Deathlogging: GoPros as forensic media in accidental sporting deaths

Abstract

This article develops the concept of ‘deathlogging’ as a complement to the more popular ‘lifelogging’ to describe how wearable cameras record fatal accidents, particularly among action sports participants. The article situates deathlogging in a history of media and communication theory interested in the relationships between life and death, and in particular the concept of forensic mediation to describe technologies capable of documenting and reconstructing accidents. The wearable GoPro camera is a camera of choice for action sports athletes to easily record and share things like BASE jumping to gain audience views and capital in the form of sponsorships. Representative examples are discussed and analyzed to demonstrate how fatal accidents transform the value of GoPro footage from social-economic capital into forensic or juridical evidence to reconstruct accidents, make sense of fatalities, and, in some instances, argue for legal culpability. The article offers deathlogging as a concept which can be applied to a variety of recording situations with different kinds of wearable cameras.

Keywords

Accidents action sports deathlogging forensic mediation GoPro lifelogging recording wearables

In August 2016, BASE jumper Armin Schmieder – who broadcast videos under the handle Sat Dex – died during an attempted wingsuit jump in the Swiss Alps. Schmieder, an action sports star who was sponsored by the wearable camera manufacturer GoPro, was recording the jump with the wearable as well as broadcasting to Facebook Live through his mobile phone, which he had tucked into his pocket before jumping (Cobb, 2016). The videos provide a means of reconstructing Schmieder’s accident and offering details of what happened (McCann, 2016). While GoPros are often incorporated into spectacular records of skydiving, BASE jumping or mountain biking, the small wearable cameras also share important connections with death records. When tricks, dives or jumps in action sports go awry, when motorcycles crash, or when hikers disappear, their GoPros can leave behind a record of their actions, reconstructing accidents or disappearances to make sense of an individual’s death, figure out what happened and even potentially assign blame.

This article draws from Thorpe’s (2017) call for more research on media technologies in action sports. In particular, I aim to develop two points in Thorpe’s proposed research agenda: one, the importance of GoPro as a device for mediatizing and recording bodily activity (p. 565; Evers, 2015); and two, the role of GoPro as a sponsorship company, ostensibly providing a means to capitalize on one’s athleticism and coordination with a camera (p. 557). Fatal accidents – and the production of visual and aural records of them via GoPro – complicate many of the ways action sport practices and lifelogging more generally are figured as means of generating capital. To that end, this article engages several high-profile instances of accidental deaths to develop ‘deathlogging’ as a related-but-distinct mode of ‘lifelogging’ which accounts for how GoPros are used forensically to assess accidental death. These cameras, in other words, generate archives of accidental death. In considering these recordings of accidents, I position ‘deathlogging’ as a subset of what Siegel (2014) has called forensic media, one which extends his considerations of black boxes and similar sorts of accident recorders into the realm of wearable cameras.

In developing ‘deathlogging’ and applying it to several case studies, this article proceeds first by defining lifelogging and some of the existing research on GoPro as a device to document everyday life, as well as a means for athletes to generate capital through their work via creating records of performance for sponsorships, endorsements and views. From there, I develop deathlogging as a concept for building complexity and nuance into analysis of GoPro’s use in action sport, demonstrating how the camera is held in tension between many different functions of recording. ‘Everyday life’ – and its attendant concepts of habit and routine (Lefebvre, 1971) – has formed a pillar of research into such technologies (Gilmore, 2016), while digital death research has engaged memorialization and grief, among others, through social networking platforms (Nansen et al., 2016). As this article argues, thinking lifelogging (as the creation of valuable records) and deathlogging (as the use of records for accident reconstruction) together permits a more complex map of what forms of knowledge these devices are used to produce.

