{"id":605586,"date":"2023-02-07T07:49:01","date_gmt":"2023-02-07T13:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/07\/when-my-dad-was-sick-i-started-googling-grief-then-i-couldnt-escape-it\/"},"modified":"2023-02-07T07:49:01","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T13:49:01","slug":"when-my-dad-was-sick-i-started-googling-grief-then-i-couldnt-escape-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/07\/when-my-dad-was-sick-i-started-googling-grief-then-i-couldnt-escape-it\/","title":{"rendered":"When my dad was sick, I started Googling grief. Then I couldn\u2019t escape it."},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019ve always been a super-Googler, coping with uncertainty by trying to learn as much as I can about whatever might be coming. That included my father\u2019s throat cancer. Initially I focused on the purely medical. I endeavored to learn as much as I could about molecular biomarkers, transoral robotic surgeries, and the functional anatomy of the epiglottis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then, as grief started to become a likely scenario, it too got the same treatment. It seemed that one of the pillars of my life, my dad, was about to fall, and I grew obsessed with trying to understand and prepare for that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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I am a mostly visual thinker<\/a>, and thoughts pose as scenes in the theater of my mind. When my many supportive family members, friends, and colleagues asked how I was doing, I\u2019d see myself on a cliff, transfixed by an omniscient fog just past its edge. I\u2019m there on the brink, with my parents and sisters, searching for a way down. In the scene, there is no sound or urgency and I am waiting for it to swallow me. I\u2019m searching for shapes and navigational clues, but it\u2019s so huge and gray and boundless.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wanted to take that fog and put it under a microscope. I started Googling the stages of grief, and books and academic research about loss, from the app on my iPhone, perusing personal disaster while I waited for coffee or watched Netflix. How will it feel? How will I manage it?<\/em><\/p>\n

I started, intentionally and unintentionally, consuming people\u2019s experiences of grief and tragedy through Instagram videos, various newsfeeds, and Twitter testimonials. <\/em>It was as if the internet secretly teamed up with my compulsions and started indulging my own worst fantasies; the algorithms were a sort of priest, offering confession and communion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet with every search and click, I inadvertently created a sticky web of digital grief. Ultimately, it would prove nearly impossible to untangle myself. My mournful digital life was preserved in amber by the pernicious personalized algorithms that had deftly observed my mental preoccupations and offered me ever more cancer and loss.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I got out\u2014eventually. But why is it so hard to unsubscribe from and opt out of content that we don\u2019t want, even when it\u2019s harmful to us?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m well aware of the power of algorithms\u2014I\u2019ve written about the mental-health impact of Instagram filters<\/a>, the polarizing effect<\/a> of Big Tech\u2019s infatuation with engagement, and the strange ways that advertisers target<\/a> specific audiences. But in my haze of panic and searching, I initially felt that my algorithms were a force for good. (Yes, I\u2019m calling them \u201cmy\u201d algorithms, because while I realize the code is uniform, the output is so intensely personal that they feel like mine.<\/em>) They seemed to be working with<\/em> me, helping me find stories of people managing tragedy, making me feel less alone and more capable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In my haze of panic and searching, I initially felt that my algorithms were a force for good. They seemed to be working with<\/em> me, making me feel less alone and more capable.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

In reality, I was intimately and intensely experiencing the effects of an advertising-driven internet, which Ethan Zuckerman, the renowned internet ethicist and professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, famously called \u201cthe Internet\u2019s Original Sin<\/a>\u201d in a 2014 Atlantic <\/em>piece. In the story, he explained the advertising model that brings revenue to content sites that are most equipped to target the right audience at the right time and at scale. This, of course, requires \u201cmoving deeper into the world of surveillance,\u201d he wrote. This incentive structure is now known as \u201csurveillance capitalism<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Understanding how exactly to maximize the engagement of each user on a platform is the formula for revenue, and it\u2019s the foundation for the current economic model of the web.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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In principle, most ad targeting still exploits basic methods like segmentation, where people grouped by characteristics such as gender, age, and location are served content akin to what others in their group have engaged with or liked.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But in the eight and half years since Zuckerman\u2019s piece, artificial intelligence and the collection of ever more data have made targeting exponentially more personalized and chronic. The rise of machine learning has made it easier to direct content on the basis of digital behavioral data points rather than demographic attributes. These can be \u201cstronger predictors than traditional segmenting,\u201d according to Max Van Kleek, a researcher on human-computer interaction at the University of Oxford. Digital behavior data is also very easy to access and accumulate. The system is incredibly effective at capturing personal data\u2014each click, scroll, and view is documented, measured, and categorized.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Simply put, the more that Instagram and Amazon and the other various platforms I frequented could entangle me in webs of despair for ever more minutes and hours of my day, the more content and the more ads they could serve me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re aware of it or not, you\u2019re also probably caught in a digital pattern of some kind. These cycles can quickly turn harmful, and I spent months asking experts how we can get more control over rogue algorithms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A history of grieving<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This story starts at what I mistakenly thought was the end of a marathon\u201416 months after my dad went to the dentist for a toothache and hours later got a voicemail about cancer. That was really the only day I felt brave.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The marathon was a 26.2-mile army crawl. By mile 3, all the skin on your elbows is ground up and there\u2019s a paste of pink tissue and gravel on the pavement. It’s bone by mile 10. But after 33 rounds of radiation with chemotherapy, we thought we were at the finish line. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Then this past summer, my dad\u2019s cancer made a very unlikely comeback, with a vengeance, and it wasn\u2019t clear whether it was treatable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Really, the sounds were the worst. The coughing, coughing, choking\u2014Is he breathing<\/em>? He\u2019s not breathing, he\u2019s not breathing<\/em>\u2014choking, vomit, cough. Breath.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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That was the soundtrack as I started grieving my dad privately, prematurely, and voyeuristically.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I began reading obituaries from bed in the morning.<\/p>\n

