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electronic adress my dead mother arrives by chance at the entrance ship in the middle of a pandemic evening, almost without announcing herself. “Beverly Blum commented on a link you shared,” the subject says.
For a single glorious millisecond I let myself live in a fantastic world that uses social media from a few perches beyond my mother.
And then I open the email: “Great piece – Dad.”
Oh, right. My 82-year-old father never wanted to endure the misfortune of creating his Facebook account, so he hides in my mother’s name. “Thank you Beverly Dad,” I reply.
When I get up for tea, I notice something else: my digital photo frame in the kitchen shows a picture of my mother on a DC subway when she visited my first year. He never seems to be happy; we are on our way to the zoo.
I feel dizzy and so I sit on the couch until the dog senses something wrong and it becomes a warm lump next to my thigh. Then I remember the other confusing images that Google Photos will inevitably show: my mother in my apartment or hospital, Ray Charles singing or tied to a mess of pipes.
For more than a year now, algorithms have been promising a way to make you sad. After creating a code that scans my photo albums and finds the most important people in my life, shows them photos in random order, completely shaping the emotional contours of my day.
I realize there is an easy solution. I can hide photos of my mother or block my zombie Facebook account. But I’m used to being upset that way. What I remember and when the technology is ordered is because I left it.
Katie Gach, a digital ethnographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been trying to understand users like me on Facebook for years. He has spoken to more than 80 study participants, sometimes for hours, about how they interact with the profiles of the deceased.
“What we’re finding is that it’s very hard to misalign what people need from this system and how it works,” he says of Facebook.
Part of the problem is that Americans are wrong planning their disappearance. Although Gach says the official count isn’t for the public, “very few” people have taken advantage of Facebook’s memorialization features, which allows them to name it “Heritage contacts”Which can help them manage their profile after death, and thus avoid unnecessary inconvenience to loved ones.
“We can give [people] all the options they want, but if they’re not communicating ‘Hey, you’re going to take care of that, and it works like this’, it doesn’t help the surviving loved ones so much, ”he says.
Memorized accounts they are basically frozen in digital amber: they can’t be tagged and aren’t included in birthday warnings, but they are allowed on the platform while the company’s servers are in the whirlwind. (A basic contact can change their profile picture and post tributes, but cannot make new friend requests or read messages).
Memorizing an account requires leg work, including providing documentation of someone’s death. But Facebook has other tricks to prevent the dead from appearing in places where they shouldn’t be seen: If you travel six months offline to Nepal, the platform will take you to the platform’s machine learning software. may die and actively remove your name from birthday announcements and invite suggestions, says Gach. But That’s it.
“There’s a sense of divine knowledge with Facebook,” Gach says. “But when did a system find out that someone had died? Telemarketers don’t stop calling. We don’t think of Facebook as an entity that needs to tell anything, because it’s automated in many other areas of our lives. “
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