death & facebook
Iphgenia Baal
200 pp
ISBN: 978-0996421881
Price: 15.95 American
June 2018
About death & facebook
No one wants to end up #RIP with 45 likes, your death traded as someone else's fleeting social capital, your last inane status update being the one that defines you for all time, your 'Friends' competitive grieving, and misery tourists perusing your profile.
But Facebook has become the channel for broadcasting news of the recently deceased, with the number of "memorialized" Facebook accounts soon to eclipse accounts of the living.
Mark Zuckerberg is a merchant of death.
Whether it's the demise of another geriatric celebrity, or that your best friend from college took a pill and jumped off a roof, nothing makes your News Feed blow up like someone being dead. There is a rush to tag the deceased in albums of lo-res photos, to share favorite songs as YouTube links, and to post long, dolorous, largely misspelled status updates.
Facebook claims the deceased as its own, commodifying misery and entering it into its usual agenda: stalking your online shopping habits, advertising clothes, confused political declarations, and wondering why you haven't had a baby yet.
Set in a London where Mick Jagger's kids rule the social scene, death & facebook is a true account of a dysfunctional love affair that ends in disaster, posthumously pieced together from threads in Facebook Messenger, archived email, saved SMS, and a Google search history.
Book Trailer
About Iphgenia Baal
Iphgenia Baal was born in London. Her first book The Hardy Tree was published in 2011. The Times Literary Supplement called it a “dizzyling dark, and twisted, collage of a novel.” A themed selection of these short texts were compiled in her second book Gentle Art. Prospect magazine called it “a book to be carried around and consulted.” Once described as “London’s most potent secret” by Iain Sinclair, Baal’s unique voice is a clear rebuke to the current milieu.
