Joseph Donnell can no longer update his facebook status, and unless someone living accesses his password or facebook changes its policy, he’s forever stuck with this: “Joseph Donnell: Knee Replacement, 5 day hospital stay … Rehab … 30 days in rehab and therapy facility … going home today, PRICELESS!!!!!!!”
In a literary sense, the narrative voice is unaware of the information readers are privy to, which is that JD is now dead. Furthermore, the fact that his status update describes an action when his present state is perpetual inaction points to a fault, an unforeseen design glitch that makes the medium incapable of fulfilling its ostensible genre conventions.
Beneath Joe’s status update, it says:
“Olivia Daniels Peachtree and 7 others like this.”
Though Joe can no longer participate as author of this digital version of himself, his friends can. And they have, and they cannot be trusted: There’s grieving disbelief: “OMG!!!” “I can’t believe it!!!!!” “Noooooooo!!!!!!!!.” There are eulogy-like communiqués to the world: “Joe was a good man. May he rest in peace,” and direct messages: “You, my friend, were the man.”
Once, we had a fairly fixed set of options for how to deal with the news of death. But facebook has altered the generic conventions of our rituals. A space intended for announcing to the world what we are doing turns into a place for our virtual friends to announce to each other what we once did. A constantly updating present becomes a perversion of our past. Certainly, our role on facebook is a kind of authorship of ourselves and others. We are signaling a version of selfhood, with links, wall posts, profile details, and various other activities we engage in. However, facebook encourages violations of sacred spaces and crosses boundaries, suggesting that we are not writing the apparatus, but the apparatus is writing a virtual version of us.
Rob,
This extends beyond facebook: even this comment is a sort of stamp that will be in the apparatus . . . forever? Thoughts of the collective, the invisible consciousness, a ballooning discourse . . . The Facebook is a crude flaw, and it seems that there are two reactions: one person sees the page as sacrosanct–the last social movements in the virtual world; another sees it as a memory-board, an ability to continue to write the narrative, perhaps out of personal necessity, sort of the way I have decided to add to the narrative of this blog.
In any case, isn’t the memory of the dead always written by the survivors? We may have control in our life, but it’s out of hands (thankfully) when we’re gone. Perhaps we have control on our narrative now, but we will be left to the collective–the apparatus–when we die. Seems like the facebook, in this and in many other social functions, has just added a new layer.
In lieu of these thoughts I am now going to post this review on the wall of my dear uncle (died in 2010), because posting it after he’s dead would bother the shit out of him.