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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Death, Identity, and the Social Network Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cn0s1xd Author Brubaker, Jed Richards Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Death, Identity, and the Social Network DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Information and Computer Science by Jed Richards Brubaker Dissertation Committee: Professor Gillian R. Hayes, Chair Professor Paul Dourish Professor Geoffrey C. Bowker Associate Professor Melissa Mazmanian 2015 © 2015 Jed Richards Brubaker DEDICATION For the friends and family, both chosen and given, who have supported me on this journey and shaped who I am today. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES V LIST OF TABLES VII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VIII CURRICULUM VITAE XII ABSTRACT XV 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Bridging Social and Technical Approaches to Digital Identity 3 1.2 Organization of the Dissertation 8 2 RELATED WORK 11 2.1 Two Fields of Digital Identity 12 2.2 Digital Death 29 3 METHODS 52 3.1 Focus & Scope 52 3.2 Data Collection & Analysis 55 4 THE POST-MORTEM PROFILE 66 4.1 Engaging the Profile 71 4.2 Digital Identity Lifecycles & Changing Infrastructure 86 4.3 Facebook’s History with Death 93 4.4 Conclusion 101 5 SPEAKING WITH THE DEAD 107 5.1 Methods 109 5.2 Authors and their Audiences 112 5.3 Temporal Patterns 118 5.4 Post-Mortem Social Networking Practices 127 5.5 Interpreting Post-mortem Comments & Wall Posts 133 5.6 Conclusion 134 iii 6 EXPANDING THE SITE OF DEATH AND GRIEF 142 6.1 Engaging Death on Social Network Sites 144 6.2 Networked and Algorithmic encounters 149 6.3 Expansions on Social Network Sites 159 6.4 Conclusion 166 7 STEWARDING A DIGITAL IDENTITY 169 7.1 Background & Context 172 7.2 Study Design & Analysis 181 7.3 The Role & Responsibilities of Stewardship 184 7.4 Conclusion 203 8 CONCLUSION 207 8.1 Features of Delegated Digital Identities 212 8.2 Future Directions 221 APPENDIX A: Sample Questions for Open-Ended Interviews about Experiences with Death on Social Network Sites 238 APPENDIX B: Semi-Structured Interview Script for Management of Post-Mortem Facebook Profiles 240 APPENDIX C: Interview Sketches and Facebook Features 247 REFERENCES 261 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 4-1. Screenshot of Facebook Reconnect. As part of the "Suggestions" section of Facebook’s Newsfeed, Reconnect encouraged people to post messages on the walls of their inactive friends. 66 Figure 4-2. Screenshot of the profile picture and basic information on a post-mortem MySpace profile. 72 Figure 4-3. An example of a post-mortem Facebook profile. Facebook profiles prioritize messages posted by friends, placing the Wall in the center of the profile. 73 Figure 4-4. Example of an About me section of the MySpace profile, edited post-mortem to include details about the account holder’s death. 82 Figure 4-5. A blank cover photo. Profiles that have not set a cover photo display a blank navy box where the cover photo would have appeared. 84 Figure 4-6. A depiction of the digital identity lifecycle. Source: Windley, 2005. 89 Figure 4-7. Facebook’s “Deceased” form, circa 2009. The deceased form allows people to notify Facebook about the death of an account holder. 97 Figure 5-1. Aggregated count of comments by day across the sample between 7 days prior to and 30 days following death. The frequency of comments spikes following the death of a user and then quickly declines. 119 Figure 5-2. Aggregate count of comments by day over 3 years. Following the death of a user, the volume of posts continues to spike on yearly intervals as users memorialize the anniversaries of their dead friends. 120 Figure 5-3. Pre-mortem and post-mortem comments by day of year, displayed as a relative proportion of total comments where each day is scaled to 1. Post-mortem profiles continue to be involved in commenting practices surrounding Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving, receive a greater proportion of comments on Christmas and New Year’s Day, and evidence new posting patterns on U.S. Independence Day. 124 v Figure 5-4. Aggregate count of posts by day relative to the deceased’s birthday (Profile N=100). The rate of birthday comments is likely influenced by the birthday notifications that MySpace continues to send the deceased’s friends post-mortem. 126 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 3-1. An overview of the studies, listed chronologically. 56 Table 7-1. Four duties described by stewards. The duties reflect tensions between the needs of the deceased and the needs of survivors, as well as existing data authored by the deceased and the new moderated data contributed by survivors. 