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Identity, memory, death and the internet
Posted on September 18th, 2009 58 commentsLofty title perhaps, but a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year + since our excellent colleague, Lee Baber died of lung cancer. A shining light that woman… and one that I’m reminded of every week. Not just in the legacy of good work and good friends that she left behind, but also on the internet. Her name is everywhere. I’ve got her in my skype account, still, she’s in my gmail memory thingy, she’s in a half dozen of my friends lists on different sites. If you a google search for me, or edtechtalk or, well, or alot of things, you’ll see her name. The page linked to above is a fine example of that… a fine person through the eyes of her colleagues. A memorial, like many others created over millenia, it’s just that this one has a different medium than most of its predecessors.
Identity is, for me, things being identical over time. When i think of my own identity i look for those things that are the same in two different incarnations or timestamps and calls those things identical. To say that there is no identity is to say that things aren’t the same, and to look at someone’s identity is to look for those things that are the same over the period you are looking at. The internet makes this both more complicated and less so. There is a sense where it crystalizes your performance of yourself and makes it possible to measure if two performances are identical, and while all things might be performance, it is difficult to think that the premeditated performance mediated through the internet somehow encompasses a ‘person.’
That being said, we are creating this identity in little bits all the time. We leave little trails of ourselves in different places only for them to crystalize when we stop feeding the beast. In Lee’s case… that was her very rapid, sudden death. No time to wrap things up or ’set things straight’ we are left with a snapshot of her work the day she stopped doing it. There is the possibility for remixing, for reshuffling, for her projects to grow (and this is happening in some cases) but the image we have of her is crystalized in a way that is unique to our particular period in history.
When we talk about students putting ’stuff on the internet that will stay with them for the rest of their lives’ we sometimes forget, i think, that in our local communities the stuff we do stays with us for the rest of our lives. Our communities allow for growth, they all for things to no longer be identical, for new patterns of behaviour to emerge, for new things to be identical. We adapt for the fact that people ‘grow out of things’ that there is a time and place for each kind of thing. We will, as a culture, adapt to this new memory that we have, this digital memory, and we will no longer worry about such things (any more than we do about the silly things we’ve done in our childhoods are anything more than an injoke in our hometowns (depending
)Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of my older brother’s death. Stephen Cormier was, in my memory, the older brother that little boys dream of. He taught me things, brought me along to the drive even though his girlfriend was going, taught me some tricks with a three-wheeler i probably shouldn’t have known… 8 years older than me, he died at the now ridiculously sounding young age of 22. He was very old and mature to me at the time, but he died 12 years younger than I am now. I remember him mostly in a series of film clips now (or so i described it to bon last night) the time we flipped that three-wheeler and i tried to hide the full length calf bruise from my parents, that drive in, wrestling in the drive way. But i still remember.
Dave Cormier and Stephen Cormier
Just not in a digital way. Not with the 1600 http://flickr.com/opoe + photos bon and I already have posted of our kids. The video http://youtube.com/davecormier . The incredible blog posts over at http://cribchronicles.com. Our grandkids will, barring a worldwide meltdown, KNOW their parents and grandparents in a way that we never did. Identity… particularly in this sense of being able to see how two things are the same over time… and how they are different, is a far more present concept.
I don’t and never have until the last couple of days, thought about his digital identity. About the fact that, for whatever i do online, I have never mentioned that name “stephen cormier” in a blog post or a tweet. His name, to my searching, didn’t exist anywhere. It got me to thinking about Lee and about the good and the bad of our identities online. About the concern that some people have about what kinds of things that people post and how i often warn people that they should be cultivating their online identities. There is a longer, more human thing at work here that I’m reaching for. There is a sense in which we are storing the memories of ourselves, of our friends, of the ways that we are all connected to each other. Of our love.
So. 20 years later. This is my flag in the ground for my long lost brother. cheers.
58 responses to “Identity, memory, death and the internet”
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Lovely thoughts here RT @davecormier -Identity, memory, death and the internet a post for my brother – Stephen Cormier [link to post] -
Gone but not forgotten. RT @davecormier Identity, memory, death & the internet a post for my brother – Stephen Cormier [link to post] -
I love the photo of you two, made me think immediately of a similar photo that was recently on my brother’s profile on Facebook (of he and I). While this wasn’t meant to be a tribute to your brother, that bits that were are beautiful, and even 20 years later, I am saddened to think you lost a wonderful part of your life and youth through his passing away.
