Post-Dead Apocalypse: Dover Edition

What does the fainting nurse event tell us about digital ghosts and the space in which they exist? A crash course in the creation of online apparitions.

On December 17, 2020 a video of a nurse collapsing after getting a Pfizer vaccine against contracting the Coronavirus went viral. It was seized upon by social media, news agencies, reporters, conspiracy theorists and the general public. WhatsApp messages of the video appeared in thousands of people’s phones and theories of whether Tiffany Dover, the nurse at CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, did or did not die. Theories started to surface almost immediately. Strange things around Dover seemed to be happening, thousands of comments were posted to her Facebook profile that was later taken down, and searches for her death records were disabled, pushing supposed ‘damage control’ articles refuting the death allegations. An obituary surfaced, claiming that she was indeed dead. Many allegations were either dismissed or debunked, but have these had the desired effect of putting to rest the ‘myth’ of Tiffany Dover that was thus created with the immediacy of a train wreck?

There are dozens upon dozens of news stories that one can read with simple Google or DuckDuckGo searches that seem to lead in two general directions - one leads toward a provable conspiracy the other toward ‘actual’ proof. But much of the evidence or proof tends to lead nowhere or move in circles. Large corporate media parrot the same story, endlessly copying and recopying the same talking points, as if beating the idea that Dover isn’t dead to a pulp will have the desired effect of a mainstream consensus on the fact that she is still alive.  The most poignant and common explanation is that Dover is alive and well, but at home, out of the limelight of media and the paparazzi. The CHI hospital released a 21 second video of Dover surrounded by other nurses on December 21 and links to Dover’s Instagram profile were posted showing recent photos. Theorists countered with propositions of a hoax, a body double, a cover-up in progress, anti-vaccine theories, and general dismissals. In the fight for ‘the truth’ it seems that the only effective tactic is ad nauseum repetition of what one believes to be true.

What is interesting about the nurse Dover story is how information and social media support both sides of the narrative in different ways, how that information is disseminated and (mis)used and how an overflow of information can actually create a deadlock instead of a pattern by which to get out of it. This is old news however and this article will not be about media theory. Instead I want to focus on the notion that events like this are precisely how digital apparitions are created, in real time. The most interesting aspect of the nurse Dover story is the amount of information that was actually deleted and taken down by media companies like Google, Twitter, etc. There are tons of searches and links embedded in articles that lead nowhere. YouTubeVideos have been deleted and accounts taken down and scrubbed. But the deletion of information connected to Tiffany Dover was followed by the creation of new information and new accounts. A search on Instagram points to various Tiffany Dover accounts. One claims to be the real Tiffany Dover, but so do others, some are obviously fake accounts. How many more accounts were there at the height of the event and how many are now gone? We may never know.

The Tiffany Dover story seems to be a classic case of ‘ghostification’ or the creation of online apparitions. Whether the story is true or not, there is an effort to create a kind of positive negation out of the story and out of the nurse herself, the result of which seems likely to be a kind of (un)real version of Dover. She is no longer in control of her own online self. Whether alive or dead, nurse Dover is now a classic online ghost, a perfect objectified subject. Where others have experienced a quiet online death and the occasional resurrection, as I’ve pointed to in my previous article, what happened to Tiffany Dover was on the other hand a very public display of online ghost creation, calling to mind a similar feeding frenzy around the subject of the vanishing monolith. Because of the nature of the medium in which observation and direct participation intersect and where the possibility of intervention is always possible, the internet and social media are in some ways perfect spaces for the creation of spectral leftovers in the guise of information. What will become of this story a year from now, five years from now? The scrubbing of information from the internet has the undesired effect of leaving behind empty spaces, which are more often than not filled up with fantasy content and collective projections. All of those dead end links, deleted videos and profiles, all have ways to return and haunt the hallways of the internet for as long as the ways to get to them exist. Of all the hundreds of thousands of comments, articles, stories, and posts that point to other forms of information, other comments and stories and videos, these together create the substance by which the online apparition of Tiffany Dover is brought back to a form of un-dead existence. One can delete a video, but not the hundreds of links that point to it. Similarly, an image search for Tiffany Dover creates a composite subject, that itself lives in a kind of gray zone, between alive and dead. The manipulation of Dover’s image, the ‘investigations’ into her eye color, shape and the way she combs her hair, the proof of manipulation by actual manipulation, and so on, created a digital zombie out of a subject about whose actual existence we now seem to know less than we did, when the first video of her fainting, hit.

This seems to be precisely how ‘real’ ghosts ‘behave.’ A ghost of any sort, in this case a specter of conspiracy in the Dover case, is typically a composite of the subject itself and its accompanying fantasy projection. We must know who the subject is, who they are or were, what they did, only then can we decide how to think about them. Existence precedes essence. This is the crux of the object/subject opposition in this case. Our will to know the details of a ghost’s life necessarily leads us into deadlock in which an accumulation of information, experience or emotion about a subject, results in an ever-receding horizon of knowledge. The more we know about the subject the less concrete the foundation on which it is built. That the debunking material presented against the Tiffany Dover conspiracy theory, becomes as much a part of this ghostification process, should not surprise us. The debunking is taking place within the space in which the process itself is taking place. It uses the same methods and tactics, it has the same tools at its disposal and the same public to present its findings. Since most of us will never actually go see and touch Tiffany Dover, alive or dead, the un-dead version of her will be what remains. More crucially, it is not just the un-dead version of a real subject we should worry about, but the ideological aspect of the ghost emerging out of the chaos of facts and anecdotes. There is an old joke that illustrates the limits of evidence-based knowledge and perception about a woman who refused to believe that Stalin had died despite the fact that official newspapers had printed the story with a photo of his embalmed body, because she did not see him for herself. What the Dover event shows is that it is this type of ghost that is deeply buried within ideology itself.

Unfortunately both sides of the struggle for ‘truth’ in the Dover case are embroiled in a battle that neither is likely to win. When the ideological battlefield is split into distinct camps, the first thing that is done away with is any semblance of objective truth. Instead what emerges is a surplus or excess of information. When this information is redacted or deleted, ghosts are what takes the place in the gap that is created.

To be continued …..