<h1 class="left">A couple of years ago, someone from my school died by suicide. Every friend I spoke to said their first instinct was to go look at her Instagram account. Nobody could explain why. Of course, it was to ‘see’ her, but did that make it more real or less real — to see active posts of someone who was no longer alive? Instagram has a feature that allows a profile to be turned into an ‘In Memoriam’ account. Spotify created a playlist for me to mourn Liam Payne. In the same places where lives are documented, death is, too.</h1>
<h1 class="left">One Direction made the internet as we know it today — or the internet made One Direction as we know them today. We saw Liam at 14, auditioning for the X Factor, and then coming back the next year to be put into One Direction. We saw the boys on weekly ‘Video Diaries’ that went viral on any platforms that teenage girls could find. These videos birthed a mythology, a secret reservoir of personal, unscripted content, and a new lexicon of parasociality to talk in. As the band progressed through X Factor and eventually released ‘One Thing,’ ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, etc, they never stopped feeding the internet. They fought with other boy bands on Twitter, released backstage footage from concerts and studios, posted their relationships on Instagram, and talked freely in their many, many interviews.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">A lot of this sounds extractive and it was — these were young boys, in their teens or early 20s, turned into media machines by The Devil, Simon Cowell. But because there was so much content, a lot of it told an unmissable story of 5 young boys in an unlikely situation, growing up in the glare of fame, for everyone to see. Fans learnt that Liam was afraid of spoons, that Zayn smoked cigarettes (#StopForMeZayn), that Louis was dating a girl called Eleanor, Niall liked Nandos, and Harry older women — these were footholds in ‘knowing’ One Direction. The boys had a ‘1D Day,’ a 7 straight hour live stream. It was more access to celebrity than had ever been seen before. Now, it’s normal to see celebrity lives documented minute-for-minute, because participating in social media has turned relevance into a game of volume and consistency. But back then, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube were fledgling platforms, with uncharted eyeballs attached to them. It was exciting and intimate and insane to see and know so much of One Direction. You could suddenly make GIFs, chat with fellow appreciators of your favourite B-side, watch videos of their day-to-day, and trend an inside joke on Twitter for your own pleasure. Seeing became like giggling, belonging, having the biggest communal experience of our short lifetimes, and creating something brand new.</h1>
<h1 class="right">It makes sense to me that there are voice recordings of the hotel’s call to the police, that there are photos of Liam with fans that same night, and that Liam himself posted to Snapchat an hour before his estimated time of death. It is devastating and unconscionable, but it makes sense to me that TMZ posted (and then rightfully deleted) photos of Liam’s dead body. In the endlessness of the digital, seeing is the same thing as living. Or dying.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Maybe some fans met them or watched them live. It doesn’t matter. The primary stream of content and the ‘stan’ community on these platforms defined the first boyband of the Internet Age. And yet, when Liam’s father went to visit the site where it happened, a sea of fans held their hands up to block the paparazzi from taking photos of his father. Even filtered through the airy wasteland of the internet, there was big love.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Liam has been a complicated man to grieve. His ex-fiancée, Maya Henry, was told by Liam’s close friends not to come out with more statements or legal action against Liam because he was in a bad place and if something were to happen to him, everyone would blame her. This came out less than a week before his death. Maya had a cease and desist order against him. She’s alleged that he forced her to get an abortion, chased her around a street violently, and preyed on impressionable fans. Her comments section in the wake of this death has been predictably disgusting. But fans’ relationship with these boys is not (generally) just one kind of hormonal worship. For years, Liam has been bullied and called a loser on social media for rudeness to Harry Styles, egotism, trying to make himself seem like the most important member of the band, as well as for his abusive and toxic behaviour with women, and general obnoxiousness. This grief is mixed up with hate, confusion, and conflict. It feels intractably adult.</h1>