I’ve not had nearly as many connections with Lee, but we are connected in places and when I see her name, it always makes me pause. It will be interesting to see how the next 10 years plays out, as I don’t think anyone has a sense of how to deal with digital legacy and remembrance very well.
This post will make me think and reflect for quite some time. Thanks for writing it.
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@davecormier Nice piece, Dave. -
RT @davecormier: Identity, memory, death and the internet a post for my brother – Stephen Cormier [link to post] -
Dave – great post. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and emotions. You emphasize a positive aspect of digital identity that is too often overlooked by privacy and security-focused discussions…
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RT @davecormier Identity, memory, death and the internet, a post for my brother – Stephen Cormier [link to post] -
a great post on digital identity from Dave RT @davecormier: Identity, memory, death & the internet [link to post] -
My dad died 6 years ago this week and every so often I do a “vanity search” on his name. He was involved stuff that fortunately captured his existence even when the interweb tubes looked something like a set of fancy hamster tubes. Here is a link from a 1993 business directory that list my dad’s name, our old address, and our old home phone number that I called for the first 30 years of my life. http://www.uwcc.wisc.edu/wiscdir/insurdir.html
Yes, one employee (him). There is something about having him pop up online when I search for him that gives me a feeling that he exits versus my ever blurring memories that he once existed.
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RT @josiefraser: a great post on digital identity from Dave RT @davecormier: Identity, memory, death & the internet [link to post] -
Thank you, Dave. Your post is touching, and humanizes the work we do and the things that we spend our time on day in and day out.
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Thank you for a beautiful, thoughtful and positive blog posting. In the middle of my ernest working day, it brought tears to my eyes. I am glad your brother’s name now exists in cyberspace- that is part of the place we all live in too.
My teenage sons told me the other day that they would never do all this reconnecting with people from the past and from their school days like us oldies are doing on FB because, they said, thanks to FB, they would never lose touch with anyone. They said their networks will just get bigger Will be interesting to see. Digital continuities? -
A great post on digital identity from Dave Courmier Identity, memory, death & the internet [link to post] RT @josiefraser @davecormier -
RT @hjarche: RT @davecormier Identity, memory, death and the internet, a post for my brother – Stephen Cormier [link to post] -
Very moving and touching. Read it with double feelings, good as well as sad. Thanks.
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RT @davecormier Identity, memory, death and the internet, a post for my brother – Stephen Cormier [link to post] Prachtig! Beautiful! -
A remarkable blog post that mixes thoughts about our digital legacy with real memories of lost loved ones. [link to post] -
RT @josiefrasera great post on digital identity from Dave RT @davecormier: Identity, memory, death & the internet [link to post] -
I came to know about Lee Barber through edtechtalk and i was too late to find her alive. I know her through edtechtalk community and your words and if there is one thing i would like for a human being to achieve in life is the respect people have for her. An amazing and dignified human being. RIP.
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RT @davecormier: Identity, memory, death & the internet [link to post] < ----- Today's must read for me. Quite touching. -
Doug Henry September 18th, 2009 at 14:51
Dave,
Very thoughtful and respectful post – it reminded me of losing my own brother, who was only 42. Radiolab.org has a podcast on death, in which they mention the notion that we die 3 times – when our heart stops, when we are interred, and finally, when the last mention of our name is heard. Seems scarily relevant to our online identites – the show described the dead as lingering and longing for the last death… -
Beautifully written, Dave, and I’m glad you shared your story and your thoughts with us.
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Wow. Beautifully stated. Thanks for sharing this window into your life.
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Frances Bell September 18th, 2009 at 22:21
Lovely post – early death is so sad. Tomorrow we gather as a family to celebrate the 100th anniversary my late father’s birth. He already has digital identity on flickr but your post has encouraged me to blog our celebration a
and amplify it. -
RT @jabbusch: RT @halafawzi: Must read:Dave Cormier:Identity memory,death & the internet [link to post] -
RT @Larryferlazzo @jabbusch @halafawzi: Must read:Dave Cormier: Identity memory,death & the internet [link to post] -
Thank you! Great post! Now I will definitely create a digital identity for my dad!
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Thank you for this post. It’s made me think differently about our digital identities and how they are retained on the internet. I was very moved by your tribute to your brother. Family is so important; your family now has a fitting tribute to return to for reflection.
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@davecormier A wonderful post Dave [link to post] A must read for everyone. -
Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of Alan Levine’s story about his brother.
I’m glad you placed a flag in the soil of the internet to mark his spot. I also love the photos on flickr.
