Good night versus goodbye? Comparing the mourning remarks of virtual and human uploaders through a data-mining approach

Abstract

In response to the rapid growth in the popularity of virtual humans, this study investigates the attitudes and perceptions of young viewers, from Generation Z in particular, toward virtual uploaders (VTubers). We qualitatively and quantitatively compared the online mourning directed at the “demised” virtual uploaders and deceased human uploaders, and human celebrities through a data-mining approach. Two salient patterns emerge. The mourning remarks for virtual uploaders are considerably different from those concerning human celebrities. And the mourning remarks for the disembodied human uploaders are more consistent with those for virtual uploaders, but the remarks for embodied human uploaders are more in line with those for offline celebrities. Our findings suggest that young viewers are becoming accustomed to virtual beings in online environments and are beginning to treat humans like machines based on their similarities (the degree of embodiment in this case). Young generations immersed in virtual spaces may develop different concepts of life, demise, and even humanity.

Keywords

Life and demise online mourning text similarity analysis virtual human VTuber

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abidin

(2022) Grief hypejacking: influencers, #ThoughtsAndPrayers, and the commodification of grief on Instagram. The Information Society 38(3): 174–187.

Adelmann

Zajonc

(1989) Facial efference and the experience of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology 40(1): 249–280.

Arnold

Gibbs

Kohn

, et al. (2017) Death and Digital Media. New York: Routledge.

Barsalou

Niedenthal

Barbey

, et al. (2003) Social Embodiment. New York: Elsevier Science.

Bilibili (2022) About us. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/blackboard/about-Us.html (accessed 26 February 2023).

Bredikhina

(2020) Designing identity in VTuber era. In: Proceedings of Laval virtual VRIC convergence, 182–184. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/download/63010301/Designing_identity_in_VTuber_Era20200419-76357-12og8r3.pdf

Bredikhina

Kameoka

Shimbo

, et al. (2020) Avatar driven VR society trends in Japan. In: 20 IEEE conference on virtual reality and 3D user interfaces abstracts and workshops (VRW), Atlanta, GA, 22–26 March, pp. 497–503. New York: IEEE.

Brubaker

Hayes

Dourish

(2013) Beyond the grave: Facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning. The Information Society 29(3): 152–163.

Cheung

W-S

(2004) The use of death metaphors to understand personal meaning of death among Hong Kong Chinese undergraduates. Death Studies 28(1): 47–62.

10.

Chow

(2017) Death in the family–bereavement and mourning in contemporary China. In: Zhao

Zang

(eds) Handbook on the Family and Marriage in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 373–391.

11.

Coleman

Paasonen

(2020) Mediating presents. Media Theory 4(2): 1–10.

12.

Cooper-Chen

(2012) Cartoon planet: the cross-cultural acceptance of Japanese animation. Asian Journal of Communication 22(1): 44–57.

13.

Dijkstra

Post

(2015) Mechanisms of embodiment. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1525.

14.

Epstein

Robertson

(2015) The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(33): E4512–E4521.

15.

Garde-Hansen

(2010) Measuring mourning with online media: Michael Jackson and real-time memories. Celebrity studies 1(2):233–235.

16.

Gibbs

Meese

Arnold

, et al. (2015) # Funeral and Instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society 18(3): 255–268.

17.

Hsieh

Shirai

Sato

(2019) Effectiveness of facial animated avatar and voice transformer in elearning programming course. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 posters, Los Angeles, CA, 28 July, pp. 1–2. New York: ACM.

18.

Hutchings

(2016) Wiring death: dying, grieving and remembering on the Internet. In: Davies

(ed.) Emotion, Identity and Death. London: Routledge, pp. 55–70.

19.

iResearch Inc. (2022) Research report on the ecology of China’s virtual anchor industry. Report, iResearch, China, October. Available at: https://report.iresearch.cn/report_pdf.aspx?id=4078

20.

Jeffery

(2018) Japanese man marries anime hologram of Hatsune Miku. Available at: https://www.techspot.com/news/77385-japanese-man-marries-anime-hologram-hatsune-miku.html (accessed 6 August 2023).

21.

Jia

Shen

Chen

, et al. (2017) An analysis on a YouTube-like UGC site with enhanced social features. In: WWW’17 companion: Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web companion, Perth, WA, Australia, 3–7 April, pp. 1477–1483. New York: ACM.

22.

Kastenbaum

Moreman

(2018) Death, Society, and Human Experience. New York: Routledge.

23.

Kember

Zylinska

(2012) Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

24.

Kern

Forman

Gil-Egui

(2013) RIP: remain in perpetuity. Facebook memorial pages. Telematics and Informatics 30(1): 2–10.

25.

Kim

D-Y

Yoo

H-S

(2021) A comparative study of user experience according to one-person media virtual YouTuber (VTuber) and general YouTuber. Asia-Pacific Journal of Convergent Research Interchange 7(5): 1–10.

26.

Krackardt

(1987) QAP partialling as a test of spuriousness. Social Networks 9(2): 171–186.

27.

Kreitner

(2016) Post-truth and its consequences: what a 25-year-old essay tells us about the current moment. The Nation 30: 156–160.

