There isn’t much to say other than this section of the AIDS Quilt was displayed on Governors Island in New York. Governors Island is beautiful and it’s been turned into a wonderful park area.
That said, seeing the Quilt this way made it feel like a Plague Island. Or an Anti-Contagion Zone of a kind.
Twenty or Twenty-five years ago, this section of the Aids Memorial Quilt would have been on display in Central Park.
In an unexpected turn of events, a section of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt arrives in New York City next week. Most people simply call it the AIDS Memorial Quilt or even the AIDS Quilt.
It’s really worth checking out.
Here are the details:
A large piece of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed on Governors Island next week, marking its first visit to New York City in more than a decade.
The 57,600-square-foot section of the quilt — made from thousands of panels dedicated to people who have died from AIDS — will be unfolded across a football field-sized area of the island.
Visitors will be able to view the quilt from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 11 and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Aug. 12.
A special dedication ceremony will be held from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 11, and members of the public will be able to participate in a name reading ceremony.
I was able to see the AIDS Quilt a few times during the 1990s. One of those viewings involved going to the original AIDS Memorial Quilt building in San Francisco. I’ll never forget it.
Here are some videos about the Quilt in the event you have no idea what this post is about.
It is also worth noting that it’s now impossible to display the entire AIDS Quilt in one place since it’s become too large.
Let us begin Day 22 of the 31 Days of Death posts with an immediate thought: Of course people are taking Selfies at the 9/11 Memorial. Even if photography was banned at the site, people would still sneak Selfies. Why? Because the expression ‘photos or it didn’t happen’ is both a joke and a serious sentiment. How does a person document, not just a visit to a place, but actually show that he or she was really, truly in that specific spot? Answer: with a Selfie; the kind of photo that an individual can autonomously take without having to ask a complete stranger (since that would be weird) to snap a picture.
You want proof that I personally experienced this amazing unforgettable Memorial space? Then here you go– a Selfie of me #standingstrong.
The entire reason that this is a story, and analysed extremely well by Leah Finnegan on The Awl, is the 9/11 Memorial’s inclusion. But for the events of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing struggle to actually build a memorial in lower Manhattan, these Selfies could be in almost any major city’s downtown landscape featuring enormous urban waterfalls.
I have a hunch that the 9/11 Memorial Selfies story is going to unleash a fury of responses, not unlike last year’s Selfies at Funerals brouhaha (which Death Ref covered in-depth).
After a while, then, the shouting (or really really really self-righteously indignant tweeting) will cease and people will continue taking Selfies at the 9/11 Memorial. Until people stop visiting the Memorial and even forget why it’s there. This won’t occur in my lifetime, but it will most certainly happen. #nofilter
The Memorial and Museum have both come under criticism for many different reasons. I visited the 9/11 Memorial site in April 2014 (alas, no Selfies…) and it’s a memorial, yes, but a memorial surrounded by a police state. The metal detectors, the armed police officers watching the crowds hustled through entrance areas surrounded by barbed wire, and the high metal fences that encase the entire site in an unwelcoming embrace are my strongest memories.
When the 9/11 Museum opened this spring it generated immediate criticism for daring to have a giftshop. Again, of course the 9/11 Museum has a giftshop. And even a Cafe.
In fact, I bet people take Selfies at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum Giftshop and Cafe. #NomNom!
New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik’s essay on the Memorial and Museum is one of the best pieces that I’ve read about the site’s complicated politics. I highly recommend it.
Adrian Tomine created the cover for that particular New Yorker issue (July 7 & 14, 2014) and calls it “Memorial Plaza.” The cover is at the top of the page and I think that I’m violating several copyright laws by using it, but Tomine truly captures the visual human experience of the 9/11 Memorial.
Indeed, a couple is taking a Selfie front and center. #NeverForget
I watched the Selfies at Funerals Tumblr link roll across the internet this week and after seeing the images I immediately knew what was going to happen. People would complain about how the kids today were so self-absorbed that civilisation was near its collapse and how today’s youth don’t have any respect. I also knew that after this immediate condemnation, another group of voices would rise up to support the forsaken youth.
And this, Death Ref faithful, is exactly what happened.
But then, as should always be expected, another group of people took a more nuanced stand per the Selfies.