<h1 class="left">When fans mourn Liam Payne, they are mourning the children they used to be when they were ‘Directioners’ — listening to the albums on repeat, emailing with their friends as ‘Future Mrs Payne,’ putting up posters in their room, logging on to chat about any news, and (literally) screaming their lungs out at concerts. They are mourning how life - music - boys - the internet - used to make them feel.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Accuse the Directioners of parasociality. Tell them they need to calm down, it wasn’t real, and they didn’t know Liam. Or, we can think seriously about the emotional stakes of community, the internet, and belonging. Because the lines — all of them — are getting blurrier than ever before. Our lives legitimise the internet constantly. Remote jobs take place on Zoom, world news is watched on live streams, relationships begin on dating apps, and learning is done through online portals. The internet is no longer separate from us. It is an authority, it is a world, and we cannot pretend with superiority and condescension that the communities it breeds are not ‘real.’ Knowing someone means many things and can take many forms. One of them is certainly online. I keep in touch with friends and family through video calls, newsletter updates, and social media posts. Yes, I also knew them at a time in ‘real life.’ But does that mean our online relationship is only a ghost? No, because communication is communication. Mediation is inevitable in any relationship.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">This past week, Gen Z have been feeling old. This is our first, true internet death. Obviously, famous people have died before. But this is not Michael Jackson or Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain or even Angus Cloud or Christina Grimmie. This is a death that made adults blow the dust off their accounts and log back on, reach out to the children they once were, and sit with their 13-year-old broken hearts. This is a “family matter.” One Direction was the second most listened-to artist on Spotify the day after the news broke. Old videos of the boys are flooding the algorithm; fans’ chock-full paragraphs are clogging up feeds. It is horrifying to witness grief as a viral phenomenon. It feels visceral and wrong and profane to see the dead living as eternal zombies on our infinite feeds. But it felt like the most honest way to grieve. Where else would we go if not online?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">A friend posts about a family member who died. I don’t like it, but I ‘like’ it. There’s light from my screen and light from the sun. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell where the glare of real life is coming from.</h1>
<h1 class="full">A couple of years ago, someone from my school died by suicide. Every friend I spoke to said their first instinct was to go look at her Instagram account. Nobody could explain why. Of course, it was to ‘see’ her, but did that make it more real or less real — to see active posts of someone who was no longer alive? Instagram has a feature that allows a profile to be turned into an ‘In Memoriam’ account. Spotify created a playlist for me to mourn Liam Payne. In the same places where lives are documented, death is, too.</h1>
<h1 class="full">One Direction made the internet as we know it today — or the internet made One Direction as we know them today. We saw Liam at 14, auditioning for the X Factor, and then coming back the next year to be put into One Direction. We saw the boys on weekly ‘Video Diaries’ that went viral on any platforms that teenage girls could find. These videos birthed a mythology, a secret reservoir of personal, unscripted content, and a new lexicon of parasociality to talk in. As the band progressed through X Factor and eventually released ‘One Thing,’ ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, etc, they never stopped feeding the internet. They fought with other boy bands on Twitter, released backstage footage from concerts and studios, posted their relationships on Instagram, and talked freely in their many, many interviews.</h1>
<h1 class="full">A lot of this sounds extractive and it was — these were young boys, in their teens or early 20s, turned into media machines by The Devil, Simon Cowell. But because there was so much content, a lot of it told an unmissable story of 5 young boys in an unlikely situation, growing up in the glare of fame, for everyone to see. Fans learnt that Liam was afraid of spoons, that Zayn smoked cigarettes (#StopForMeZayn), that Louis was dating a girl called Eleanor, Niall liked Nandos, and Harry older women — these were footholds in ‘knowing’ One Direction. The boys had a ‘1D Day,’ a 7 straight hour live stream. It was more access to celebrity than had ever been seen before. Now, it’s normal to see celebrity lives documented minute-for-minute, because participating in social media has turned relevance into a game of volume and consistency. But back then, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube were fledgling platforms, with uncharted eyeballs attached to them. It was exciting and intimate and insane to see and know so much of One Direction. You could suddenly make GIFs, chat with fellow appreciators of your favourite B-side, watch videos of their day-to-day, and trend an inside joke on Twitter for your own pleasure. Seeing became like giggling, belonging, having the biggest communal experience of our short lifetimes, and creating something brand new.</h1>
