Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media

Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media

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Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media Peter Joseph Gloviczki

JOURNALISM AND MEMORIALIZATION IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Copyright Peter Joseph Gloviczki, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-46536-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-49951-9 ISBN 978-1-137-46087-5 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137460875 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Gloviczki, Peter Joseph. Journalism and memorialization in the age of social media / Peter Joseph Gloviczki. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Online social networks. 2. Memorialization Social aspects. 3. Social media. 4. Journalism United States History 21st century. 5. Virginia Tech Shootings, Blacksburg, Va., 2007 Case studies. I. Title. HM742.G58 2015 302.30285 dc23 2014039797 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Jenny and my mother and father

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Contents List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Acknowledgments ix xi xvii xix 1 Journalism in the Age of Social Media 1 2 The Case of the In Memorial: Virginia Tech Facebook Group 25 3 The News Cycle in the Age of Social Media 45 4 Public Memory in the Online World 65 5 Emotion on the Screen 85 6 The Audience after Virginia Tech 105 Notes 127 Bibliography 151 Index 181

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Illustrations Figures Figure 3.1 The process of identifying the news cycle in social media conversations 48 Figure 3.2 The six stages of the news cycle 50 Figure 5.1 Measuring effectiveness of socioemotional expression in online memorial groups by desired goals and goals accomplished 93 Tables Table 2.1 Virtual presence and virtual absence in a memorial group context 41 Table 3.1 Users may be seeking different forms of media for information and expression 56 Table 4.1 Three aspects of memorialization 66 Table 4.2 Criteria for social media sharing 75

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Foreword I had a writing professor in graduate school that encouraged me to put process before product. That was a valuable lesson for me. Prior to that moment, I had never thought as much as I probably should have about the way that things get made. 1 Writing, like so many things, is a constructive process. It is about building things; words are the structures that build worlds. 2 As much as anything else that I ve learned in my formal education, the principle of putting process before product has encouraged me to take risks and try new things as a writer and a researcher. In doing so, I believe that my worldview in relation to the objects and theories that I study has become considerably broader. 3 Coming to know the world, for me, has been a process of both construction and evaluation. I am the person at the table who must touch the hot food to make sure that it is actually hot, even though I ve been warned multiple times to be careful because this plate is hot. I think of myself as an evaluator. I like to test things; I like to know for sure. 4 And so I ask a lot of questions. I hope that, in the practice of asking interesting questions, I will gradually move toward new knowledge. I realize that this is a slow and challenging process, but I am in it for the long haul, and I appreciate the ride. Again, there is an element of enjoying process over product in this approach. 5 By now, my Coker students are well aware that my favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry. I was working with an independent study student this summer, and we were talking about certainty in communication research. More specifically, she had read about the interpretive process in communication research, and we were discussing certainty and its relationship

xii Foreword to interpretation. 6 She came to think about the value of interpretation in the way that we see the world. 7 Throughout this book, I establish my position in relation to this research, and I work diligently to explain how I ve come to understand both online memorial groups in general and online memorial groups in times of crisis in particular. I aim to write in a readable, approachable style, because my hope is that this book will be useful to undergraduate students, graduate students, scholars, and researchers working in communication and related fields. I hope that the pages in this book encourage readers to think broadly and deeply about the twin processes of remembering and forgetting, while also working toward a fuller understanding about the relationship between journalism and memorialization in the age of social media. 8 The process of putting this book together (again, process over product) has been greatly aided by three weeks spent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the summer of 2014. My writing ritual has been to wake up early and write; I thank my mother for allowing me the time and space to focus on this ritual while visiting her, and I thank my personal trainer, Keith Hagen, for keeping me even more fit than I already was in the process of completing this book. In fact, I have thought extensively over the past several years about the mind- body connection. Though I know almost nothing about this connection from a scholarly perspective, I can say that it has felt incredibly helpful to me to engage in core exercise and regular strength training as a part of my daily routine. Feeling healthier has made me think about the way that health influences how we see the world, and it encourages me to make further personal strides in this arena. 9 One of my mentors just completed a pilgrimage in Europe. She walked for several days (I believe it was thirty full days, though I may be mistaken) and spent most of each day walking. After walking for a full day, she told me, she felt too tired to do anything, including write her book. She is a very accomplished writer and researcher, with several books to her name. I very much admire her approach to the scholarly process. 10