A matter of lifelogging and deathlogging

Research on wearable cameras has examined lifelogging as a series of practices to convert daily life into a series of recordable and storable video clips (Mann, 2014; Chalfen, 2014; Bell and Gemmell, 2009). Lifelogging practices employ smartphone applications, photographs and moving image cameras to create recordings of daily life (Selke, 2016). Lifelogging was developed, in part, to potentially help those with Alzheimer’s or other forms of memory loss retain some memories of their lives (Woodberry et al., 2015), as well as to help create memorials of one’s life to pass on to family members (Briggs and Thomas, 2014). While GoPro is not the only wearable camera used for lifelogging purposes, it has become largely synonymous with the larger category of consumer-grade wearable cameras. Some researchers have incorporated footage from GoPro cameras into their projects (Birdsall and Drozdzewski, 2018; Lupton et al. 2018). Unger (2017) has examined GoPro as part of ethnographic filmmaking practices, while Yu (2017) and Hrehorová (2019) have considered the use of GoPro in fictional action cinema. Ortiz and Moya (2015) describe the ‘action cam phenomenon’ as an emergent means of representing reality, similar to Vannini and Stewart’s (2016) ‘GoPro gaze’. Humphreys (2018) has likewise celebrated GoPro as a form of media accounting, or use of media technologies to record and reflect on everyday life. GoPros are figured as useful tools for capturing and reflecting on lived experiences (Heehs, 2013). Everyday life and the recording of habits and activities have been a recurring engagement in mobile media scholarship (Linke, 2013; Burchell, 2015).

Similarly, questions of how digital media transform human relationships to death have also generated important research into the accounting, experience and memorialization of human death (Arnold et al., 2018). Some research centers on processes of commemoration, such as saving voicemails of those who have died (LeFebvre and Haggadone, 2019). In other instances, the death itself is pathologized, such as when those who die while in the process of taking a ‘selfie’ (Maddox, 2017; Scott, 2018). Where Lupton (2018) has described ‘lively data’ as a means to explain the connections between digital data and human life, as well as how data have a life of their own, accidental deathlogging also suggests a corresponding deathly data, which might encapsulate the relationships between all manner of mediated data and human death, including not only things like death certificates, hospital records and autopsies, but also the mediated representations of human death found in the GoPro videos under consideration here.

The term deathlogging has been used by Bourdeloie and Julier-Costes (2016) to describe how deceased individuals are memorialized on social networking sites: ‘By making death visible in our everyday life and our most commonplace… [social media] are actively changing our habits and social relationships and redefining our relationship with death’ (p. 146). To define ‘deathlogging’, as they do, as ‘the digital persistence of deceased persons’ (p. 130), overlooks the importance of the gerund form of the word – deathlogging is an active process, something that someone does through, for my purposes, wearable cameras. Where Bégin (2016) argues ‘the function of the GoPro is to record [the filmer’s] presence’ (p. 107) and Bédard (2015) has emphasized how GoPro facilitates the creation of ‘new and unusual points of view’ (p. 1), deathlogging points to a presence lingering after the wearer’s death; the footage persists and acts as a point of reference not just of the person who died, but in particular the moment of their death.

There are many other modes of deathlogging that go beyond the accidental deaths under consideration here. The recording of officer-involved shootings on police body cameras has been the subject of debates about transparency and accountability for nearly a decade in the United States (Reynolds, 2021), where official public reports sometimes incorporate video of shootings to try and demonstrate what happened during violent altercations with police (Lum et al., 2019; McDonald and Bachelder, 2017). While they do not always involve GoPros specifically, mass shooters have also used wearable cameras or smartphones to document and distribute their violent actions (Teague, 2015; Dreyfuss, 2017). Active military members have also worn cameras for some time to document different aspects of their work, with some of that footage being uploaded to dedicated sites for streaming military combat footage (Jaffe, 2013). Additionally, some individuals have livestreamed suicide and murder (Tourjee, 2016; Blaise and Moreno, 2016). During the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing like FaceTime and Zoom was also used through laptops and mobile phones to say goodbye to dying relatives in hospitals (Kiel, 2020).