186 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The intellectual work of this dissertation is not mine alone, and it would be a lie to claim sole ownership. The credit belongs to the rich network of people who have made this project possible, and the countless more they represent. These acknowledgements are only a small gesture of my gratitude. Truly, this work belongs to them. First, to my advisor, Gillian Hayes, who supported me through every twist and turn on this adventure. Rather than showing me a path, she helped me navigate and craft my own. She both honored and tolerated my passion, and spent the time helping me learn how to bring it into focus. To my committee members, Geoffrey Bowker, Paul Dourish, and Melissa Mazmanian, thank you for your energy, patience, and generosity. I could not have chosen a more diverse committee, or one more perfect for the project they helped me undertake. I am indebted to two amazing sets of academic siblings. First, to Stuart Geiger and Margarita Rayzberg, who have both supported me for the better part of the last decade. Their shared academic vocabulary and upbringing have provided a foundation to support fragile ideas, and a home in which to take refuge when traveling too far afield. And to Lynn Dombrowski and Sen Hirano, who through their intellectual generosity and friendship, helped me discover the best in my work viii and myself as well. Thank you for understanding and fostering parts of me that I did not know existed. Collaborators have provided me with invaluable opportunities to grow, learn, and play. I would especially like to acknowledge Janet Vertesi, who helped me launched this project at its very beginning; Funda Kivran-Swaine, who laughed when I told her that I believed in her methods more than my own, and gained a life long friend when she said she was pretty sure that I had gotten that backward; and Oliver Haimson, who allowed me to play in domains and with methods that would have otherwise been deemed out of scope. Working with talented and passionate undergraduate research assistants has been one of the highest privileges throughout my graduate studies. I am especially grateful to Anita Marie Tsaasan, Nafiri Kusumakaulika, and Grace Pai who played a special role when studying the stewardship of post-mortem social media accounts, and were obstinate enough to insist I continue my career in higher education. I have been surrounded by intellectual colleagues and dear academic friends who have influenced my work in ways they probably do not suspect: Amelia Acker, Marisa Cohn, Ellie Harmon, Lilly Irani, Tamara Kneese, Silvia Lindtner, and Cortney Loder, who were always ready to explore the big ideas; Morgan Ames, Jeffery Bardzell, Michael Bernstein, Matthew Bietz, Jeremy Birnholtz, Elizabeth Churchill, Mark Handel, Charlotte Lee, Mor Naaman, Katie Pine, David Ribes, Irina Shklovski, Khai Trong, Amy Voida, and Stephen Voida, who each blurred the ix line between mentor and friend, giving me the best of both; and to Judy Chen, David Nguyen, Six Silberman, and friends in both STAR and LUCI who are a steady reminder that the best forms of support often involve Rock Band and FroYo. I am indebted to mentors, researchers, and fellow conspirators at Microsoft Research, Intel, and Facebook, especially Gina Venolia, John Tang, Kate Crawford, Cathy Marshall, Mic Bowman, Melissa Gregg, Pete Fleming, and Vanessa Callison-Burch. Likewise, this work would not have been possible were it not for support from the National Science Foundation, the ARCS Foundation, the Robert Kling Fellowship, and the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. There is one group of people to whom I owe the entirety of this project, but that I regretfully cannot name. The participants and informants I with whom I engaged gave life to this project. Some I met briefly for a single conversation. Others I spoke with multiple times, staying in touch across the years when they reached out to give me updates. Many shared their deepest pain during their darkest times. Far too often, all I could do was bear witness to their grief and share in their tears. I remain humbled by their collective candor, generosity, and willingness to be vulnerable. Though their participation enabled this work to progress, their stories and experiences and changed me in the process. I have sought to make their voices heard, and to make changes on their behalf and on behalf of those they represent. I can never repay their kindness and bravery, but I hope that I have done them justice. x Beyond the academy, my family was there long before I started down this path. My parents never asked for any reason to support my education other than knowing that it was my choice. They tolerated far too many spontaneous monologues about the importance of my research, even as I worked to figure out what my research was.
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