28.

F-L

Zhao

, et al. (2021) AliMe Avatar: multi-modal content production and presentation for live-streaming E-commerce. In: Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, Virtual Event, 11–15 July, pp. 2635–2636. New York: ACM.

29.

Fang

Sun

, et al. (2022) Gulliver’s game: multiviewer and VTuber extreme asymmetric game. In: 2022 IEEE conference on games (Cog), Beijing, China, 21–24 August, pp. 598–599. New York: IEEE.

30.

Shen

, et al. (2021) More kawaii than a real-person live streamer: understanding how the otaku community engages with and perceives virtual YouTubers. In: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–14.

31.

Marwick

Ellison

(2012) “There isn’t wifi in heaven!” Negotiating visibility on Facebook memorial pages. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56(3): 378–400.

32.

Meier

Schnall

Schwarz

, et al. (2012) Embodiment in social psychology. Topics in Cognitive Science 4(4): 705–716.

33.

Mizuko

Okabe

Tsuji

(2012) Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

34.

Mollahosseini

Abdollahi

Sweeny

, et al. (2018) Role of embodiment and presence in human perception of robots’ facial cues. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 116: 25–39.

35.

Myles

Cherba

Millerand

(2019) Situating ethics in online mourning research: a scoping review of empirical studies. Qualitative Inquiry 25(3): 289–299.

36.

Nah

Han

, et al. (2022) A study on the user experience to improve immersion as a digital human in lifestyle content. Applied Sciences 12(23): 12467.

37.

Nass

Steuer

Tauber

(1994) Computers are social actors. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Boston, MA, 24–28 April, pp. 72–78. New York: IEEE.

38.

Phillips

(2021) The accident in being: Michel Serres on the emergence of the object. Media Theory 5(1): 254–272.

39.

Pradhan

Gyanchandani

Wadhvani

(2015) A review on text similarity technique used in IR and its application. International Journal of Computer Applications 120(9): 29–34.

40.

Ramos

(2003) Using TF-IDF to determine word relevance in document queries. In: Proceedings of the First Instructional Conference on Machine Learning 242: 29–48.

41.

Reh

Van Quaquebeke

Giessner

(2017) The aura of charisma: a review on the embodiment perspective as signaling. The Leadership Quarterly 28(4): 486–507.

42.

Roll

(2018) Popular virtual YouTuber Kizuna AI selected as ambassador for new “Come to Japan” campaign. SoraNews24 -Japan News-. Available at: https://soranews24.com/2018/03/07/popular-virtual-youtuber-kizuna-ai-selected-as-ambassador-for-new-come-to-japan-campaign%E3%80%90video%E3%80%91/ (accessed 23 July 2023).

43.

Sabra

(2017) “I hate when they do that!” Netiquette in mourning and memorialization among Danish Facebook users. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 61(1): 24–40.

44.

Saputra

DIS

Setyawan

(2021) Virtual YouTuber (VTuber) sebagai Konten media Pembelajaran online. Prosiding SISFOTEK 5(1): 14–20.

45.

Savin-Baden

Burden

Taylor

(2017) The ethics and impact of digital immortality. Knowledge Cultures 5(2): 178–196.

46.

Shirai

(2019) REALITY: broadcast your virtual beings from everywhere. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Appy Hour, Los Angeles, CA, 28 July, pp. 1–2. New York: ACM.

47.

Stanford (2022) Artificial intelligence index report 2022. Report, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.

48.

Sumiala

(2022) Mediated Death. Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons.

49.

Tan

(2023) More attached, less stressed: viewers’ parasocial attachment to virtual YouTubers and its influence on the stress of viewers during the COVID-19 pandemic. SHS Web of Conferences 155: 03012.

50.

Tang

Zhu

Popescu

(2021) Alterecho: loose avatar-streamer coupling for expressive vtubing. In: 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), pp. 128–137. IEEE.

51.

Walter

(2015a) Communication media and the dead: from the stone age to Facebook. Mortality 20(3): 215–232.

52.

Walter

(2015b) New mourners, old mourners: online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21(1–2): 10–24.

53.

Mou

, et al. (2020) Investigating American and Chinese subjects’ explicit and implicit perceptions of AI-generated artistic work. Computers in Human Behavior 104: 106186.

54.

(2023) Female-oriented dating sims in China: players’ parasocial relationships, gender attitudes, and romantic beliefs. Psychology of Popular Media 12: 58–68.

55.

Yick

Gupta

(2002) Chinese cultural dimensions of death, dying, and bereavement: focus group findings. Journal of Cultural Diversity 9(2): 32–42.

56.

Yin

(2020) An emergent algorithmic culture: the data-ization of online fandom in China. International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(4): 475–492.

57.

Zhang

Cassany

(2020) Making sense of danmu: Coherence in massive anonymous chats on Bilibili.com. Discourse Studies 22(4): 483–502.

58.

Zhou

Zhong

(2021) Social media, collective mourning and extended affective space: a computational communication analysis of Li Wenliang’s Weibo comments (2020–2021). International Mass Media 43(3): 79–106.