Caroline Flack's death made me ask – what happens to our digital life?

stuff.co.nz 2020-02-24 20:02

A week ago, I knew nothing of Caroline Flack. Offered a million pounds for the correct answer, I still couldn’t have connected her name and her face. Today, I know the names of her family, the breed of her dog, and the sound of her voice. I have contrasted her glossy Instagram feed with troubling news reports of her arrest in December.

Watching a video of her dancing, I have sensed her vitality, only to recoil at the stark, silent picture my imagination sends me when I read details of her death. I have felt envious of her hair and her clothes, and then have been hit in the gut by her private pain, expressed so poignantly in some of her final words.

British TV personality Caroline Flack.

This journey of discovery is only possible because of the internet. As long as the limelight has existed, people have developed strong attachments to the people bathed in it. In a “parasocial” relationship, we feel connected to public figures who wouldn’t know us from Adam, and when those people die, our sadness at their passing can be profound. I was one of the many that cried on the day that David Bowie died, but his heyday was long before social media. Now, the constant stream of personal content on Instagram and Twitter makes it far easier to develop feelings of closeness and connection with celebrities, even if our insights into their lives prove illusory in the end.

Many people who Flack didn’t know are feeling grief for her, and everyone who did meet her is posting a tribute somewhere. Her Instagram has transformed overnight, from a carefully curated autobiographical exercise to a fast-developing online memorial. If her account disappeared at the behest of her family, the outcry would likely be deafening, so her Instagram will likely stay put, part of the digital tapestry that is now “her”. She lived her life online, and there she will stay, there she will evolve. The influencer is dead, long live the hashtag #bekind.

You do not have to be a celebrity, of course, to leave behind a digital footprint when you die. Nearly all of us do, and what to do with these ongoing digital selves is a question for our age.

My research into Flack’s life and death this week reminded me of sensations I experienced when I encountered my first dead person on the internet. It was 2007, and I was looking for my offline friends on Facebook, a newly launched online space. I wasn’t expecting to see a phantom.

I didn’t recognise this ghost – she was someone with a similar name to a school friend I was searching for – but I quickly felt like I had known her. I can picture her still. She had a lot of blonde hair and liked to post photos of herself in risqu?? outfits at crazy parties. I watched as her friends reacted to her death, carrying on talking to her. Underneath photos of drunken, crazy nights out, they reworked her life story. “You were such an innocent angel,” they said.

At that time, social media was new, and online hauntings were not an everyday phenomenon. In 2020, though, the digital trail we leave behind in life can become our enduring legacy after we’re gone. The data of the dead lingers indefinitely on the phones we carry and on the social media sites we use. No magic switch exists to make a person’s entire online persona die with them, so ghosts now roam the internet. Scholars at the Oxford Internet Institute have predicted that Facebook could house 4.9 billion dead people by the end of the century, and social media profiles are just a fraction of the data on the world’s overheating servers.

We may have tried to shove it away in modern times, but mortality is back with a vengeance, courtesy of the internet. For most of history, we would have experienced death often and up close. Modern medicine, hygiene and technology pushed death so far away from us that it’s become difficult to cope with, unfamiliar, a problem to be solved. Most of us have never seen an actual dead body. But now, the dead are logged in whenever and wherever we are.

On the internet, we see death as it happens, often being notified minutes after it’s occurred. A parent might find out about a child’s car accident or school shooting on Twitter before the police have time to get to the door. Our much-loved and missed friends or relatives can stay in our social networks, popping up unexpectedly on Facebook on “This Day in 2014.” An influencer we follow dies, and we feel things that we didn’t expect to feel.

Although death is everywhere online, modern technology has given us an Instagram filter for it. The dead – looking as alive as they ever did – carry on smiling at us through our smartphones, undeleted and incorruptible. Dead influencers carry on influencing us, albeit in different ways. Kyrzayda Rodriguez, a popular fashion blogger who died of stomach cancer in 2018, still has more than half a million followers on Instagram. What affects people most when they see Rodriguez’s account – her illness, her bravery, that fabulous bag? How long might the account remain, and what will it continue to mean, to whom? Who will ultimately decide its fate, and how Rodriguez will be remembered when it’s gone?

On the internet, we do what humans have done for millennia – continue bonds with those who have gone before. Because of posthumously persistent social media accounts, we can continue bonds with anyone who ever affected us, even if we didn’t know them In Real Life.

But digital spirits don’t stay online forever. One day, we might reach out to a ghost and find that they have dissolved into the ether. The big technology companies that manage our data when we’re alive call the shots about what happens to it after we’re dead. We assume that Flack’s Instagram will remain as a tribute, a memorial, and a reminder. But should we?

When journalist Deborah Orr died last October, her Twitter account was deactivated soon thereafter. Orr had tweeted about the most intimate details of her life, from her divorce to her last days in hospital. Her Twitter account was in her voice, unlike the stories told about her in the media. She controlled the narrative. When that narrative disappeared, someone on the site called it a “violent act”, like a murder.

Anyone who was an official representative of her estate could have requested its removal, but speculation raged over who could have done such a thing. Many vilified her ex-husband as suspect number one, but there was also incredulity and anger over Twitter having allowed the deactivation at all. Her supporters felt that Orr had been silenced.

For all her reach, Flack, too, felt herself to have been silenced. Visibility does not always grant us the power to reveal the truth about ourselves. Explaining her decision to publish Flack’s final statement, last week, her mother said she wanted her daughter’s “little voice to be heard”. A little voice, quieter than Instagram, quieter than her advisers’ alleged insistence that she hold herself back.

Our digital footprints may enable us to carry on influencing the world after we’re gone, and to have control and authorship over parts of our enduring digital legacy. But the internet is also the place where we lose control of the narrative of our own lives. What part of Flack’s digital footprint will speak the loudest, will determine her place in history? And can that ever be the same as what was true?

The Telegraph, London

Original Source