Full Description
This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny.
With DeadSocial™ one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way.
Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived.
Contents
Introduction
A. David Lewis and Christopher M. Moreman
Part I: Death, Mourning, and Social Media
1 Messaging the Dead: Social Network Sites and Theologies of Afterlife
Erinn Staley
2 Profiles of the Dead: Mourning and Memorial on Facebook
Heidi Ebert
3 Virtual Graveyard: Facebook, Death, and Existentialist Critique
Ari Stillman
4 Tweeting Death, Posting Photos, and Pinning Memorials: Remembering the Dead in Bits and Pieces
Candi K. Cann
Part II: Online Memorialization and Digital Legacies
5 eMemoriam: Digital Necrologies, Virtual Remembrance, and the Question of Permanence
Michael Arntfield
6 The Restless Dead in the Digital Cemetery
Bjorn Nansen, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, and Tamara Kohn
7 The Social Value of Digital Ghosts
Pam Briggs and Lisa Thomas
8 Mythopoesis, Digital Democracy, and the Legacy of the Jonestown Website
Rebecca Moore
Part III: Virtual Worlds beyond Death
9 Remembering Laura Roslin: Fictional Death and a Real Bereavement Community Online
Erica Hurwitz Andrus
10 Necromedia—Reversed Ontogeny or Posthuman Evolution?
Denisa Kera
11 Infinite Gestation: Death and Progress in Video Games
Stephen Mazzeo and Daniel Schall
12 The Death of Digital Worlds
William Sims Bainbridge
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index