As mentioned in the introduction, deathlogging is a form of what Siegel has described as ‘forensic mediation’ (2014: p. 6), which considers ‘how, since the nineteenth century, media technologies have informed and facilitated an ongoing project to deal with the problem of technological accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes’ (p. 7), including flight-data recorders, crash-test cinematography and accident reconstruction technologies – all of which respond to cultural, industrial or political concerns with properly accounting for accidents. While lifelogging may allow an athlete to generate views, sponsorships and revenue from recording and sharing their stunts, the moment of the accident converts lifelogging’s relationship to capital into deathlogging’s relationship to forensics. When the wearer of a camera expires, the camera leaves behind a trace. Much as flight-tracking data can permit the reconstruction of an accident to assess mechanical or human failures (Siegel, 2014), so too do wearable camera recordings of death become ways reconstruct circumstances of an individual’s death.

Forensic mediation is only one of many ways to record death. While its development is coterminous with the development of recording technologies in the nineteenth century (Kittler, 1986), records of death have long been part of human societies. The process of producing death certificates provides a legal mechanism for marking the end of life, and these are also transferred into death logs, which Wernimont (2018) has charted in her work on colonial-era township death records in the United States. Histories of bureaucratic processes have noted the difficult process of developing systems which can account for the death of humans, such as Colin Koopman’s (2019) history of ‘documentary identity’, which partly entailed the creation of a national registry of births and deaths in the United States.

Media and communication theorists have also conceptualized the relationships between recording and death in a number of ways. Here, media act as means to create a version of immortality, finding ways to allow their memories to survive their passing. Barthes noted this poignantly in Camera Lucida (1981) when he described at length a photo of his mother he recovered after her death. Sterne (2003) has similarly noted how audio recordings provide access to deceased voices. Peters (1999) suggests, ‘all mediated communication is in a sense communication with the dead, insofar as media can store ‘phantasms of the living’ for playback after bodily death’ (p. 142). Vilèm Flusser has described much the same phenomenon as a process of ‘becom[ing] immortal within others’ through our means of communication (2016, pp. 31–32). Applied to deathlogging, these same technologies which allow traces of humans to exist beyond their corporeal departure also (purportedly) make the experiences of death more accessible and encounterable for the purposes of making sense of death.

Think, for example, of the 19th century tradition of postmortem photography, which posed and photographed recently deceased bodies to store and preserve a memory of a body near to its moment of expiration. Linkman suggests ‘survivors drew great comfort from expressions they could interpret as calm, peaceful and serene, especially if the final illness had been particularly painful, or if death was due to an accident or an act of violence’ (2011: p. 17). In analyzing the virality of images of dead refugee bodies circulating on social and news media, Papailias (2019) argues, ‘Witnessing the corpse—or the corpse-image—leaves traces of objects, bodies, spaces, and images’ (p. 1059). As Hjorth (2021) further argues, reflecting on these forms of witnessing during the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘mobile media bring grief and death literally and metaphorically into our hands’ (p. 593, emphasis original). Such recording of dead bodies differs from practices like sharing photos at funerals on social networking sites like Instagram (Gibbs et al., 2015). Indeed, photography has always seemed to have something to do with death. In his foundational essay on photography’s ontology, Bazin (2005) compares photography to mummification: ‘for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’ (p. 14). Photography (as a particular form of mediation), in other words, has a lengthy history of intertwining life and death, where some historically even suggested media provide access to spirits (Sconce, 2000). Deathlogging adds more layers to mediated practices mentioned, where the recording of death itself becomes valuable.

Death is also a recurring concept in theories of everyday life, most often as something that evades knowability and experience. De Certeau’s The practice of everyday life (1984) includes an entire chapter on dying, which he calls ‘The Unnameable’. He argues, ‘all through my life, I can ultimately only believe in my death…There is nothing so other as my death, the index of all alterity’ (pp. 193–194, emphasis in original). Basically, de Certeau suggests that humans build everyday life out of practice and experience, but it is impossible to experience death in the same way one experiences the act of walking, for instance. For theorists of everyday life, then, death is something of a conceptual problem. While Peters argues that ‘life depends on death’ (2015: p. 384), and the knowledge of death haunts human life, the act of experiencing death falls beyond human capacity.