The husband of a fellow Notre Dame alumna dropped dead during a morning run. I started checking her Instagram daily, trying to get a closer view. This drew me into #widowjourney and #youngwidow. Soon, Instagram began recommending the accounts of other widows.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A friend gently suggested that I could maybe stop examining the fog. \u201cHave you tried looking away?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

I stayed up all night sometime around Thanksgiving sobbing as I traveled through a rabbit hole about the death of Princess Diana.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometime that month, my Amazon account gained a footer of grief-oriented book recommendations. I was invited to consider The Year of Magical Thinking<\/em>, Crying in H Mart: A Memoir<\/em>, and F*ck Death: An Honest Guide to Getting Through Grief Without the Condolences, Sympathy, and Other BS<\/em> as I shopped for face lotion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s website says its recommendations are \u201cbased on your interests.\u201d The site explains, \u201cWe examine the items you\u2019ve purchased, items you\u2019ve told us you own, and items you\u2019ve rated. We compare your activity on our site with that of other customers, and using this comparison, recommend other items that may interest you in Your Amazon.\u201d (An Amazon spokesperson gave me a similar explanation and told me I could edit my browsing history.)<\/p>\n

At some point, I had searched for a book on loss.<\/p>\n

Content recommendation algorithms run on methods similar to ad targeting, though each of the major content platforms has its own formula for measuring user engagement and determining which posts are prioritized for different people. And those algorithms change all the time, in part because AI enables them to get better and better, and in part because platforms are trying to prevent users from gaming the system.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Sometimes it\u2019s not even clear what exactly the recommendation algorithms are trying to achieve, says Ranjit Singh, a data and policy researcher at Data & Society, a nonprofit research organization focused on tech governance. \u201cOne of the challenges of doing this work is also that in a lot of machine-learning modeling, how the model comes up with the recommendation that it does is something that is even unclear to the people who coded the system,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

This is at least partly why by the time I became aware of the cycle I had created, there was little I could do to quickly get out. All this automation makes it harder for individual users and tech companies alike to control and adjust the algorithms. It\u2019s much harder to redirect an algorithm when it\u2019s not clear why it\u2019s serving certain content in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When personalization becomes toxic<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One night, I described my cliff phantasm to a dear friend as she drove me home after dinner. She had tragically lost her own dad. She gently suggested that I could maybe stop examining the fog. \u201cHave you tried looking away?\u201d she asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps I could fix my gaze on those with me at this lookout and try to appreciate that we had not yet had to walk over the edge.<\/p>\n

It was brilliant advice that my therapist agreed with enthusiastically.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I committed to creating more memories at present with my family rather than spending so much time alone wallowing in what might come. I struck up conversations with my dad and told him stories I hadn\u2019t before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I tried hard to bypass triggering stories on my feeds and regain focus when I started going down a rabbit hole. I stopped checking for updates from the widows and widowers I had grown attached to. I unfollowed them along with other content I knew was unhealthy.<\/p>\n

But the more I tried to avoid it, the more it came to me. No longer a priest, my algorithms had become more like a begging dog.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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My Google mobile app was perhaps the most relentless, as it seemed to insightfully connect all my searching for cancer pathologies to stories of personal loss. In the home screen of my search app, which Google calls \u201cDiscover,\u201d a YouTube video imploring me to \u201cTrust God Even When Life Is Hard\u201d would be followed by a Healthline story detailing the symptoms of bladder cancer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(As a Google spokesperson explained to me, \u201cDiscover helps you find information from high-quality sources about topics you\u2019re interested in. Our systems are not designed to infer sensitive characteristics like health conditions, but sometimes content about these topics could appear in Discover\u201d\u2014I took this to mean that I was not supposed to be seeing the content I was\u2014\u201cand we\u2019re working to make it easier for people to provide direct feedback and have even more control over what they see in their feed.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an assumption the industry makes that personalization is a positive thing,\u201d says Singh. \u201cThe reason they collect all of this data is because they want to personalize services so that it\u2019s exactly catered to what you want.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, he cautions, this strategy is informed by two false ideas that are common among people working in the field. The first is that platforms ought to prioritize the individual unit, so that if a person wants to see extreme content, the platform should offer extreme content; the effect of that content on an individual\u2019s health or on broader communities is peripheral.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s an assumption the industry makes that personalization is a positive thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