Foreword xiii I hope, though, that I would never be too tired to write, even after walking five hundred miles. The process of scholarly writing engages my mind, and I truly appreciate the way that it encourages me to see the connections that might not otherwise be apparent. I feel as though words can nourish my mind and my body. I ve often felt that words run through my body, which is to say that I tend to feel them very strongly in my bones. 11 The subject of this book, too, is one that I have felt and continue to feel very strongly in both mind and body. I am thinking this morning about the people that Nic Harter and Katherine Olson would have become. I mean this line of thought with the greatest level of respect, because I admired their broad ways of thinking about the world, even though I did not know either of them extraordinarily well. The process of writing this book has encouraged me to revisit my connections to them and to further examine the impact that their lives had on mine. 12 I open the introduction to this book by sharing each of their stories as I remember them and discussing the fact that they provide, as I term it, the engine that drives this book forward. Later in the book, in Chapter 3, I even incorporate one of the postings that I made about Katherine into my analysis of the news cycle in the age of social media. I hope that this sense of positionality reveals to the reader that I care very deeply about both my participation in and my research about online memorial groups. Rather than creating separate categories around the notion of participant and researcher, I choose to embrace them both, asserting that participation strengthens research. 13 I conclude this book by discussing the potential for emotive news, then by referencing the poetry of Stephen Dobyns, and then by including a personal story about Radio Free Europe, which is a story that I ve told and retold in research writing on at least a few occasions. I choose to conclude the book in this way because I believe that scholarly work is, for me, a necessary blending of the personal and professional, a kind of concert between mind and body. The concluding chapter of this book what I, in my mind, call the Stephen Dobyns chapter of the book has an interesting backstory to it. That chapter comes from the first draft that I wrote of the conclusion section

xiv Foreword of my dissertation. Though the dissertation ultimately finished somewhat differently, that version of the conclusion was always my favorite, because it brought together the mind and body, the personal and professional, which I believe is so important to this book. The fact that I am able to include my favorite version in the conclusion of this book is a testament to one practice: never throw away anything that you write. Put more delicately, always hang on to your notes. I received that advice from my first poetry teacher, Eliot Khalil Wilson, and those words have meant more to me than he knows. Those words also emphasize process over product. I would like to offer an assist in that regard to Google Docs, because that document management system has allowed me to keep multiple drafts of everything that I ve written about Virginia Tech since 2007, all in one place. I firmly believe that hanging onto my notes and keeping everything in one place has helped make the final version of this book as strong as it is. As will no doubt become clear in this book, my view of social media and technology is very much optimistic, but I am quick to remind both my students and myself about the boundaries of and for both social media and technology. They can be instructive tools, as I reveal in this book, for revoicing a news conversation, but those tools are, all too often, mostly available to individuals who are already doing relatively well: middle- to upper- class individuals, often living in countries where there is fairly stable rule of law, with most of their basic needs met. 14 Telling the story of social media use is too frequently telling the story of those who have already made it, at least in the aforementioned terms. I would like to see the future of social media use come to more holistically tell the story of those who have not yet made it in life and of those who are still working to make it. I would like social media sharing to come to be the story of more people sharing in more ways than is currently the case. 15 I thank Shayla Thiel-Stern for helping me recognize, several years ago now and early on in this research process, that my orientation to research and writing has a strong element of social justice in it. I offer this thanks to her because I am not certain

Foreword xv that I would have arrived at that realization without her pointing it out to me. Recognizing this social justice element, which she says she could read in my writing early on, has helped me frame both this research in particular and my orientation to research in general. I truly hope that the technologies and platforms that have become so popular in the past decade, the technologies and platforms at the center of social media sharing, help us to more easily understand one another in the world. 16 As I complete this book in late summer, my mind is turning to thoughts of the coming school year and to the tasks of teaching and service that will soon be at hand. I wish to thank my students for encouraging me to think broadly and deeply about the changing communication environment. At the University of Minnesota and at Coker College, I have been lucky to have some of the best students in the world. I thank them for making it a pleasure to wake up and come to work every day. They inspire me with their broad vision of the communication landscape, and I share the joy of this accomplishment with them. 17 I also feel fortunate to have grown up online; thank you to my parents for buying me my first computer (I think it was an Apple IIe, but I may be mistaken). The online world has, from my first memories of playing chess with others via TELNET, been a source of deep fascination for me. I am excited to see where that fascination will take me in the future, and I offer this book as one step on the journey. August 2014 Minneapolis, Minnesota