My good friend Caitlin Doughty at the Order of the Good Death wrote a strong defense of the kids on Jezebel and I mostly agree with her thoughts on the images. Where I disagree with Cailin is in arguing that these images represent a broader social disengagement with the reality of death. If anything, these photos show young people engaging with death, and doing so with a specific language that they’ve developed.
We humans invented all of our human death rituals. As a result, this means that all death rituals are constantly being changed, altered, and turned into hybrids. There is nothing innate about any ritual (given its human construction) so I think that it’s important to say that I would be more surprised if young people weren’t taking Selfies at funerals. This is the world they know but that doesn’t mean that today’s youth somehow lack any education about death.
Ironically enough, the Selfies at Funerals Tumblr page probably caused thousands more people to discuss actual death and funerals this week because of its supposedly disrespectful tone. Maybe, just maybe, the kids beat the adults at their own ‘We NEED to talk about death game.’
Katy Waldman at Slate took a wise step and waited a few days before writing anything. She presents a good critique of responses to the images but also brings everything back to the kids using the photographs as forms of grieving. I agree with this point and I kept waiting for someone to roll out a broader discussion about the relationship between photography and death.
Photography has a long standing relationship with funerals, especially in America. The camera phone is only the most recent example of a technology we humans use to capture images at funerals. Another way of looking at these photos is this– what else would anyone in the First World expect teenagers to do with their camera phones at funerals? Megan Garberoct at The Atlantic wrote an uncannily timed article on 19th century postmortem photography and the ability of Victorian era photographers to capture ‘Sprit’ images with their cameras.
Selfie of the Author
But more than the photos themselves, it seems that the people criticising the kids just don’t like the technology involved, i.e., the camera phone that produced the self-taken image.
Here, then, is the key lesson for everyone loving to hate and hating to love the Selfies at Funerals: We humans remain deeply conflicted when mixing all forms of technology with death.
The great science fiction writer Douglas Adams (who died far too young) made the following observation about humans and technology in The Salmon of Doubt:
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Given that my own research in the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society examines how technology and death intermingle all the time, I want to let everyone know that Selfies at Funerals represent only the beginning of a much longer future. We should already be asking ourselves what happens when a person wearing a computing machine, such as Google Glass, captures images and video at a funeral. Is a line being crossed there and why? How? I ask these questions, because it is going to happen and happen soon.
Just remember, and not so long ago, the idea of using the internet for anything to do with death seemed inappropriate. So did playing pre-recorded music on a CD (especially loud rock and roll music), having mourners draw or paint on a coffin, or even choosing to be to cremated.
What we humans forget is that death’s persistence means that we will persistently invent new kinds of death rituals. No ritual lives forever. Will Coldwell’s Guardian article on Dark Tourism highlights how easily the very idea of established and appropriate ‘death rituals’ can be changed.
Earlier this year, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror television series ran an episode called Be Right Back that effectively dramatised how the not-to-distant future might offer new kinds of technology for human grieving. Here is the show’s description:
Martha and Ash are a young couple who move to a remote cottage. The day after the move, Ash is killed, returning the hire van. At the funeral, Martha’s friend Sarah tells her about a new service that lets people stay in touch with the deceased. By using all his past online communications and social media profiles, a new ‘Ash’ can be created. Martha is disgusted by the concept but then in a confused and lonely state she decides to talk to ‘him’…
Trust me when I say that if the technology imagined in Black Mirror suddenly appeared, the Selfies at Funerals shock and outrage would quickly wash away into the sea of human memory.
So where does this week take us? It’s hard to say, because I have a feeling most people have already forgotten about the Selfies at Funerals and moved on to other more pressing issues.
But I do think that it is now time to officially launch a new Death Reference Desk rule about death and technology. To wit:
The Death Ref Technology Law: Any use of new technology that involves death, dying, and/or the dead body will be simultaneously rejected as a breakdown in human civility as well as embraced as an innovative turn for human grieving.
Or, as my friend Max summed up the situation on Facebook:
I was disgusted by this until I remembered I took a selfie at the last funeral I went to. Now I’m okay with it.
