Vital Ties: Digitally-Mediated Intimacies Between the Living and the Dead by Molly Bales

Vital Ties: Digitally-Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead by Molly Bales DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Medical AMhtopology in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO Copyright 2018 by Molly Hales ii Dedication To my father, Peter Bacon Hales, who was the inspiration for this project in many ways. He was a historian of American culture who was particularly interested in the role that certain forms of media have played in shaping cultural ideas and ideals. He also read every single one of my papers until his death in 2014, and his encouragement still rings in my ears. Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to my dissertation committee members, Ian Whitmarsh (chair), Lawrence Cohen, and Daniel Fisher. I owe a particular dept to Ian Whitmarsh; many of the key questions and ideas guiding this dissertation were developed in conversations with him, and I feel that they are his as much as mine (although the errors and oversights are entirely my own). His approach to anthropological theory—which involves finding and building on its strengths rather than looking for its flaws—has provided a much-needed corrective to my own sweeping critiques. He also went above and beyond the call of duty in reading and re-reading the many variable iterations of this manuscript. Daniel Fisher pushed me to theorize mediation, and his insights into materiality and form have opened up new horizons in my thinking. Finally, I thank Lawrence Cohen for encouraging me to more carefully situate my critique of contemporary grief theory, as well as for his close and thoughtful reading of the manuscript. My gratitude also goes out to Sharon Kaufman and Vincanne Adams, whose input helped guide the direction of the dissertation. Among the many colleagues to whom I owe my thanks, I am particularly indebted to Dana Greenfield and Clare Cameron. My conversations with Dana Greenfield about her own dissertation fieldwork with the Quantified Self movement spurred some of my earliest questions iii about data and the dead. Clare Cameron read and commented on each chapter of this dissertation as I wrote it, and her commentary greatly strengthened this work. I owe tremendous thanks to my interlocutors for their generosity in inviting me into their lives (and deaths), and devoting considerable time to this pursuit. I am particularly humbled by their willingness to open up painful and highly emotional subjects in our conversations, and for sharing their digital materials with me. The labor that I put into this dissertation was made possible by the labor of those who cared for my two young children during the many hours of research and writing that went into this project. I am lucky to have received much of that childcare from my mother, Barbara Monier. Thanks is also owed to my son’s babysitter, Celeste Patterson, who has welcomed Alder into her home and treated him like her third child since he was three months old. My partner, Jared Slucter, has been both a source of childcare and a champion of my work from the beginning. This dissertation would not have been possible without the institutional and financial support of the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine (DAHSM) and the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at UCSF. I owe my thanks to the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley for sharing in my graduate training. My work was also supported by the Earl C. Anthony Fellowship at UCSF, and I received office space through the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley, for which I am grateful. iv Vital Ties: Digitally-Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead Molly Hales Abstract This dissertation explores relationships between the living and the dead that are mediated by digital technologies including online memorials, social media accounts, smartphone apps, and virtual reality platforms. As digital media make possible new forms of presence, I ask what the implications are for how grief is experienced, whether and how relationships continue after death, the form that these relationships take, and the ways that they are structured by particular media. I consider what the implications of these emergent relationships are for both models of grief and for theories of mediation. This ethnography is based on over a year and a half of fieldwork in San Francisco, Chicago, and online. I restricted my fieldsite to the English-speaking world, and my interlocutors were in Britain and Australia as well as the United States. Through interviews and participant- observation, I explored their digital practices and the impact of these practices on their experiences of grief and connection with the dead. The dissertation uses a case-study approach, with each chapter exploring a different digital media through one relationship that takes place on that media. My findings demonstrate that relationships with the dead not only persist, but can also deepen after death. I argue that the intimacy engendered by these relationships, as well as the forms of reciprocity that they entail, confound contemporary models of normal grief—including those that embrace “continuing bonds” with the dead. The relationships that I describe are often melancholic, organized around the many absences that death introduces. They are also in some v way sustaining for both the living and the dead, producing and reproducing them in relation to each other. I use the concept of animation to unpack the particular form of mediation involved. Animation draws attention to forms of presence that do not rely on a one-to-one correspondence between the figure and its iteration, but are rather enriched by the variability, multiplicity, and sometimes even the sparseness with which they are “drawn.” It also invites us to consider how the dead might be animating digital technologies, breathing life into the media through which they encounter their loved ones. vi Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 1. Virtual homes for relationships with the dead: Corey and Marty’s online memorial ………..43 2. An intersubjective cartography of memory: Erin and Patricia’s app………………………...94 3. The empty hub: Frank and Lois’s Facebook page…………………………………………...145 4. Governing relations with the dead on Facebook……………………………….…………….196 5. Bodies of the Dead: Mike and George in Elysian Fields…………………………………….245 Conclusion………………………….…………………………………………………………..301 Sources Cited…………………………….……………………………………………………..317 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Screenshot of the home page for the research project website………………………37 viii Introduction It was a hot and muggy July afternoon in Chicago, and Lois and I were stretched out in her living room trying to catch the faint breeze from the open windows. The sound of children playing in the park across the street drifted in, punctuating our conversation. Lois didn’t seem to hear; she was lost in thought, gazing absentmindedly at her laptop screen. She had moved from the armchair to sit next to me so that I could see her brother’s Facebook page as we spoke. The loveseat was small, and our bodies were pressed together, our thighs absorbing the warmth coming off of the laptop. In the electric heat of the afternoon, the room felt charged. At first, Lois had been careful to contextualize each of the messages, photos, and videos that filled his page. “Carol Jane Levy. I didn’t know who that was, because I didn’t recognize the last name. But her mom and my mom were best friends, they lived right next door to us.” After a few minutes, Lois fell silent, held in sway by the page. A small smile played at the corner of her mouth, and yet her eyebrows were drawn together as though in pain, a deep line cutting through the space between them. As she continued scrolling through the posts and replies, her voice grew soft, so soft that I had to lean even closer to hear her. The amount of material that had been put up in the six months since Frank’s death was staggering, displaying images and stories from every point in his life. Each one had garnered dozens of responses from others in his network, and as Lois clicked on the links to display them she opened up long strings of replies and counter-replies. These responses had become the fodder for new stories, each person adding to or embellishing what had come before. I could see Lois drawing closer and closer to her brother with each passing moment, pulled in by the words and memories of the network that held Frank at its center. And yet most of the posts were about 1 his absence, cries of pain and loss that stretched the possibilities of what the medium could communicate. “I cant believe i wont see u again i will miss you always heartbroken i loved you Franky i cant believe this just cant…” This particular post was accompanied by several photographs of Frank from decades before. In the months that I had spent haunting his page, I had gotten to know the burly, barrel- chested, graying Frank of recent years, and I almost didn’t recognize the slim and smooth-faced youth in the photos. I leaned closer to look, trying to take in every detail of his face, to find the similarities to the middle-aged man I had grown to know so well. Lois leaned in too, sighing as she gazed at the photo of Frank holding up a freshly-caught trout, and for a moment our heads almost touched. This ethnography explores the intimate relationships between the living and the dead that have developed around digital technologies including online memorials, social media accounts, smartphone apps, and virtual reality platforms.

Load more