Death and the Virtual Platforms that Make You Look Alive Forever

Hundreds of Facebook users, bloggers, and twitterers die a day. What agency do their profiles, still present on these virtual platforms, have on the living? Do their web-based identities ease the mourning process or make it more difficult? Could the virtual be the only space where the dead and the living co-exist with similar materialities?...

The Atlantic just published a great interview of Patrick Stokes, a philosopher working out of Melbourne University about these ideas. Best quote from How Facebook Lets You Live Forever (Sort Of):

"we really have continuing moral duties to dead people even though they don't exist anymore; they exist as objects of duty. That's something Kierkegaard talks about, the fact that we have these duties to dead people, like the duty to remember them, or the duty not to slander them, and so forth. We live with this very profound ontological ambiguity with dead people: they both absolutely don't exist anymore, and yet they exist as these people that we have to love and care about."

Buying Individuals, Data Collections and Online Ads

From the great article A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's Watching Your Every Click, published in The Atlantic by Communications professor Joesph Turow.

DJ Medhi, Layton, Winehouse: A Dead Famous Person or The Collective Ritual

The death of famous people does something funny to the common people left behind. It's not quite like loosing a friend with whom you've actually talked to, established a reciprocal relationship with, it's more like loosing a collective notion, idea or product embodied by a human. 

Obviously everyone agrees that death is a sad event - it's difficult for humans to conceive of their own mortal nothingness - but when it comes to celebrity deaths it generally turns out to be this really great opportunity to connect with all the living people left behind. Over and over again similar things occur: facebookers change their facebook statuses quoting their last words (Jack Layton), tweeters tweet #allmythoughtstothefamily (DJ Mehdi), bars play their music again (Amy Winehouse), the highest-grossing documentaries of all time are produced (Michael Jackson), prices skyrocket (Lucian Freud) and solo shows sell out (Alexander McQueen); and all this with the best indications that they were simply geniuses, that success and death are anecdotal.... 

Overall a virtuous circle gets established through general mobilization: everyone wants to partake in this collective mourning or performative event where the famous person's death and life get washed-down, simplified and commodified into a tasty digestible narration. Unlike those that are still alive, famous dead people can't disappoint. Unlike those that are still alive, famous dead people get closer to home and in a sense become more alive than when they were actually alive.

Consuming a famous dead person is both an attempt to belong to and by those left behind and an honest mechanism of panic in front of oblivion.

Hence, because DJ Mehdi died earlier this week, as a way to confront death and in the hope to be part of a collective CBC played this - I never knew he produced it, but Tonton Du Bled was a huge hit when I was 15 keeping it real in Sèvres:

Facebook Death, Death by Facebook

About a month ago Facebook published a decrease of use in three of its first markets: 6 million Americans, 10 thousand Brits and 1.52 million Canadians commited Facebook Suicide during May 2011. Not much relative to the 700 million monthly Facebook users but still it launched a wave of 'Is this the death of Facebook?' debates - which were interesting since I still haven't understood how Facebook actually makes money.

Since then I've been receiving approximately 3 friend invites from people I do not know (and can’t complain about it to anyone) and if it weren't from a helpful hand I would still be logged on to fb's video chat; as a result I can add at least 2 reasons to why I hate Facebook.

But here's a great list of ten good reasons to:

1. babies
2. here is a picture of what i just ate
3. my mom is on facebook too
4. suggesting i 'like' something that benefits you
5. old cool friends have gone insane
6. getting gifts that are cartoon cows from moo-land
7. tagged in pictures where you look terrible
8. friend suggestions
9. default privacy settings
10. ......

The Heavy Materiality of All Things Virtual

The Funniest Use of Personal Digital Branding: Harper's Adorable Kitten

The realisation that in less than two weeks more than the equivalent of two thirds of his nation's population had seen the video 'mom cat hugs baby kitten (having a nightmare)' must have sparked somekind of fabulous lightbulb within the Canadian Prime Minister's personal branding team; something like adorable kittens do well at making things go viral and our client (Harper), although viral, is anything but adorable so let's try to use that 'insight' and make Harper adorable.

A few days later they came up with a facebook status and an album - "We have a new family member, a grey tabby, what do you think he should be named? Nous avons un nouveau membre de la famille. comment devrions-nous l'appeler?"

Interested in helping Harper? Go to Harper's personal facebook page before midnight or else Stanley will be the attributed winner. Not interested in helping the Harpers baptize their new grey tabby or contribute to the 505 messages left by the kitten's friends? Then at least go check out Stephen Harper's profile picture and discover what a Harper family picnic looks like:

http://www.facebook.com/pmharper

Porn Sells (my Blog)

Ever since I posted about photoshopped playmate bunnies in December my blog's audience has increased tremendously. "Kill stretch marks" and "playmate bunnies" are now among the top key words with which people land on my blog. I'm very flattered obviously by all this extra attention, but since I'm not much of a porn expert and actually tend to think porn doesn't really exist, except as a joke people amuse themselves with like wearing hats or collecting stamps, that realization was fascinating to me.

Earlier this month, my fascination experienced a breakthrough when the week I spent in nyc was the week New York magazine's special Porn issue came out. The magazine had three stories on the topic - one on the recent 'arrival' of the web in the industry, a second on how this open to all free content is affecting teens and a third on how porn is decreasing men's libido.

From the first I discovered new astonishing websites and also that Montreal didn't only give Arcade Fire to the world but also the three geniuses behind Brazzers, pornhub, xtube and extrememetube (among many more excellent sites). Apparently they are the people behind the revival of the MILF in porn. Great you say? well they didn't stop at that achievement. They also made millions by making platforms for free porn - free to watch, free to post, free to make, free to stop, free to zap, free to collect, etc. The old porn millionaires hate them, but many thank them, like Liz, 30, who claims "I get excited making them [porn videos], posting them and seeing how people react to them." (p.88)

The second wasn't as exciting. Alex Morris talks to young girls who post images of themselves online, but have boyfriends who may or may not know about this but that anyways are their boyfriends only online because boys don't assume in real life what they are online or something. Basically Morris seems as confused as the 14 year olds he's interviewing except he doesn't post sexy images of himself online. Frankly I'm not convinced facebook has shattered teenage angst at its core: when I was 14, there was no facebook and boys would say things that they knew nothing about but had the terms for, all while looking at boobs, and then would call us to talk about homework. 

The third was about male porn watchers having libido decreases. That could be really bleak or not so much. When I was in Egypt a few 14 year old boys groped me and a friend in Alexandria. It was funny and punishable by Allah. There's three ways to read the situation: either they associated white females to the western porn they saw on xtube so they groped us, or they were frustrated that they couldn't wank off to real girls so they groped us, or they were just very confused teenagers so they groped us. Hopefully those kids marched to topple their government and got their cherry popped in the process and/or wank off to xtube videos guiltlessly. Maybe their libido is so low now they can actually go on date without the extra sister or female cousin to look out for his female date.