Finally, the increase in inscription and recorded media online has led to the development of concerns about various forms of posthuman immortality. Bollmer (2013), for instance, has examined the challenges social media companies face in maintaining profiles of deceased users, as well as the emergence of services designed to manage or delete public profiles of deceased persons. The lingering traces of deceased people through their online or other forms of recorded data has led to discussions of the ‘postmortal society’ (Jacobsen, 2017), while Lagerkvist and Andersson (2017) have used the concept ‘lifeline communication’ to describe the vulnerable practices of blogging through one’s terminal illness – and, thus, impending death – online. Lupton (2019) has likewise called attention to the ‘ethical and moral issues’ of the ‘digital memorializing of dead people’ online, or the creation of ‘digital remains’ (p. 98; see also Stokes, 2015 and Ulguim, 2018). While not the primary focus of this article’s application of deathlogging, this indicates how lifelogging is always about reckoning with one’s own death and memory, at least to a point (Lagerkvist, 2013).

This section has sketched some of the tensions between lifelogging and deathlogging, showing each as mutually constitutive of the other. The following sections explore the tensions between these two terms as applied to GoPro footage. First, I analyze GoPro’s relationship to lifelogging, established through advertising and its place within action sports communities as a means of using footage to generate capital (in the form of sponsorships or the social capital of recognition and value within the community). I then contrast these dominant understandings of GoPro footage with several deathlogging cases drawn from different accidental deaths related to action sports and activities.

Method

The examples in this article come from the author’s multi-year research into wearable cameras’ development and implementation in a variety of contexts, including how they are imagined in relation to everyday consumer use, how they are used by athletes for promotion and training and how a variety of actors and institutions – from mass shooters to pet owners to police departments to militaries – have used wearable cameras to record and share activity. The data collection for this subset of the research agenda occurred through ongoing sampling of news stories about wearable cameras – in particular, GoPro – beginning in 2015 using variations on the search query ‘wearable + GoPro + death + accident’ in Google and LexisNexis every several months.

This process focuses on publicly circulating material, including GoPro’s advertisements, online videos hosted on GoPro’s official YouTube and Vimeo channels, newspaper stories in national and local papers and magazine profiles of action sports stars who use GoPro to document and share their work. These materials emphasize how GoPros generate documentation of various actions (discussed in the ‘lifelogging and capital’ section below), as well as an understanding of the role of GoPros in making sense of accidental deaths (as discussed in the ‘deathlogging and forensic media’ section). Most videos of accidental sporting deaths are not publicly available, so this public reporting becomes necessary for researching how GoPro is represented as a form of forensic mediation. For instance, a high-profile death discussed below was not only significant in that community; these individuals’ successful jumps had been profiled in magazines like National Geographic as well as featured on national news in the United States. Not all accidental deaths may be given this kind of news coverage, which inherently limits the reach of this method. At the same time, the reporting on these accidental deaths is often limited to what information law enforcement or the family is willing to share; their descriptions of the videos, which are then reported in press outlets, means that tracing deathlogging through public discourse places the researcher at several degrees of removal from the primary text of the video itself.

In analyzing these materials, a combination of visual analysis and discourse analysis was used. When examining videos uploaded to YouTube and official GoPro advertisements, visual analysis focused on how the camera creates a means of embodied perspective emulating or approximating the action in the video, like a jump. Because deathlogging videos are not available, discourse analysis assessed how the videos were discussed, summarized and presented in public reporting. In some instances – the death of climbers in the Himalayan mountains and an accidental scuba death – some video and still images were made public, which allowed for some visual analysis of these GoPro videos. Again, this reliance on publicly circulating reports of stories about GoPro allows for the ability to examine how GoPro’s forensic mediation is used in some high-profile cases, but also has limitations regarding the extent to which researchers can examine these specific videos in the same way advertisements and officially sponsored videos are examined.

GoPro, lifelogging and capital

Before examining how GoPro acts as a deathlogging device, this section explains its more dominant positioning as a lifelogging device, drawing from the company’s advertising as well as popular press articles about individuals who use GoPro. These examples position a dominant conceptualization of GoPro as a camera for effectively capturing banal moments of daily life (Seegert, 2016; Groening, 2016), and for action sports athletes to generate various forms of capital through recording and promoting their work.

