Angels and the Digital Afterlife: Death and Nonreligion Online

Abstract

This brief article aims to draw the attention of nonreligion researchers to a growing interdisciplinary research field: the study of death online. In digitally networked societies, the dead are remembered online, and their survivors can use digital resources to express grief, find support and construct memorials. New norms and languages of mourning are emerging, including new references to heaven, angels and communication with the dead. The boundary between religion and nonreligion is blurred in these new practices, but we know very little as yet about what this blurring actually means to the bereaved. This article will outline the main approaches to religion in studies of death online, draw on nonreligion research to critique these approaches, and call for new directions and methods in future studies of nonreligion and media. It will argue that scholars of religion and nonreligion have much to offer to the study of death online, and this article acts as an introduction and an invitation to future interdisciplinary exploration.

Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…The book spans scholarly perspectives and topics from the cost of storing the dead's data to the accidental and intentional creation of digital memories, and calls for a deeper contemplation of psychological and ethical questions of the collection, storage, and use of digital remains of the dead. Works have further considered the general implications of the digital immortality movement, such as the extent to which people in a digital society can really meaningfully author their own post‐death story (Özdemir et al, 2021), the social effects of the persistent digital presence of the deceased (as digital zombies or digital angels ; Hutchings, 2019; Tietz et al, 2018), and the appropriation of social media spaces for such memorialization (Biçer & Yıldırım, 2022).…”