Digital Death and Spectacular Death

Abstract

Throughout human history, individuals, communities and societies have always had to confront and tackle the problem of death. Consequently, death remains a topic of social scientific relevance, highlighting the need for its study and for theorising around it. This article analyses the development of the social scientific study of death and dying, taking inspiration from Philippe Ariès’s historical stages to discuss the recent developments in the field, namely the study of digital death. The article begins with a discussion of the visibility of death in modern society in the context of spectacular death. The analysis emphasises its four dimensions: mediatisation, commercialisation, re-ritualisation and the revolution in end-of-life care. The article moves on to discuss the emergence of digital death as the current stage and reflects on its similarities to spectacular death and its transformation of public imaginaries around death in contemporary society. The article concludes with a reflection on future developments in the field, specifically the emergence and study of artificial intelligence (AI) in digitalised death culture.

Theorising Digital Afterlife as Techno-Affective Assemblage: On Relationality, Materiality, and the Affective Potential of Data

“…However, rather than add conceptual clarity or analytical usefulness, placing the terms in a hierarchical relation serves to blur the constitutive boundaries of each, especially as the subordinate category (digital immortality) seems to be at temporal odds with the superordinate one (digital afterlife). If hierarchical relation was insisted on, and if some analytical utility was achieved through this move, then perhaps 'digital death' (see Sumiala and Jacobsen 2024) as a broader, more encompassing concept might best serve this function.…”