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Preface Imagine a group of mourners gathered together in the aftermath of a tragedy. Imagine they are in a cemetery gathered around a specific gravestone. Imagine that some people are leaving flowers at the site, while others are standing quietly and remembering the deceased individual. After several minutes of silence, imagine that a few loved ones and close friends begin telling stories about the deceased person. 1 A grade school classmate might recall a funny exchange on the playground, a college roommate might tell about the time the two climbed a tree, while a professional colleague might recount a tale about the accomplishments of the deceased individual in her or his profession. 2 Our lives consist of our stories: those that we tell and those that are told about us. 3 In the pre- social- media age, a gathering of mourners like this one would have likely featured tight geographic and temporal boundaries. 4 The gathering would have happened in a particular location, and it would have lasted for a specific and finite period of time. At the end of the gathering, food would have likely been served, and after that everyone would have headed home. 5 In the age of social media, though, the memorial is interactive and ongoing. 6 A gathering of mourners no longer has necessarily tight geographic or temporal boundaries. The process of remembering can span space and time in a way that turns a seemingly private event into a much broader, more public conversation. 7 The stories of which our lives consist have more potential to be retold and even reshaped in remembrance.

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Acknowledgments Every book is a team effort. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have a fantastic group of people on my team. Foremost I thank my parents, Peter Gloviczki, MD, and Marta Matray, for teaching me to be extraordinarily curious and for inspiring me to never give up. I deeply value their support of my life and work. I am grateful for the presence of Jen Fierke in my life. She is such a supportive person, and I am fortunate to know her. I love you, Jenny. As always, I must begin listing the teachers who shaped my education with my first grade teacher, Mrs. Mary Lou Capelle. Thank you for your support of my boundless energy. I also wish to thank Mickey Laughland for guiding me throughout much of my early education. I wish to thank Mark Ryan for being one of the first teachers to really get me excited about science and the scientific method. At Mayo High School, I wish to thank Jeff Lunde, Jeff Swegarden, Larry Fowler, Howard Wayne, and Susan Wolfe. Each of these individuals reminds me every day why I, too, chose to be a teacher. At St. Olaf, many thanks to Bill Sonnega, David Booth, Susan Carlson, Sheri Breen, Kathy Tegtmayer Pak, Christopher Brooks, Eric Fure Slocum, Sheri Breen, Kris Thalhammer, Kurt Burch, Shawn Paulson, Steve Reece, Doug and Kathy Schuurman, Jolene Barjasteh and Ed Santurri, Cindy Book, and Gary Wicks. To those who I have named, and to all those who helped guide my college education, a sincere thanks for helping me learn about the value of a liberal arts education. I am a stronger and better person for having learned this model. At the University of Minnesota, I am truly grateful to Al Tims, Kathleen Hansen, Kathy Roberts Forde, Laura J. Gurak, Shayla Thiel- Stern, Tom Misa, Giovanna Dell Orto, Catherine

xx Acknowledgments Squires, Mark Pedelty, Ron Faber, Michael Stamm, Heather Myers Larson, Sara Jane Cannon (whose presence in the Silha Center was a fantastic delight), the always helpful Jan Nyberg, John Logie, Michael Dennis Browne, Ray Gonzalez, Maria Damon, and William Reichard. At Coker College, I wish to especially thank Richard Puffer, Robert Wyatt, Tracy Parkinson, David and Wendy McCracken, Cathy Cuppett, Rhonda Knight, Mac Williams, and all my colleagues in the Department of Language, Literature and Communication. I thank the unbelievable Tarshia Edwards, who always seemed to have the answer to everything. Thanks to Kevin Kenyon, Shawn Lay, and Jim McLaughlin for taking such a vested interest in me. Thank you, Trina Rose and Sentry, for being our friends and also for taking such good care of Wax. Thanks to Alexa Bartel, Todd Rix, Emily Mann, and the entire library staff for your willingness to answer any and all my library questions. In my personal life, I wish to thank my extended family, Julia, Michael, Monika, Arthur, Tim, Gergo and Mate Dzsinich, Nick Gabrielson and family, and Katie Ohland. Thank you for going to baseball games with me and for the extended conversations; you are the best. Lauren and Jimmy, thank you so much for everything. It means more than you know. Keith, thank you for being the best personal trainer I could ever ask for. Thank you to Robyn, Erica, Mark, and the team at Palgrave Macmillan for giving this book a home and for supporting my scholarly efforts. In many ways, I write this book for the people who are no longer here. I write for Geza Mozes and Nic Harter and Katherine Olson. In writing this book, I hope I have done justice to the media as a source of and for memory.