The relationship between death and technology is as old as human civilisation; from cenotaph to facebook memorial, industries have been built on our desire to remember and be remembered. Technology now enables us to create spine-chilling immersive experiences; allowing us to embody the worlds of our ancestors, enter our ghost stories and even plan a little post-mortem haunting ourselves. We want to move the conversation beyond discussions of data legacy to ask whether we can engender a new form of history, one that allows us to interact with the dead.
Bringing together experts in human remains, memorialisation and new technology this Panel will explore our relationship with mortality in a digital age. The discussion will draw on recent projects which have used new technology to augment cemeteries, populate historic sites with ghosts of their past and instigate twitter conversations with a 1,610 year old woman.
Platforms for Haunting: The Talking Dead
South by Southwest Interactive media conference
Saturday, March 9
5:00PM – 6:00PM
Radisson Town Lake
Town Lake Ballroom
111 E Cesar Chavez
The Death Reference Desk is headed to the 2013 South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive media conference in Austin, Texas.
Doing our best to keep Austin weird!
Death Ref is part of a panel, Platforms for Haunting: The Talking Dead, on death, technology, the dead body and the future relationships of all these things. Same old same old, really. Death Ref John’s Future Cemetery project will also be involved.
Here is the panel’s description so that everyone can see what they’re missing (or seeing– if you’re at SxSW):
The relationship between death and technology is as old as human civilisation; from cenotaph to facebook memorial, industries have been built on our desire to remember and be remembered. Technology now enables us to create spine-chilling immersive experiences; allowing us to embody the worlds of our ancestors, enter our ghost stories and even plan a little post-mortem haunting ourselves. We want to move the conversation beyond discussions of data legacy to ask whether we can engender a new form of history, one that allows us to interact with the dead.
Bringing together experts in human remains, memorialisation and new technology this Panel will explore our relationship with mortality in a digital age. The discussion will draw on recent projects which have used new technology to augment cemeteries, populate historic sites with ghosts of their past and instigate twitter conversations with a 1,610 year old woman.
The QR Codes are back. More precisely, QR Codes on gravestones are in the news again. In May 2011, Kim posted an excellent piece about the use of QR Codes in cemeteries,The Value Added Tombstone. For those who have always wondered, the Q and the R stand for Quick Response.
Kim explained how QR Codes work in her original Death Ref post:
For the uninitiated—or perhaps those without a smartphone—a QR code is a two-dimensional code readable by dedicated QR code readers and camera phones…. So how does it work? Well, say Aunt Sally’s family puts one on her headstone. If your smartphone has a barcode reader app installed, you can point the camera on your phone towards the code. The camera then scans the code and relays information to your phone by taking you to a website where more information is available. Maybe it brings up Aunt Sally’s memorial service posted on YouTube or maybe it takes you to an online photo album or a page on the funeral home’s website that includes her obituary or tribute. Snazzy, huh?
We at DeathRef don’t think QR Codes will last in the long run. Kim and Meg, in particular, laid out some reasons as to why in the Comments section of the original post. I have my own reasons for doubting the QR Code’s long-term success since the world of information coding keeps changing. And fast. Indeed, I’ve already begun looking at Augmented Reality possibilities but I’m keeping that top secret for the time being.
There’s another angle here too, which is aesthetics. I know. I know. But it’s true. Over time something like a QR Code can come to look completely normal on a gravestone, but that time has yet to arrive. For the time being, even the most discreetly placed QR Code looks a little clunky. In this regard, however, QR Codes have history on their side. Over the centuries, the symbols attached to gravestones have certainly changed and there’s no reason that the QR Codes can’t enter that historical milieu. That said, technologies for understanding those symbols also change and my money isn’t on the long term technical supremacy of 2012’s integrated computing devices.
But because this entire post is about QR Codes I went ahead and generated the Death Reference Desk’s own QR Code. Here’s a link, in case you’re cheap like me and don’t actually have a phone or device that can read QR Codes(!).
On the Media: Updating Your Social Media After You Die
WNYC Public Radio (March 23, 2012)
With social media, so much of our interactions with the world now live online, even after we may not be living at all. Brooke talks to James Norris, the founder of the website Deadsocial about prolonging social media relationships after death.