GoPro’s advertising in the mid-2010s underscore how the company imagined their products as useful for capturing everyday life. A 2016 television spot called ‘Capture Different’ exemplifies how GoPro markets embodied recording as more valuable than mobile phone recording (GoPro, 2016). This commercial demonstrates the differences between mobile phone use and GoPro use, arguing that wearability is a fundamental shift in the effect of recording. It begins with a shot of visitors lining the Grand Canyon, each with a cell phone or camera in front of her or his face. A narrator asks: ‘Is this being in the moment?’ Mobile phones, in other words, are mediators that get in the way of presence, creating an obstruction between people or between people and nature. The commercial then contrasts these images with a series of GoPro-created images, including young men and women jump off a small cliff into a pool of water, one of them holding a GoPro camera to capture the experience of the fall. The advertisement has pulled a bait and switch: it appears to suggest that nature needs to be experienced without the mediation of screens, when in fact it argues that only some types of screens diminish experience, while others promote a more authentic fusion of living and recording: GoPros are positioned as maintaining – if not enhancing – the joys of lived experience.

This capacity to easily record ‘in the moment’ were also used to sell the camera to action sports athletes who could use the camera to record their activities and share them online. By 2014, GoPro’s popularity led to several detailed newspaper and magazine profiles that helped to further legitimate GoPro’s status as a leading camera for a variety of amateur and professional media producers and athletes. A profile of mountain biker Aaron Chase in a September 2014 issue of The New Yorker explains how capturing footage through an assortment of GoPros had become the raison d’etre of Chase’s multi-day trips: ‘He used to just do the thing—plan the killer trip or trick and then complete it, with panache…Now the purpose of the trip or trick is the record of it. Life is footage’ (Paumgarten, 2014). Here, the important thing is GoPro’s ability to continuously record and, in doing so, to create a document of life that doubles as a document for generating capital.

In these respects, GoPro cameras offer a rejoinder to Blanchot’s (1987) declaration that the ‘everyday escapes’. The use of GoPro among action sports athletes entails a promise to capture those otherwise-escapable moments. Through their capture, they can be uploaded and shared, turning the ability to perform various feats into consumable content. While GoPro generally offers the recording and storage of everyday life, the transformation of life into footage also allows for the generation of capital for athletes who can take advantage of these recording opportunities. These indicate the intersections of GoPro with social capital, Bourdieu’s (1979) term for describing value generated through reputation and influence. For content producers who share videos on YouTube, Vimeo or other hosting websites, this may lead to sponsorships or monetary deals for being influencers (Burgess and Green, 2018) in their activity or sport.

As an example of how this generation of capital works, GoPro offers cash prizes through its Million Dollar Challenge competitions, where ‘The only guidelines [are to] submit unedited content that highlight the key capabilities of the new camera’ (GoPro, 2020). Anyone can submit GoPro footage, and any number of videos can be selected to split a prize pool of one million U.S. dollars. Videos must be filmed using the most recently released GoPro camera, so that this competition doubles as a series of advertisements for new cameras and encourage content creators to keep buying the most recent models. One video featured on GoPro’s main YouTube channel from the 2021 competition was Jan Verhaeren’s video ‘Base Jumping in Moab’ (GoPro, 2021). In the 105-s video, Verhaeren attaches a GoPro camera to a drone and flies it up a rock cliff to meet a BASE jumper as they leap off the rock. The video then cuts together approximately a dozen different jumps in the Moab desert and shows off Verhaeren’s ability to affix the drone to a GoPro and capture high quality, exciting footage of these jumps from above and alongside the jumpers. These Million Dollar Challenge videos reinforce the multiple forms of capital circulating around the intersections of lifelogging and action sports, where individuals compete for both cash prizes in annual contests but also the esteem of public recognition on GoPro’s YouTube channel, which is as of this writing has 10.6 million subscribers.

GoPro’s advertisements to a larger consumer public and its status as a sponsor of different action sports communities are part of how the company imbues lifelogging with capital. The worn nature of the camera allows the action sports athlete to become, essentially, a one-person camera crew, or for videographers to combine the cameras with equipment like a drone to reduce equipment and crews needed for video shoots. The ability to gain recognition and, potentially, sponsorship through online distribution channels like YouTube positions lifelogging in action sports as both an economic and social practice.

