CN: I talk about a podcast that discusses suicide and, more specifically, about the sudden death of my friend.

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Screenshots are often talked about as a tool for some of the worst parts of culture: shame, judgment, and outright abuse. Alternatively, they can speak truth to power. “Receipts,” slang for proof or evidence, are almost synonymous with screenshots, co-evolving with consequence culture more broadly. Fear of this culture of mass image-making centers around a fear of exposure or loss of control, in which mediation itself renders interaction vulnerable to unplanned capture.

“The idea that anything and everything you do online could be—and let’s face it, probably is—captured by someone, somewhere, and then stored for future use, has imbued our lives online with a latent sense of paranoia,” writes Kaitlyn Tiffany, in The Atlantic. Likewise, the headline of Clio Chang’s recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, suggests that, “screenshots tell the real stories about who we are.” Chang described their own collection of screenshots as a kind of digital hoarding, in which screenshots are “like little fossils preserved in amber that allow us to slow down and capture pieces of our online lives.” Chang writes that while photos have a “sense of exteriority” to them, screenshots are more intimate.

What makes a screenshot more intimate than a photograph? Media have always captured our most intimate missives. Like a handwritten letter or a postcard—a medium originally criticized for the way the format exposed personal messages— the screenshot can crystallize our interactions precisely because of the nature of mediated communication.

“Screenshots are the snapshots of our computers,” writes Jacob Gaboury in his genealogy of the screenshot, picturing a “moment in the life of a machine.” Visual output in the form of a screen, now so ubiquitous, wasn’t originally a feature of computers. As Gaboury outlines, screenshots first emerged as a tool to capture the otherwise ephemeral visual field of computation. Before the development of the modern computer screen, screenshots were necessary in order to share the output of computers with anyone beyond the select few who had access to computer research laboratories. In order to capture the images they were working with researchers had to use an external analog camera to capture the screen. For non-graphical interfaces, users would print out an alpha-numerical version of the screen in what was then called a “screen dump.” The term screenshot came into wider use in the 1980s and was used primarily to refer to the practice of photographing computer screens to capture video games—advertising games, and services, or documenting high scores and in-game achievements. While these early iterations of the screenshot were created outside of the screen, the modern screenshot creates an image with just a few buttons, coming to serve, as Gaboury puts it, as “as arbiters for the veracity of computational actions,” or as he sums it up: “screenshots or it didn’t happen.”

“Computational actions” make up much of our everyday communication patterns, making screenshots documents of our interactions and reactions—anchors of tiny joys, small fits of anger, and miniature laughter. Frozen (and reduced in scale) for transmission, if only to a future self. At worst these images only serve to picture a back and forth between you and your phone, but I think that they also have a central role in mediating relationships—friendships, in particular.

Like relationships, stories can form around these digital breadcrumbs. Unread is a four-part audio documentary created in the year following the death of Alex, host Chris Stedman’s close friend. One day, Chris receives an e-mail from Alex, whom he hadn’t heard from in over a year. The e-mail turns out to be a scheduled e-mail announcing that by the time Chris received the e-mail Alex would no longer be alive—a digital suicide note. Upon receiving the message Chris panics and jumps into action, trying to call Alex, other friends, and a national suicide prevention hotline. Within a day of receiving the e-mail, Chris received confirmation that Alex has died. He also quickly begins to learn of other friends and family members who also received personalized scheduled messages.

Alex’s e-mail to Chris offers the kind of acknowledgment and affirmation that is often inaccessible after a tragic death. In his e-mail to Chris, Alex includes a sincere message of love and friendship but also a mysterious link to a private SoundCloud account. Upon listening to the recordings, Chris realizes that they are conversations between Alex and “Alice” on Tinychat, an online chat website. Alex had told Chris about Alice before, recounting how they met on a fan forum for Britney Spears. Alex, it turns out, was a huge fan of Britney. Alice was famous amongst Britney stans because her voice and laugh were eerily similar to that of the singer, leading some to speculate that Alice was really Britney in disguise attempting to communicate with her fans under some veil of anonymity. While Chris is demonstratively skeptical of this connection, he is left wondering why Alex would have wanted him to have these recordings. The podcast follows Chris’s search to find the “real” Alice.

It quickly becomes apparent that the recordings aren’t the only “digital breadcrumbs” that Alex left behind. Chris has access to Alex’s digital archives, all of which appear to have been meticulously organized and strategically arranged to tell a story about Alex’s world and his reasons for choosing to leave it. These archives include all sorts of files, but Chris lingers on photographs and screenshots—intimate evidence of Alex and his inner life. In the networks of friendships that emerge after his death, Alex’s friends (many of whom did not know each other while Alex was alive) form a tight bond. Messaging on Instagram or chatting on video, the group shares their grief and love by talking about Alex and his many gifts. In addition to being an incredibly beautiful and complex portrait of friendship, the story is also about how image sharing constitutes emotional bonds and how digital images in particular—memes, selfies, and screenshots—take on new meaning when the person who sent them is no longer around to send another image.

I didn’t plan on writing about him here but the whole time I listened to this podcast I had one person in my heart: Kipp. My (our) friend died suddenly this April. Up until this point, I had the good fortune to never really understood grief culture on social media. I will admit that I had previously occasionally judged—foolishly, for when is a judgment not an act of self-protection— some expressions of grief on social media as somehow inauthentic. But all too suddenly I understood. Over 2,000 kilometers away during the height of a global pandemic, all I had were images shared by people who loved him. I greedily wanted as many pictures as possible, scouring Instagram and my own camera roll for images of him, coming across many blurry ones and screenshots of text messages between us documenting some of the characteristically wild, annoying, hilarious, and charming things he would say. From a suitcase in my closet, I savored stacks of polaroids and (film) photos, remnants of “photoshoots” and pre-phone camera times. More times than I would like to admit, I went back to our last text message exchange where he asked me to come on his radio show. I said I would and neither of us followed up. In the week that followed his death, some friends who co-hosted a radio show with him put together a kind of best-of from the digital archive of the show. This, for me at least, operated as a kind of live-streamed memorial so I could cry and laugh in my kitchen. The fact that this was possible is a testament to the unbelievable gift of Kipp’s friendship. Later, I watched his funeral alone on YouTube. I took a screenshot to remember it by.

There are more differences than parallels between these stories, though I suppose death is the great leveler. Like photographs, other genres of digital “ephemera” take on new meaning in grief. Boon or burden, these unassuming images operate as evidence of our relationships and attest to both the ubiquity of image sharing in daily life and the surplus of digital detritus that trails behind us.

This piece by Safy-Hallan Farah unflinchingly thinks about the “culture industry” and its continued investment in consumer choices as de facto personality traits. Something I think about a lot lately, particularly in terms of a renewed millennial nostalgia for early 2000s culture.

After a necessary break from pandemic coverage, lately, I’ve had a renewed interest in reading different perspectives on the pandemic, particularly in terms of global media and visual culture. Visualizing the Virus is a digital media project that brings together projects on a variety of topics like “vaccine imperialism” and other subjects that “center the inequalities the pandemic makes visible.”

A cover of “The Safety Dance” that I actually want stuck in my head.