Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media
Who is remembered by society after they die? Although scholars as well as the broader public have speculated about this question since ancient times, we still lack a detailed understanding of the processes at work when a public figure dies and their media image solidifies and is committed to the collective memory. To close this gap, we leverage a comprehensive 5-y dataset of online news and social media posts with millions of documents per day. By tracking mentions of thousands of public figures during the year following their death, we reveal and model the prototypical patterns and biographic correlates of postmortem media attention, as well as systematic differences in how the news vs. social media remember deceased public figures.To get more news about
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Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) 1 y before and after death. We measure the sharp spike and rapid decay of attention following death and model collective memory as a composition of communicative and cultural memory. Clustering reveals four patterns of postmortem memory, and regression analysis shows that boosts in media attention are largest for premortem popular anglophones who died a young, unnatural death; that long-term boosts are smallest for leaders and largest for artists; and that, while both the news and Twitter are triggered by young and unnatural deaths, the news additionally curates collective memory when old persons or leaders die. Overall, we illuminate the age-old question of who is remembered by society, and the distinct roles of news and social media in collective memory formation.
Being remembered after death has been an important concern for humans throughout history (1), and conversely, many cultures have considered damnatio memoriae—being purposefully erased from the public’s memory—one of the most severe punishments conceivable (2). To reason about the processes by which groups and societies remember and forget, the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs introduced the concept of collective memory in 1925 (3), which has since been a subject of study in numerous disciplines, including anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, history, psychology, and sociology, and which gave rise to the new discipline of memory studies (4). Over the decades, collective memory has moved from being a purely theoretical construct to becoming a practical phenomenon that can be studied empirically (5), e.g., in order to quantify to what extent US presidents are remembered across generations (6) or how World War II is remembered across countries (7).
Whereas oral tradition formed the basis for collective memory in early human history, today the media play a key role in determining what and who is remembered, and how (8⇓⇓–11). Researchers have studied the role of numerous media in constructing the postmortem memory of deceased public figures. A large body of work has investigated the journalistic format of the obituary (12⇓⇓⇓–16), which captures how persons are remembered around the time of their death (14). Taking a more long-term perspective, other work has considered how deceased public figures are remembered in the media over the course of years and decades (17⇓⇓⇓–21). As ever more aspects of life are shifting to the online sphere, the Web is also gaining importance as a global memory place (22), which has led researchers to study, e.g., how social media users (23⇓⇓⇓–27) and Wikipedia editors (28) react to the death of public figures. In the context of social media, the detailed analysis of highly visible individual cases, such as Princess Diana (24), pop star Michael Jackson (25, 26), or race car driver Dale Earnhardt (27), has revealed how people experience and overcome the collective trauma that can ensue following the death of celebrities.
Although such studies of individuals have led to deep insights at a fine level of temporal granularity, they lack breadth by excluding all but some of the very most prominent public figures. What is largely absent from the literature is a general understanding of patterns of postmortem memory in the media that goes beyond single public figures.
