrypt 14 years ago | 15 comments

rubidium 14 years ago |

"Have you ever been at a cemetery, making a mass-visit to a dead loved one?" People do that all the time. Some cultures have a whole "day of the dead" to remember the deceased. The medium may be different (and the reach a bit farther), but the relationship with death is the same.

AznHisoka 14 years ago | |

Yep, Chinese have a day devoted to this. We burn money and eat good tasting food.

carguy1983 14 years ago | | |

It's not actual money.

gala8y 14 years ago | |

In some cultures people unbury loved ones once a year to dance with them.

Not an anthropologist and would not know details, but found this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...

joshuap 14 years ago |

"As we have become less worried of posting photos of our children and to display our location to a level of accuracy that would have scared us ten years ago, so we have started experiencing death in unexpected ways." - I know I certainly haven't, and frankly the whole "memorializing" of someone's Facebook page is distasteful to me. Nothing like commoditizing my dead childhood-best-friend so that everyone can feel better. I wonder if Facebook will show ads for funeral services in my timeline after I die?

radu_floricica 14 years ago |

The anime Ghost in the Shell approached this in a pretty interesting way. Making a superficial simulation of somebody is reasonably easy. But real people also have what GitS calls a "ghost", something similar to the concept of soul. It's the added depth of complexity which makes a simulation or a conversational AI radically different from a real person - or a real AI.

puntofisso 14 years ago |

My point was a bit different. The day of the deads is a day in which you remember the deceased as a whole. It's not the same, to me, as remembering that particular person, together with all your common friends, in a celebrative way (i.e. "Happy Birthday"). --@puntofisso

lmm 14 years ago | |

At least in my (former) church, there's a tradition of having a mass for them on the anniversary of their death (first and tenth in particular), and family/friends would gather and make a social occasion of it, which was often quite a joyful affair.

puntofisso 14 years ago | | |

Yes, I'm not discussing this. I'm suggesting that social media is making it a mass, public phenomenon such that is making people be willing to make arrangements.

digitalsushi 14 years ago |

I dont know much about this Tupac dude other than that he was famous and died, and then yesterday a hologram was represented of him somewhat convincingly at a public performance on a stage. It makes me reflect that, of my superset of all friends, 99% of them I have not talked to in years, and they could very well be dead. A few actually are and I found out only recently. To suppose there eventually will be a way of programming the states of our personality into some agent, and let others interact with it, I might say this surrogate might be enough to trick my brain that they are still alive. What if facebook could ask you 1500 questions, and emulate the first 80% of your psyche? It would be a weird way to remember someone, chatting with their agent like that. Like that mastergeek at the end of Serenity, perhaps. Some limited interaction thing. It's all damned weird to think about. I am uncomfortable with this thought experiment so far.

mechanical_fish 14 years ago | |

On the one hand, there's nothing new about the phenomenon you're talking about. Books, symphonies, paintings: Most of the famous ones are by people who are dead. We treasure these things, in part, because they are ways of connecting with such people across time.

The Tupac thing isn't so creepy either, once you get used to it. We in the audience know it's not really Tupac - after, all, if we thought it were a hologram of a living person it wouldn't have the same dramatic effect. We know it's a movie made by other people in honor of Tupac. It's only incrementally creepier than watching Tupac videos on YouTube or listening to his recordings, which are also the ghosts of someone who is dead.

In theory, one could be creeped out by the Mona Lisa because, geez, this four-hundred-years-dead woman is sitting there in front of you. But we got used to paintings years ago.

In the future, will people think it creepy to decorate their worlds with bots that can emulate long-dead people? It's hard to know in advance, but I think we might just get used to it. Van Gogh is dead, but reproductions of Van Gogh paintings are everywhere. Elvis is dead, but entire restaurants are full of Elvis memorabilia. We won't be consciously fooled - Elvis's biggest fans do know that Elvis is dead. And we might eventually get bored and tune out: Once you've heard the same tune a hundred times it just becomes part of the landscape, and similarly I think a Facebook bot that emulates a dead person will be just as pleasant as a Facebook bot that emulates a living person. ("Not very.") But maybe it will prove soothing to periodically have the words of dead people piped at you. People read Pepys's diaries. People read Mark Twain. People read the Bible.

streptomycin 14 years ago | |

You might be interested in reading the short story "Learning To Be Me" by Greg Egan, which touches on this type of issue. A quick Google turned up this PDF: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

digitalsushi 14 years ago | |

Or to expound on that for a moment, think of Barkley in the holodeck - what are the ramifications of us programming our own psyches of people we know, to have virtual instances of them that we can interact with? How weird/wrong/fine is it to program up some girls you went to high school, but tweak them all to be friendly? I know this is a bit of a rant from the topic of social media familiarizing us with first-person death experiences. It just makes me stop for a moment to contemplate what we really are inside, or what we really arent.

mechanical_fish 14 years ago | | |

Emulating the behavior of other people inside your mind is normal; there are folks who have tried to use that ability as part of the definition of human-level intelligence.

And trying to mentally simulate a world where those other people like and admire you is also normal: This is how we figure out what to do, and why. Yeah, it verges on the crazy fantasy sometimes, but hey, if you can't dream in your own dreams where do you dream?

You can't stop doing this, any more than you can consciously stop breathing.

What makes me want to watch that Barkley episode again, now, is that I wonder if it's really about privacy. Humans need privacy inside their own heads. They need privacy with their counselors. They need the freedom to work things out without other people taking their thoughts out of context. You need to be judged by the things that you do, because your editor needs a chance to work before the raw footage gets plastered all over Google.

zalew 14 years ago |

no.