It’s amazing to me how you, whom I’ve never met, can write about someone I’ll never know and yet I want to know more. His life somehow matters to me.
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RT @jennyluca: @davecormier A wonderful post Dave [link to post] A must read for everyone. -
Felix Huang September 19th, 2009 at 00:22
Thanks for sharing. I don’t have a brother or sister. But my cousins are close as brothers. Your sensation awakes my memory of them, when long time no see.
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Lovely and touching.
1. I have a good friend I helped to set up a website as a part of his significant health challenges, including a heart transplant. It was intended to be a simple way of communicating the current news of his condition more easily than fielding a lot of phone calls. Hut he turned out to be such a brilliant writer that it’s become a wonderful chronicle of a brave man. His underlying condition means that his life will be relatively short, and it got me to wondering what will happen when the domain or hosting services expire for so many, and will Wayback Machine retain enought of it–since my own experiences there have make it seem it’s often not exhaustive.
2. I own the domain name Wikistoria.com, and have wondered about using it to create a wiki that allows for the posting of personal biographies that wouldn’t meet Wikistoria’s source standards. I thought it might even be a great curricular project–a way of recording those histories that don’t know have digital identities?
Thanks for bringing these thoughts up.
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RT @halafawzi: Must read:Dave Cormier:Identity memory,death & the internet [link to post] -
RT @Larryferlazzo: RT @jabbusch: RT @halafawzi: Must read:Dave Cormier:Identity memory,death & the internet [link to post] -
@AdeleMaclear relevant to ur wkshp tomorrow? Dave Cormier:Identity memory,death & the internet [link to post] (via @Larryferlazzo) -
Thanks everyone. It’s nice to share someone who was such a significant part of me becoming who i am with all of you.
I am seriously starting to wonder about the stewardship of digital identity. Who cultivates our digital graves when we leave?
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My immediate connection to the first few paragraphs here was the death of a best friend and colleague a few years ago of a stroke at the age of 41 on a school day morning.
I think the year was 2004… and the thing that got to me that year, and several since was her name prominently in my cell phone and email address books.
This was happening at the steep climb toward web2, and I realized then (and pondered it often) that we would never really leave the physical world in the same way again.
Now that I think of it, I have been terribly lucky to have not lost anyone near me with even a shred of digital presence since that time. Dena Bachman left a cell phone number on my phone. I can’t really yet imagine how hard it will be to deal with even deeper digital connections.
While I believe it will be a really positive thing in most respects… it will just be different.
Thanks for using your blog as more than just a way to share nifty new websites. Those of us with a heartbeat certainly appreciate it.
Sean
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RT @halafawzi: Must read:Dave Cormier: Identity memory,death & the internet[link to post] -
A beautiful post; thankyou. You know, some people look down on what they consider as a ’self-prostitution’ of online writing, especially if it contains personal references. I think this is snobbism. If a person ‘makes it’ to the news on TV, radio, newspaper or magazine then it’s wow! Blogging and microblogging has taken people’s identity to a broader audience in a more democratic way. I often wish we had film of our family from my childhood. Memories are there but they fade. It would be nice to look back and have a record of the past.
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RT @taniasheko: RT @jennyluca: @davecormier A wonderful post Dave [link to post] A must read for everyone. -
RT @jennyluca A must read for everyone [link to post] A wonderful post on digital identity by Dave Cormier -
Beautiful sadness of our digital identities. Via @monk51295 @taniasheko @jennyluca, post by @davecormier [link to post] -
[link to post] Identity & memory of the web -
Thank you for sharing this thought provoking post. Digital graves…. food for thought, for sure.
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Identity, memory, death and the internet @ Dave’s Educational Blog (via feedly) [link to post] Excellent post about how we may be un … -
LynDeckard September 20th, 2009 at 04:42
Thanks for a positive post about online identity. It is important to see the positive side of the footsteps we leave in cyberspace along with the negative.
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Great (and touching) post by @davecormier on digital identity: Identity, memory, death and the internet [link to post] -
Cynthia Houser September 20th, 2009 at 20:36
Thank you for a reminder about the meaning of life.
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Wow this is beautiful. As we age preservation is so important. I too lost a brother this coming year will be twenty years. Have his voice, photos, videos, his thoughts available would have been made the mourning process easier. It would have made it easier to visit a private to listen to him again, see him as he would want to be seen.
