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.

Wearable witnesses: Deathlogging and framing wearable technology data in “Fitbit murders”

“…This article builds on Gilmore's (2023) concept of deathlogging, or how technologies can (accidentally) generate archives of human death, which are then used as the basis of accident reconstruction and assessment. The initial conceptualization of deathlogging focused on accidental sports deaths that had been recorded on mounted GoPro cameras, leaving "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" (p. 482), and related specifically to Siegel's (2014) notion of forensic mediation, or the ways media technologies are used to reconstruct "what has happened".…”