Death and digital media

Arnold, Michael A.; Gibbs, Martin; Kohn, Tamara; Meese, James; Nansen, Bjørn

doi:10.4324/9781315688749-8

Cited by 15 publications

(30 citation statements)

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“…The burden of not having been there for the last moments of a loved one and the absence of funeral rituals could have multiple impacts of mental health and grief processes that are yet to be qualified. While digital technology could offer means to mitigate these impacts, from online memorials and virtual funerals (Arnold, Gibbs, Kohn, Meese, & Nansen, 2018) to online peer support groups (Robinson and Pond, 2019), the benefits people can retain from these tools differ according to their digital skills levels. For instance, the lack of experience with online memorials features both on grief specific and unspecific websites (e.g.…”

Section: Vulnerability To the Repercussions Of The Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and digital inequalities: Reciprocal impacts and mitigation strategies

Beaunoyer

Dupéré

Guitton

2020

Computers in Human Behavior

774

620

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With more than three billion people in isolation, the status of digital spaces is switching from an amenity to a necessity, as they become not only the main way to access information and services, but also one of the only remaining vectors for economic, educational, and leisure activities as well as for social interactions to take place. However, not all are equals in terms of access to networks or connected devices, or when it comes to the skills required to navigate computerized spaces optimally. Digital inequalities were already existing, yet the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating them dramatically. On the one hand, the crisis will worsen digital inequalities within the population. On the other hand, digital inequalities represent a major risk factor of vulnerability for exposure to the virus itself, and for the non-sanitary consequences of the crisis. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the reciprocal impacts of the COVID-19 crisis and digital inequalities, and to propose operative solutions to help fight the nefarious consequences of the crisis. We first describe how digital inequalities are a determinant of health. We then investigate how COVID-19 can potentiate digital inequalities, and how digital inequalities potentiate vulnerability to COVID-19. Finally, in order to contribute to the mitigation of this crisis, we propose a set of multi-layered strategies focusing on actionability that can be implemented at multiple structural levels, ranging from governmental to corporate and community levels.

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Section: Vulnerability To the Repercussions Of The Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and digital inequalities: Reciprocal impacts and mitigation strategies

Beaunoyer

Dupéré

Guitton

2020

Computers in Human Behavior

774

620

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“…The partial picture of a person present on digital platforms, even for a prolific social media user, are, at best, incomplete, fragmented and unrepresentative of the gamut of a person's life. While social media has facilitated many new spaces and practices of mourning and commemoration (Leaver, 2013;Leaver & Highfield, 2018;Meese et al, 2015;Nansen, Arnold, Gibbs, Kohn, & Meese, 2016;Arnold, Gibbs, Kohn, Meese & Nansen, 2018), the current limits of posthumous performance and residues are driven by the energy and effort of mourners and their uses of digital platforms. Social media, to date, provides spaces to remember and reminisce, not reanimate, the dead.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

Leaver¹

2019

Preprint

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Technology enabling resurrection and reanimation of the dead has long been a theme in popular culture, and in science fiction (SF) in particular. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), generally considered the beginning of SF as a genre (Freedman, 2000), tells the tale of a scientist who harnesses technology and electricity to reanimate an entity stitched together from the remains of the recent dead. However, it is telling that Victor Frankenstein is now generally considered a metaphor for the arrogance of scientists who fail to consider the harmful potential of their work. While rarely as dramatic as stories of resurrection, Tony Walter (Walter, 2015) has convincingly argued that for thousands of years every communication technology, from etching in stone and cave paintings onward, has been used to communicate with the dead in some fashion. It comes as no surprise, then, that technology start-ups and entrepreneurs are attempting to harness digital technologies, social media, and networked communication not just to speak to the dead but also to use their digital residues to seemingly offer both resurrection and immortality.This chapter examines the promotional discourse deployed by three of these futuristic start-up companies – LivesOn (LivesOn, 2013), Eterni.me (“Eterni.me - Virtual Immortality,” 2016) and Humai (Humai, 2016) – and compares these with several notable SF texts which explore the underlying presumptions and broader cultural and social ramifications of these companies succeeding in achieving digital resurrection. The episode ‘Be Right Back’ of the dystopian television series Black Mirror (Harris, 2013) imagines a world where someone could be reconstituted from the detailed record of their lives left behind across various social media accounts, but with clear echoes of Frankenstein. The series returns to these themes in a more endearing fashion in the upbeat ‘San Junipero’ (Harris, 2016) which features a digital afterlife fashioned after the nineteen eighties. Australian hard SF author and computer scientist Greg Egan also explores this terrain in great detail; his short story ‘Learning to be Me’ (Egan, 1995) and novel Permutation City (Egan, 1994) reveal many of the philosophical presumptions and potential outcomes of a digitised afterlife (Leaver, 2004). In comparing these technology companies and SF texts, this chapter operates on two levels: the first, being to ask what presumptions are being made about contemporary personhood, culture and death; and secondly, mapping what future issues might the success of these start-ups actually provoke.

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“…Not only has grief gone public in the digital age as mourners bring their personal losses into social media networks (Arnold et. al., 2018;Moreman and Lewis, 2014), but mourning culture itself has also become a basic idiom of contemporary public discourse.…”

Section: Mourning Becomes Memementioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

Papailias

2018

Media, Culture & Society

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This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.

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Death and digital media

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

COVID-19 and digital inequalities: Reciprocal impacts and mitigation strategies

COVID-19 and digital inequalities: Reciprocal impacts and mitigation strategies

Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

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