<h1 class="full">It makes sense to me that there are voice recordings of the hotel’s call to the police, that there are photos of Liam with fans that same night, and that Liam himself posted to Snapchat an hour before his estimated time of death. It is devastating and unconscionable, but it makes sense to me that TMZ posted (and then rightfully deleted) photos of Liam’s dead body. In the endlessness of the digital, seeing is the same thing as living. Or dying.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Maybe some fans met them or watched them live. It doesn’t matter. The primary stream of content and the ‘stan’ community on these platforms defined the first boyband of the Internet Age. And yet, when Liam’s father went to visit the site where it happened, a sea of fans held their hands up to block the paparazzi from taking photos of his father. Even filtered through the airy wasteland of the internet, there was big love.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Liam has been a complicated man to grieve. His ex-fiancée, Maya Henry, was told by Liam’s close friends not to come out with more statements or legal action against Liam because he was in a bad place and if something were to happen to him, everyone would blame her. This came out less than a week before his death. Maya had a cease and desist order against him. She’s alleged that he forced her to get an abortion, chased her around a street violently, and preyed on impressionable fans. Her comments section in the wake of this death has been predictably disgusting. But fans’ relationship with these boys is not (generally) just one kind of hormonal worship. For years, Liam has been bullied and called a loser on social media for rudeness to Harry Styles, egotism, trying to make himself seem like the most important member of the band, as well as for his abusive and toxic behaviour with women, and general obnoxiousness. This grief is mixed up with hate, confusion, and conflict. It feels intractably adult.</h1>
<h1 class="full">When fans mourn Liam Payne, they are mourning the children they used to be when they were ‘Directioners’ — listening to the albums on repeat, emailing with their friends as ‘Future Mrs Payne,’ putting up posters in their room, logging on to chat about any news, and (literally) screaming their lungs out at concerts. They are mourning how life - music - boys - the internet - used to make them feel.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Accuse the Directioners of parasociality. Tell them they need to calm down, it wasn’t real, and they didn’t know Liam. Or, we can think seriously about the emotional stakes of community, the internet, and belonging. Because the lines — all of them — are getting blurrier than ever before. Our lives legitimise the internet constantly. Remote jobs take place on Zoom, world news is watched on live streams, relationships begin on dating apps, and learning is done through online portals. The internet is no longer separate from us. It is an authority, it is a world, and we cannot pretend with superiority and condescension that the communities it breeds are not ‘real.’ Knowing someone means many things and can take many forms. One of them is certainly online. I keep in touch with friends and family through video calls, newsletter updates, and social media posts. Yes, I also knew them at a time in ‘real life.’ But does that mean our online relationship is only a ghost? No, because communication is communication. Mediation is inevitable in any relationship.</h1>
<h1 class="full">This past week, Gen Z have been feeling old. This is our first, true internet death. Obviously, famous people have died before. But this is not Michael Jackson or Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain or even Angus Cloud or Christina Grimmie. This is a death that made adults blow the dust off their accounts and log back on, reach out to the children they once were, and sit with their 13-year-old broken hearts. This is a “family matter.” One Direction was the second most listened-to artist on Spotify the day after the news broke. Old videos of the boys are flooding the algorithm; fans’ chock-full paragraphs are clogging up feeds. It is horrifying to witness grief as a viral phenomenon. It feels visceral and wrong and profane to see the dead living as eternal zombies on our infinite feeds. But it felt like the most honest way to grieve. Where else would we go if not online?</h1>
<h1 class="full">A friend posts about a family member who died. I don’t like it, but I ‘like’ it. There’s light from my screen and light from the sun. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell where the glare of real life is coming from.</h1>