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Inspiring post. My oldest brother died at 30 (kidney failure) and his 3 kids don’t have memories of him. We didn’t reminisce or share stories because my mom was all Scarlett O’Hara about it (I won’t deal with it today – maybe tomorrow)and my dad turned him into a saint (someone we didn’t know and wouldn’t have loved). Now that both of our parents have passed, my other brother and I should give him a digital identity. I see him every day in my children but his descendants can’t see him in their children.
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It’s a post like this that makes the question of identity and sharing far more complex, difficult, and poetic than anything we can dream of in 1 and 0s It’s a form of narrative that has a new sense of linearity and time, and no story or memory is more powerful than that of loss, but the abilty to frame loss in more ways than sorrow and anger is the poetry here. So thanks, I haven’t been able to blog directly about my mother’s death, which is nearly three years on now for a variety of reasons, mainly I haven;t dealt with it, but herein lies the means to start erecting a memory shrine for those that meant so much to us. In many ways blogging about the little things, like toys, is blogging about past one is trying to recapture because of the people that brought any object, as isolated as it may seem, into a living and breathing relationship with those we love.
Thanks for this, it is a powerful meditation on our moment that moves well beyond the very focused questions and issues we often get trapped within.
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I lost a brother when I was just a kid – I was only 4, he was 10 (I think) and hit by a hit-and-run drunk driver.
I don’t remember my brother at all. I’ve realized any memories I have of him are just shadows of photographs displayed in darkened corners. Stories retold by my parents years later.
I wonder how things might be, had he left more of a trace. If he’d written, or drawn, or photographed, or anything that produced artifacts that could then help me to feel what he was. (sure, he was only 10, but my 6 year old has had several orders of magnitude more media recording his life than my brother ever did)
He’s gone. I’ll never really know anything about him.
My father in law died last christmas. He had a few scattered photographs of his childhood and early years, but that’s about it. Much of his history went to the grave with him.
When I die, my son (and his, etc…) will know something about me. They’ll know something about my son’s childhood. They’ll know from several perspectives, from documentary and real life snapshots of who we were. Who we are. What will this mean to them, in the decades to come? I don’t know. But I’d rather have a few gigabytes of stuff to sift through, than struggling to remember anything of a brother now lost forever.
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Hi Dave … just came across this post today and have to tell you just how much it meant to me. I just finished up a visit with a brother who didn’t pass away, but has been away for over 25 years. He’s come back into my life in a very strange way — I’ve now seen him twice in a span of 25 years. Your post pushes me further towards attempting to make sense of those new interactions. I know pieces of my own identity is tied up in all of it somehow.
On the other hand, the post itself raises amazing questions and makes me want to think more critically of the time we spend sharing things online. What all this means is so radically different than it did merely ten years ago — I am now able to preserve my words like “real” authors … perhaps they’ll be read by my children someday, perhaps not. Either way, the footsteps we leave in the snow are, at some level, being preserved like never before. I guess I’ve spent most of my time thinking about how all of our artifacts add up to something, when I shouldn’t really worry about that. One phrase, one tweet, one picture, or one movie may hold the hidden secret for someone looking for answers about my life someday — and I’ve become my own archivist and curator. Somehow all of our sharing and connecting online just got more important to me.
Again, thanks for a wonderfully insightful and touching post.
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Thought-provoking, lovely post, Dave. Thank you.
I have struggled these past few months with some of the questions you raise here about our digital identities, so much so, in fact, that I pop onto Twitter from time to time, and post photos to Flickr (almost never of my family), but no longer blog. I want to live intensely in my senses in my head and heart without cluttering up the air with so much stuff, so much ephemera.
I have lost dear ones. I never Google them. I choose to remember them through our shared experiences, through the fragments of artifacts they have left, until for whatever reason, they slip away. That seems right to me. The rhythms of the generations, the slim echoes of family traits and shards of stories of who they were finally fading into the earth. How strange to have everything here, recorded, to WATCH.
As a child (yes, I suppose I was strange) I collected old photographs of people and spectacles and vintage clothes as bits of people’s lives, but lives unknown to me. I loved imagining their stories without being yoked to fact. I have a huge box of photos from my mother’s family–I have no idea who half those people are. But that’s kind of wonderful in my book. I like the thought of the thread of identity weaving itself through time, but then it is released, or at least it fades or is loosened from the tethers of circumstance.
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Marc Doucet September 30th, 2009 at 20:54
Great post Dave. Inspiring thoughts.
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[...] Identity, memory, death and the internet- Dave’s Educational Blog, September 17, 2009 [...]
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.@davecormier and you’re making me cry, darn it, with this post [link to post]
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