2. Today: Death, media and the media life perspective Online memorials, witnessing death online, immortal digital lives, what it means that we can no longer forget. Pro-ana: a web community where identity and relationships are disembodied. What does pro-ana have to do with death and the media life perspective? In-class discussion
16. Our digital souls have the potential to be truly immortal. But do we really want everything we've done online - offhand comments, camera-phone snaps or embarrassing surfing habits - to be preserved for posterity? One school of thought, the "preservationists", believes we owe it to our descendants. Another, the "deletionists", think it's vital the internet learns how to forget.
17. “The thing is you never really get out of the relationship.” “you cannot de-boyfriend yourself.”
18. It's hard to forgive and forget if you can no longer forget.
20. More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone. The information about ourselves that we record online is the sum of our relationships, interests and beliefs. It's who we are. - Hans-Peter Brondmo
21. In his 2009 book Delete, Mayer-Schönberger proposed that we should build technology that forgets gracefully. Files might come with expiry dates, he suggests, so that they simply vanish after a certain point. Or they might "digitally rust", gradually becoming less faithful unless we make a concerted effort to preserve them. Perhaps files could become less accessible over time - like consigning old photos to a shoebox in the attic rather than displaying them on the wall.
22. How does Pro-ana connect to what we know about the Media Life Perspective? Relationships and identity are disembodied. Meaning is made and documented in media. The body is just a hollow vessel for the spirit. The identity one portrays in media is everything! Both death and Pro-ana show how networked individualism (a concept we use in economics and sociology) can be applied to our fundamental experiences of being human. The body, which is geographically situated, becomes just part of the stories we tell in media about ourselves. It is secondary to the meaning we get from creating an identity (reality) and making connections and fostering relationships with others.
24. Pro-ana websites: definition A genre of websites disseminating information about eating disorders, primarily anorexia nervosa, and providing girls and women with a forum to discuss and share information about anorexia (Dias, 2003).
30. The pro-ana phenomenon Anorexia as a life style not a disorder. Community forming and interpersonal relations are higher priorities for the site users than forming a coherent philosophy (Overbeke, 2008). Pro-ana often comes with aversion to recovery (Williams & Reid, 2007).
31. My ED Diary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPEe5o1Ves4&NR=1
33. Why study? A legitimate community for women suffering from ED, created by the Internet (Dias, 2003; Norris et al., 2006; Gavin et al. ,2008) Creating outrage in public domain (Giles, 2006) No data about actual internet use of individuals with ED’s (Giles ,2006; Chelsey et al.,2003)
34. Research question What are the pro-ana bloggers motivations to publish a blog? What are the pro-ana bloggers perceived benefits of publishing a blog?
35. Pro-ana blogging: The U&G approach (Katz et al. 1974) Perceived benefits Motives Eating disorder Blogging Other consequences Social & Psychological origins Needs Media Use Need gratifications Other consequences
36. Pro-ana blogs: motives Connecting (Burleson et al. 1994; Dias, 2003) Coping (Sundar et al.,2007; Hu, 2009) Identity construction (Dias, 2003; Sundar et al., 2007)
37. Pro-ana blogs: benefits Cognitive change (Esterling et al., 1999, Nardi et al.,2003; Hu, 2009) Emotional benefit ( Sundar et al., 2007; Hu, 2009) Behavioral change (Burleson, 1994; Esterling et al.,1999, Lipczynka, 2007)
RFID tags in hands with health care information. In some places you can pay for things by swiping your hand. Tyler Clementi committed suicide because his sexual orientation was made public online.By taking this stance, we can move beyond the question of whether media causes revolutions. We do not take a society-centric or technology-centric point of view. We argue that moving beyond this question allows us to posit new empirically based hypotheses and research questions that focus on understanding modern subjectivities, culture and social structures.
Man in the UK. Was one of a number of cases of this. One of the first though. While some users reportedly tried to talk him out of it, others goaded him to get on with it.Although administrators later turned off the webcam feed, several screen grabs of the tragedy have been appeared on the web.The Evening Standard newspaper said he was chatting with around 50 other users at the time, in a special "insult" chatroom.
A member of a chat room where people go who like to work out.
Had a webcam on. Took Pills. Turned around and died. Look at the gun pointed at him. The chat was still going on while all this was happening. Some people didn’t know if it was real or not. They only realized it was real when the police broke down the door and turned off the webcam. The transcript of the chatroom chats was not about him doing it or what he was doing. It was about whether or not this was real. What’s fascinating is the discussion about whether or not this is real.
We can’t just say we want this occupying force out of our country. We need to kill someone on camera for it to be real and meaningful.
The last public hanging in the US around 1936. Some argue that the decline in public hangings is related to the rise in popularity of the newspaper and mass media. Why? Well because each tells us who is in and who is out. It informs us of how we are NOT supposed to behave if we are to be good citizens.
Start video at 1:55We don’t believe something is true unless we see it represented in media.
Dying is just something that happens to your body. Our bodies are just vessels for our spirit, emotions and the stories we tell about our lives.
Facebook memorials
Question: How are some technologies building this technology into their functionalities? If designers of technology realize that forgetting is an essential human trait how can they design for this as technologies are usually built to remember things? Question: What do we loose if we program our technologies to forget things?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDp-F3Y97ZQ
A genre of websites disseminating information about eating disorders, primarily anorexia nervosa, and providing girls and women with a forum to discuss and share information about anorexia ( Dias, 2003).
Norris- content: main themes control, success, perfection. Anorexia as a lifestyle. Religious metaphors. Pro-ana braceletsOutrage- content. Media exposure highlighting the most controversial content of pro-ana – advices on purging and concealing eds from friends and family resulted in closing down a series of websites. (Yahoo) Pr-ana responseExplorative research provides support for the argument that pro-ana forums appear to be providing much needed support
Blogging is related to Behavioral change- better coping an treatment, which may in turn improve health outcomes. However, since pro-ana websites creators claim routinely that ‘Anorexia is a lifestyle, not a disease’ lipzynca, a behavioral change might be a negative one.
