August 2024 Community Gathering with Sarah Wambold and Rem Moore on Second (Digital) Loss
Our August gathering was quite a bit more interactive and technical than previous ones, as our guests demonstrated a mockup of a tool that might be used to catalogue, store, and then slowly and gently degrade a digital artifact over time. Taking inspiration from their 2023 article, Only Loss, the two posited that technology might assist us to develop strategies to contend with, exert control over, and/or even prevent the “second loss” that occurs when we lose —- or lose access to —- the digital assets of deceased loved ones.
As practitioners in community organizing and digital research (Rem) as well as technical writing and funeral direction (Sarah), the two were able to draw from a variety of experiences and disciplines to engage the community in the technical demonstration, the question and answer session, and also a fantastic collaborative writing exercise. Here are a few salient themes that emerged during our conversation:
Loss Is Baked Into The Digital Experience
Rem and Sarah’s work was sparked in part by the question of how to deal with the lingering digital artifacts of those who have passed away. As a funeral director, Sarah was all too familiar with dealing with bereavement of the natural, biological sort but the long tail of digital recordings, images, writings was another matter. In exploring this question they turned to the work of Debra Basset, namely her article “Profit and Loss: The Mortality of the Digital Immortality Platforms” for language to think through the challenge of encountering and then losing precious digital remnants of those who have passed.
“Our state of being online right now is sort of a state of being bereaved. Whether we know it or not; whether we’ve experienced the ‘first loss’ or not. We’re kind of like always contending with it.”
Pushing Past Precious
According to Moore and Wambold, “Bassett makes a distinction between two types of encounters with the afterlives of data: intentional and accidental. Example data includes: photos, voicemails, texts, and posts that are scattered across devices and websites that we access throughout our everyday lives. Intentional encounters with this data are those where select data has been prepared in advance and curated to represent a particular memory of the person the data indexes. Accidental encounters on the other hand account for the refuse of data we leave behind unaccounted for, never intended to serve as memorials. Bassett interestingly frames these encounters through the prism of memory, referring to the data for each type of encounter as either ‘intentional digital memories’ (IDM) or ‘accidental digital memories’ (ADM). “ Moore and Wambold question the idea that memories can be digital and further raise the concern that the nature of the digital encounter can lead either to a drive towards the transformative — the desire to use the data in novel ways—- or towards the archival, something they refer to as “precious-making”.
in past sessions, particularly the one on museums with Erin, the group discussed the dangers of collective meaning-making through the hoarding of physical and digital items. Those of us who work with organizations grappling with what and how to preserve resources and create a digital legacy, must be aware of the tendency toward precious-making that could blind decision makers to the deleterious effects of merely archiving the work they’ve done in a form that makes it difficult to parse, engage with, use, or remix.
Capability Beyond “Keepability”
This session was particularly special for the level of engagement with the idea of composting and hospicing that underpins this community. The primary purpose of the demonstration was to challenge users to explore what it would mean for a chosen piece of data to no longer be recognizable and then to no longer be accessible. According to Moore, this provocative practice was in service of “getting past the idea that something that you have should be unchanging and offering ways for people to see what it would be like if that thing was to no longer exist.”
As we continue to grow this community, we hope to engage all sorts of practitioners in the collective imagination of objects, projects, organizations, and systems —- up to and including this community! —- fading away.