Back in February, I wrote about WNYC’s radio program On the Media and its show on Facebook. That Death Ref post, subtly titled 19,000 Facebook Users Die Each Day. Here is How FB’s Memorialization Mode Works, discussed the current, nonstop discussions about what to do when web users (especially FB users, it seems) die.
The Death Reference Desk has been tracking most of the various suggested ways to maintain postmortem control over social media accounts, Facebook in particular, and you can read those posts here. You should also check out the Death + the Web and the Death + Technology sections.
For this week’s On the Media show, co-host Brooke Gladstone interviewed James Norris about his solution to the social media death problem, a platform called Deadsocial.
A couple of points.
Gladstone asked the most pressing question, which is this: How long lived is any new media solution to human death issues given how quickly computing technology changes?
Norris offers a couple of logical responses, mostly about how Deadsocial would adapt to any future social media platform and that doing so was only ethical.
I’m still skeptical that any of the various dead user related websites/programs will remain relevant into the future but I could be totally wrong. I say I’m skeptical because I know how much technology has changed when it comes to death, dying, and the dead body. Meg’s brilliant post on 19th Century Anti-Premature Burial Device Patents elegantly demonstrates how social concerns about different kinds of postmortem technological fixes radically shift over time.
In fact, I will suggest that most of the current, various dead user inventions, programs, and products are more or less 21st Century versions of 19th Century anti-premature burial devices. The thinking now isn’t so much that people need tools to prevent them from being buried alive (modern embalming and cremation solved that dilemma), rather now we need tools to make sure that we Humans can still exert some control over how our digital selves are buried.
In 50 years time, I fully expect that all of these social media concerns will have been forgotten. Or replaced with other, more pressing technology issues.
A second point about the interview. The Deadsocial system was described as a signaling program which checks on users and notifies other, predetermined people when a person isn’t responding to automated messages. A handful of other programs already do this, namely, Deathswitch. All of these programs are different in their own ways, so I’m not suggesting that any company is ripping anyone else off. What is more interesting, I think, is that these various companies keep inventing ways to notify next-of-kin or friends or all of the Facebook that someone has died.
This was also one of the telegraph’s key uses, from the start. A long forgotten but extremely important social communication technology.
My point is this — we should continue to have these conversations about what happens to computer information when people die but we should also realize that these conversations are finite.
I actually found another section of the same On the Media episode far more compelling as it regards the dead user conundrum. The interview focused on something called the Archive Team:
Most of us think nothing of putting our lives in the cloud; photos in Flickr, videos on YouTube, most everything on Facebook. But what about when those services abruptly go away, taking all of our collective contributions with them? Well Jason Scott operates on the assumption that everything online will one day disappear. He explains to Bob why he and the Archive Team are dedicated to saving user-generated content for posterity.
At least the Achive Team understands the rapidly increasing ephemerality of web based information. Indeed, the Archive Team’s motto says it all: History is Our Future.
More than likely, we will need future Archive Teams of all kinds that simply try to understand why some early 21st Century humans became so obsessed with preserving their technological, social media selves. It will all seem to peculiar and strange.
Not unlike 19th Century devices to prevent premature burials.
WNYC’s On the Media radio program dedicated this entire week’s show to Facebook and its users. Per usual, it was an excellent set of stories. I was a little surprised, however, that the program didn’t discuss what happens when Facebook users die.
So let me pick-up that storyline.
Let’s roll out some numbers. The current number of Facebook users is somewhere near 845 million. The rough annual mortality rate across the planet is 8.37 deaths per 1000 individuals (this number is gleaned from the CIA World Factbook on global mortality statistics and is far from exact, so we’re dealing in broad approximations). After doing a little math, this means that over 7 million Facebook users die each year. Divide that by 365 days and you’re looking at over 19,000 Facebook users dying every day.
By comparison, 1500 people die every day across England, Scotland and Wales. In America, over 6,000 people die a day. I could go on and on.
I was already thinking this week about death and Facebook since a handful of American states are either drafting legislation to enable next-of-kin access to social media accounts, and/or the laws have already been enacted. The BBC story at the top of the page discusses proposed legislation in Nebraska. You can see short summaries of both proposed and passed legislation here and here.
Facebook anticipated this situation a few years ago and the Death Reference Desk has been covering this situation since day one. You can see of all our posts on Facebook and Death here.