The second is that the algorithm is the best judge of what content you actually want to see.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For me, both assumptions were not just wrong but harmful. Not only were the various algorithms I interacted with no longer trusted mediators, but by the time I realized all my ideation was unhealthy, the web of content I\u2019d been living in was overwhelming.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I found that the urge to click loss-related prompts was inescapable, and at the same time, the content seemed to be getting more tragic. Next to articles about the midterm elections, I\u2019d see advertisements for stories about someone who died unexpectedly just hours after their wedding and the increase in breast cancer in women under 30.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese algorithms can \u2018rabbit hole\u2019 users into content that can feel detrimental to their mental health,\u201d says Nina Vasan, the founder and executive director of Brainstorm,<\/a> a Stanford mental-health lab. \u201cFor example, you can feel inundated with information about cancer and grief, and that content can get increasingly emotionally extreme.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Eventually, I deleted the Instagram and Twitter apps from my phone altogether. I stopped looking at stories suggested by Google. Afterwards, I felt lighter and more present. The fog seemed further out.<\/p>\n

The internet doesn\u2019t forget<\/strong><\/h3>\n

My dad started to stabilize by early winter, and I began to transition from a state of crisis to one of tentative normalcy (though still largely app-less). <\/strong>I also went back to work, which requires a lot of time online.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The internet is less forgetful than people; that\u2019s one of its main strengths. But harmful effects of digital permanence have been widely exposed\u2014for example, there\u2019s the detrimental impact that a documented adolescence has on identity as we age<\/a>. In one particularly memorable essay, Wired<\/em>\u2019s Lauren Goode wrote about how various apps kept re-upping old photos and wouldn\u2019t let her forget<\/a> that she was once meant to be a bride after she called off her wedding.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I logged back on, my grief-obsessed algorithms were waiting for me with a persistence I had not anticipated. I just wanted them to leave me alone.<\/p>\n

As Singh notes, fulfilling that wish raises technical challenges. \u201cAt a particular moment of time, this was a good recommendation for me, but it\u2019s not now. So how do I actually make that difference legible to an algorithm or a recommendation system? I believe that it\u2019s an unanswered question,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Oxford\u2019s Van Kleek echoes this, explaining that managing upsetting content is a hugely subjective challenge, which makes it hard to deal with technically. \u201cThe exposure to a single piece of information can be completely harmless or deeply harmful depending on your experience,\u201d he says. It\u2019s quite hard to deal with that subjectivity when you consider just how much potentially triggering information is on the web.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have tools of transparency that allow us to understand and manage what we see online, so we make up theories and change our scrolling behavior accordingly. (There\u2019s an entire research field around this behavior, called \u201calgorithmic folk,\u201d which explores all the conjectures we make as we try to decipher the algorithms that sort our digital lives.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

I supposed not clicking or looking at content centered on trauma and cancer ought to do the trick eventually. I\u2019d scroll quickly past a post about a brain tumor on my Instagram\u2019s \u201cFor you\u201d page, as if passing an old acquaintance I was trying to avoid on the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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It did not really work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of these companies really fiddle with how they define engagement. So it can vary from one time in space to another, depending on how they’re defining it from month to month,\u201d says Robyn Caplan, a social media researcher at Data & Society.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many platforms have begun to build in features to give users more control over their recommendations. \u201cThere are a lot more mechanisms than we realize,\u201d Caplan adds, though using those tools can be confusing. \u201cYou should be able to break free of something that you find negative in your life in online spaces. There are ways that these companies have built that in, to some degree. We don\u2019t always know whether they\u2019re effective or not, or how they work.\u201d Instagram, for instance, allows you to click \u201cNot interested\u201d on suggested posts (though I admit I never tried to do it). A spokesperson for the company also suggested that I adjust the interests in my account settings to better curate my feed.<\/p>\n

By this point, I was frustrated that I was having such a hard time moving on. Cancer sucks so much time, emotion, and energy from the lives and families it affects, and my digital space was making it challenging to find balance. While searching Twitter for developments on tech legislation for work, I\u2019d be prompted with stories about a child dying of a rare cancer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I resolved to be more aggressive about reshaping my digital life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How to better manage your digital space<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I started muting and unfollowing accounts on Instagram when I\u2019d scroll pass triggering content, at first tentatively and then vigorously. A spokesperson for Instagram sent over a list of helpful features that I could use, including an option to snooze suggested posts and to turn on reminders to \u201ctake a break\u201d after a set period of time on the app.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I cleared my search history on Google and sought out Twitter accounts related to my professional interests. I adjusted my recommendations on Amazon (Account > Recommendations > Improve your recommendations) and cleared my browsing history.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Tips for managing your algorithms<\/h2>\n