I See Dead People (on YouTube)

The video site is filled with hundreds of thousands of memorial videos commemorating the lives of those who have passed away.

A few years ago one of my closest friends died while I was on vacation. When I returned home there was a message on my answering machine from him. I played the message, listening to the voice that now belonged to the dead. I played it over and over, trying desperately to encounter my friend for one last time in the digital stream of sound. It wasn’t a message from beyond the grave, but one very close, at the edge.

My friend was gone forever, but communication technology left his voice hanging in the air of my living room. For months afterwards, the most recent messages from my friends were left on my answering machine. I could not bring myself to delete their voices, in case someone else died and all I had left was that one last digital trace of their being.

As a networked digital society, we now find ourselves turning to the internet, and to YouTube in particular, to find traces of the recently deceased. When the famed performer and entertainer, Lena Horne, died in early May 2010, Newsweek published a review of her career that used clips from YouTube to survey her 92 years as an angel of song on this blue green planet of ours. Horne singing Stormy Weather in 1943, a duet with Perry Como in 1960, on Sesame Street in 1971 singing The Alphabet Song, at 80 years old singing in a Gap commercial in 1997, and on and on. Whether it’s from The Cosby Show, Sanford and Son, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, or in various movies, we find the memory of Horne scattered across YouTube. When the boomer generation has finally shuffled off this mortal coil we will find them on YouTube, and litigate endlessly for control over their digital ashes.

Elephants will carry the tusk of a dead companion with them for days. Monkeys also mourn their dead in their own way. Every culture has its funeral rites, but none have seen such rapid changes in the way they treat their dead as we have. Soon after the World Wide Web was invented we started to inter the digital ashes of our dead on websites. YouTube, barely more than five years old, is already filled with hundreds of thousands of memorial videos that commemorate the lives of our friends who have gone before us.

Like so much of the rest of the internet, the significance of our digital funerary rites is that the very process and privilege of being remembered is itself being democratized. The preservation of an individual’s words, pictures, and moving images was once almost entirely the mark of fame and wealth. In the pre-internet era, the unwashed masses would leave little behind to mark their stay on earth. Like the summer grass, it has been the destiny of most of humanity to wither and fade into oblivion. The tomb of Everyman has but one word upon it – “Forgotten.” But that was then, and now we are jacked into the global memory bank of the internet.

Curiously, the use of YouTube as a place to remember the dead was preceded by what has been described as a major revival of the obituary form. Equally curiously, the same has been said of a revival of autobiography in the early 1990s. It is as if the internet rose up to meet a growing need for self-documentation that was denied to the masses in the age of analogue broadcast media. Through the internet we now find solace in the public expression of private loss. YouTube transforms into DeathTube – the place where we will all eventually end up interred forever.

While there is much that could be said about the social and psychological significance of our new digital bereavement rituals, I’ll leave you with this one thought: While the privilege of being remembered has indeed been democratized, we should all remember that the bits of our lives we leave behind on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other commercial sites are now the private property of media corporations. The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.

In memory of Marc Christian Gautier, 1965-2003.