GoPro, deathlogging and forensic media

Where athletes may turn to lifelogging to generate capital, deathlogging converts this relationship between human and machine into a forensic archive when accidents occur. This section analyzes two examples: two BASE jumpers who accidentally died while filming their jump and an accidental death during a scuba dive where the camera’s recording was submitted as part of a lawsuit against an instructor. These examples were selected because they received newspaper and magazine coverage in local and national outlets, as well as because they demonstrate that these accidental deaths – this conversion of lifelogging to deathlogging – are not isolated to a single kind of activity or sport. Again, when accidental deaths have occurred during these recordings, the value of the footage instantly changes, converting the GoPro camera into a form of forensic media. This tension between lifelogging and deathlogging indicates just one of the ways in which recording media are subject to a wide array of unexpected and unintended uses.

The embodied aspect of GoPro use that makes it so useful for these athletes to generate capital through their videos is also what allows these devices to become important for accident reconstruction. The tethered nature of the device allows it to mimic, at least to a point, the perspective of the individual. The recording can, potentially, pinpoint the precise moment an accident happens: a BASE jumper may hit a tree branch or a rock outpost, a wingsuit may fail, a diver may become trapped underwater or a motorcyclist may lose control of their vehicle. At the same time, a GoPro’s recording may make it difficult to ascertain precisely what caused an accident to occur. The video may offer a record of someone’s fatal plummet or collision, but this record does not necessarily fully recreate the accident. GoPros mediate the accident through their claims to offer direct access to embodied experience. When a group of climbers in the Himalayan mountains died from an avalanche in spring 2019, the deputy inspector general of the Border Police described the camera as ‘like the black box of an aircraft giving an insight into the last few moments of the climbers’ (Karasz, 2019). Deathlogging allows those who find the recording to try and reconstruct what happened.

In 2015, BASE jumpers Dean Potter and Graham Hunt died in an accident during a jump in Yosemite National Park in the United States. Potter was well-known in the BASE jumping community, and was the subject of documentaries for National Geographic, among others (Stonich, 2014). Many photographs and videos of his rock climbs and jumps were taken over his career. Potter’s collaborations with National Geographic indicate his considerable social capital and his ability to serve as a public spokesperson for his community, and their deaths received national media coverage.

Roughly one week after their deaths, Yosemite officials disclosed that a GoPro camera had been strapped to Potter’s helmet and recovered from the accident scene. In information shared with journalists, ‘Hunt apparently clipped the right side of the notch [the rock outpost]. Potter immediately swooped away, lost altitude, and hit the rocks a split second later’ (Fimrite, 2015, emphasis added). These details would be impossible to understand without the availability of the deathlogging video. The use of the word ‘apparently’ is important, indicating that the recovered footage suggests this was the sequence of events, although there may still be some debate as to how Hunt clipped the outpost, where he clipped it, and how Potter reacted, among other particulars. Still, the worn nature of the GoPro is instrumental to accident reconstruction. Because the camera is perceived to mimic Hunt’s perspective, its position can be used to register how his body is moving and, potentially, where the accident occurs. While some of their friends and associates were nearby taking still photographs and videos from a distance, they were not in a position to record the crash itself.

Yosemite park officials were explicitly using the GoPro camera in tandem with the photographs others took of the jump to try and ‘re-create the accident’ (Fimrite, 2015). Potter’s video transformed, in a second, from one part of his work to build social capital around his jumps and showcase his abilities to others through recordings. It became instead an artifact of forensic mediation, allowing for a posthumous reconstruction of what went wrong in the jump. While Hunt and Potter’s crash has been one of the more high-profile instances of accidental death, there have been a number of others, including Uli Emanuele, who was sponsored by GoPro at the time of his fatal crash in the Dolemite mountains in Switzerland (Payton, 2016). Armin Schmieder – whose death was mentioned in the introduction to this article – also died during a crash in 2016, where he both recorded a video using his GoPro and livestreamed his crash via Facebook Live (Cobb, 2016).