In 2009 (October 26, 2009 at 4:48pm to be exact) Facebook announced that it was now using something called Memorialization Mode for dead account holders. This Facebook blog post, Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook by Max Kelly, explained how Memorialization Mode worked. Here are the key sections from the post:
We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it’s important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized. For instance, just last week, we introduced new types of Suggestions that appear on the right-hand side of the home page and remind people to take actions with friends who need help on Facebook. By memorializing the account of someone who has passed away, people will no longer see that person appear in their Suggestions.
When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased’s privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance.
Now, I’ve never had to report a deceased person’s account (which is nice) so I don’t have any direct experience with how it works. I also can’t tell if Facebook has modified what happens to dead user accounts since the initial 2009 announcement.
Here’s the rub — at some point Facebook will require an entire department dedicated to User Mortality. At approximately 19,000 deaths a day, the situation can only be left to its own devices for so long.
If for any reason, to prevent false death notifications like this one.
Indeed, what Facebook needs is a Senior Vice President for User Mortality Affairs and the DRD Team is more than happy to take on that job, should FB’s headhunters be tooling around the Death Reference Desk.
But until that job offer arrives, we at Death Ref will continue to track how over 7 million deceased Facebook accounts are turned into ad hoc digital memorials.
A quick post for Armistice Day (in the UK), Veterans Day (in the US) and Remembrance Day (in Canada). A few years ago, volunteers began amassing online photos for The War Graves Photographic Project. People can search online for graves all over the world and see images of the gravestones. The Guardian article at the top discusses the project and how it got started.
As of right now, it looks like the graves are only for the UK and Commonwealth Nations. That said, it seems like something which will catch on in America.
This American Life
In this show, we return to people who’ve been on This American Life in the last ten years, whose lives were drastically altered by 9/11, including Hyder Akbar, an Afghan-American teen who moved to Afghanistan after his father was tapped to become governor of Kunar province there.
On the Media
Ten years after 9/11, a look at the state of American civil liberties, growing up after the attack, and the evolution of 9/11 humor.
The Death Reference Desk is a website about death, dying, the dead body, memorialization, funerals, and then some. As such, it would seem that Death Ref would have a lot to say about the events on September 11, 2011 to commemorate September 11, 2001.
But what more could possibly be said?
Even now, a week later, on September 18, 2011 I am pulling this post together only because I came across two different radio broadcasts which caught my attention.
It’s telling, I think, that a non-visual medium produced these stories. Both of the broadcasts, by WBEZ’s This American Life and WNYC’s On the Media captured images from the last ten years in a far more evocative manner than any of the television coverage.
In a nutshell, you have to see these radio programs in your head and that takes more work than anything by CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, or ABC.
There is not much new to say about the events of September 11, 2001 that has not already been said during the last decade.
Check back with the Death Reference Desk in fifty years.
Holy Smoke
Planning a loved ones final arrangements can be a challenging responsibility, one you want to do with care and consideration. Allow Holy Smoke to help you create a tribute to your outdoorsman or woman like no other.
So yeah. I had heard about people loading ammunition with human cremated remains and then shooting the ammo but I did not know, until this week, that a company would do it for you.
And based on the reaction of my British friends (I live in England), many people still do not believe it is possible. And/or, the loading of live gun ammunition with human cremated remains is a distinctly American form of memorialization. Not unlike spelling memorialization with a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’.
Take that Red Coats!
But I digress.
Here at the Death Reference Desk we believe in presenting the full monty when it comes to contemporary forms of postmortem memorials. So a company such as Holy Smoke is due some respect for combining two of America’s great past times: shooting bullets and capitalism. Not necessarily in that order.
But lo, what might you receive when purchasing Holy Smoke’s ammo? Well, their website explains:
Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedents ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverent staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge. (Please note that our process uses only a portion of the ash from a typical cremation.)
Example: 1 Pound of ash is enough to produce 250 shotshells (one case).
Now, I’m not a gun person (even though I grew up in the great state of Wisconsin) so 250 shotgun shells sounds like a lot of ammo. I can’t imagine firing a gun 250 times to remember a person I loved.
Unless, of course, you’re using the Holy Smoke ammunition to defend the human race against the imminent Zombie Apocalypse!