In other instances, people who are not established action sports figures also die accidentally while recording their activities. Many of these are amateur enthusiasts who may have simply wanted to create videos of their hobbies. The 2020 death of Linnea Mills during a scuba instruction class in Glacier National Park, Montana, U.S.A., demonstrates one way a deathlogging video can not only assist with reconstructing an accident, but can also be offered as part of a lawsuit. During an advanced diving class, Mills was allegedly diving with a suit she had not been trained to use, and which ‘lacked a functional inflator’ among other forms of negligence from the instructors (Valley, 2021). During the dive, the air squeezed out of her suit due to improper equipment use the instructors had not checked or corrected prior to the dive. At that point, another diver – Bob Gentry – who was wearing a GoPro camera noticed Mills struggling and unsuccessfully tried to save her. Details from Gentry’s GoPro video, which was never released to the public, were incorporated into the formal legal complaint filed with the lawsuit. As summarized in a local news outlet:

Linnea [Mills] frantically signaled to Gentry, who immediately swam to help. But Linnea’s gestures spun her backward and she rapidly sank, her eyes wide with fear as she reached for Gentry. Gentry swam after her, finally catching her…Gentry worked for 32 seconds trying to save Linnea as they continued to sink, but he couldn’t find the lead weights to drop them. As Linnea lost her air regulator, Gentry tried to give her air from his. But with the higher pressure, they were both running out of air. As a lest effort, Gentry tried to heave Linea upward but couldn’t (Lundquist, 2021).

These details, drawn from the GoPro video and incorporated into the legal complaint, help provide precise characterizations of what happened, such as the duration of time Gentry spent trying to save Mills. Descriptive details, such as describing Mills’s eyes as ‘wide with fear’, also interpret the footage in absence of actually showing it. Here, the GoPro video acts as a key piece of evidence for this legal complaint, serving the kinds of testimonial work also seen when things like cell phone cameras witness acts of police brutality.

The actual legal complaint and demand for jury trial includes more details from the GoPro video, mentioning the device explicitly five times in the 112-page legal complaint. The complaint details how ‘The video and audio captured by the GoPro camera also shows Linnea was fully aware of her predicament and in terror’ (Mills v. Gull Dive Center & PADI, 2021: p. 51). The complaint also includes three still images from Gentry’s GoPro video: The first provides documentation of how her suit was not properly connected. The second shows ‘Linnea Mills being left on the sloping bottom, in distress’, where Mills is shown to be standing at a lower depth than two other divers. The third figure, ‘Linnea Mills falling to the bottom of Lake McDonald’, shows a full body shot of Mills with her face clearly visible and eyes wide open. These still images are the only visual evidence provided in the legal complaint, which demonstrates how attorneys representing the plaintiff perceived deathlogging videos to have value as legal evidence; this is, again, a far cry from how Gentry likely originally imagined his video as having value of his dive and documenting the experience.

However, in June 2021, state attorneys chose not to prosecute the instructor. They stated that although the instructor was ‘likely at fault to some extent for Mills’ death, we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally culpable’ (McAlpine, 2021). According to local reporting on the lawsuit, ‘witness statements and video’ were used to ‘shed light on Mills’ death, but attorneys cannot establish it was the instructor’s knowing conduct that caused her death’ (McAlpine, 2021). While the family was not able to prosecute the instructor based on this evidence, the inclusion of the GoPro video in and of itself demonstrates how deathlogging videos have potential merit in litigation, allowing not just for a forensic mediation of accident reconstruction but also acting as a supporting document in a lawsuit, serving as a form of witness testimony. The GoPro, in this sense, corroborates the details of Gentry’s testimony. The GoPro is an additional layer of evidence, an actor or agent in this lawsuit that exists both in relation to and apart from Gentry’s personal eyewitness account.

These are not the only examples of instances where deathlogging videos have assisted with accident reconstruction (Fortin, 2019, e.g.), but they point to GoPro’s important forensic capacities. While they may lack the medical precision of autopsies for deducing what has caused a body to die, the ability to record a person’s death from an embodied perspective is positioned as valuable, as a means of generating knowledge in official reports and lawsuits alike.

The broader terrain of deathlogging

As Hjorth (2021) reminds, ‘death isn’t the binary opposite to life. Rather, it is through the rituals of connecting with death and grief in quotidian ways that we can make sense of the world’ (p. 593, emphasis original). In examining the relationships between lifelogging and deathlogging in accidental sporting deaths, this article has demonstrated how the recording of life and death transpires over the course of the same video. What begins as a desire to share a well-timed and skillful jump in a national park can end in the creation of a death record which can be used not to accrue sponsorships, but to help authorities and loved ones reconstruct an accident.

Analysis of these deathlogging cases has relied on public summaries and descriptions of the videos, provided through journalists, legal complaints, or statements from national park officials or law enforcement. Deathlogging videos are not publicly stored and promoted in the same way as successful tricks and jumps, which are pinned and featured on GoPro’s official social media channels and archived on their YouTube channel. Where lifelogging may always be geared towards death, a means to record and store one’s life as a way of maintaining memories and achieving a version of digital immortality, deathlogging provides some sort of audio–visual record of the last moments of a person’s life. This dialectic dance of life and death remains part of how recording media are imagined and implemented.

While this article has focused on accidental deaths during action sports, it is important to reiterate that there are many ways wearable cameras have been used to document human death: mass shooters have worn them to record and distribute their actions (Macklin, 2019), military soldiers wear them into combat (Stein, 2017), and police officers record violent altercations among citizens. Other ways of recording death, such as livestreams of murders and suicides onto social networking platforms through mobile phones, also offer other avenues for developing research around deathlogging beyond what this article has emphasized (Urbas, 2021). The forensic mediation of human death via the proxy of GoPro’s lens provides an avenue to examine how GoPro creates forms of evidence for accident reconstruction and accountability in other case studies and circumstances beyond those discussed in this article.

Conclusion

This article conceptually developed ‘deathlogging’ as the process of recording human death through wearable cameras, and how this recording makes death aimed to complicate how wearable technologies intersect with and transform the knowability of everyday life (Gilmore, 2016) through incorporating them more into discussions of how death is recorded through digital technologies. Building on Thorpe’s (2017) calls for a research agenda around GoPro cameras in action sports, this article has offered the conceptualization of deathlogging through two related developments. First, ‘deathlogging’ adds conceptual dimensionality to definitions and discussions of lifelogging, clarifying how death has often been discussed in relation to recording through preservation and memorialization, such as digital death scholarship which examines how people’s recorded and shared traces of their lives linger after their death. Second, the applications of deathlogging to accidental deaths recorded with GoPro cameras demonstrates how deathlogging can be understood as a form of Siegel’s (2014) understanding of forensic mediation. In these case studies, wearable recording technologies became records of accident to assist officials and family members in the process of reconstructing accidents, assessing blame, or making sense of accidental death. Further research can explore the concept’s ability to provide nuance and complexity to analysis of mobile and wearable camera recordings in other domains, institutions and circumstances to understand more completely the tension between lifelogging and deathlogging.

This article used a combination of visual and discourse analysis which focused on publicly circulating materials. The hope is that this blend of visual and discourse analysis can begin mapping these relationships between lifelogging and deathlogging in action sports and open up additional methodological and conceptual development in additional case studies or areas of research (such as mass shooters using GoPro to record their violent acts) in future studies. This may also allow for other kinds of case study work which do go beyond the publicly circulating material used for analysis in this article. While much research is already ongoing in examining how different forms of death are documented through mobile, wearable and other kinds of digital recording technologies, this article has offered deathlogging as a conceptual tool which can be applied to different case studies beyond the accidental sporting deaths considered here. This concept turns attention to the moment of death and its recording, and how those recordings are connected to different forms of knowledge production and value.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

James N Gilmore

Author biography

James N. Gilmore is an assistant professor of media and technology studies in Clemson University’s Department of Communication. He researches the critical relationships between technology and culture, with an emphasis on how everyday technologies and digital platforms produce knowledge about humans. Email: jngilmo@clemson.edu

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