scholarly journals Writing Letters to the Dead: Cripping Networked Temporalities on Social Media

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-96
Author(s):  
Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Dead

Mourning and Memorialization on Social Media

2019 ◽  
pp. 466-484
Author(s):  
Elaine Kasket
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Social Networking Site ◽  
Continuing Bonds ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
The Dead ◽  
And Control ◽  
Opening Up

Mourning and memorialization on social media are prominent features of modern bereavement and are common on Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site. On Facebook, profiles of deceased users are memorialized by default, continuing to be present and accessible on the network and opening up new possibilities for the ongoing role and influence of the physically dead. Paradoxically, Facebook and other aspects of digital legacy have potential to both facilitate and disrupt continuing bonds, a term that describes the connection we experience with our dead. The psychological and sociological impact of the dead online is only beginning to be understood; in the meantime, it is argued that designers and operators of social networking platforms have a moral imperative to consider how to better facilitate individual choice and control over both our own digital legacies and our interaction with the digital legacies of those we have loved and lost.

scholarly journals Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tama Leaver
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Nineteen Eighties ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Cave Paintings ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Start Ups ◽  
Promotional Discourse

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.

Automating Digital Afterlives

Disentangling ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 115-136
Author(s):  
Robbie Fordyce ◽  
Bjørn Nansen ◽  
Michael Arnold ◽  
Tamara Kohn ◽  
Martin Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Social Media Presence ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Social Media Communication

The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.

scholarly journals "Bara en fot och en känga"

Budkavlen ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Sofie Strandén-Backa
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Living Tradition ◽  
Child Eating ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Folk Tradition ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Newspaper Articles

‘A foot and a boot’. Narratives about children killed by wolves in Finnish folk tradition and media material   Sofie Strandén-Backa   Keywords: wolf attacks in Finland 1880–1881, children, living tradition, mass and social media   The article focuses on narratives about children and wolves, and the material consists of different texts that deal with children who have been killed by wolves in Finland in earlier times. The particular events in question are a series of well-known and documented wolf attacks on children in the Turku region during 1880 and 1881. Older newspaper articles, as well as contemporary texts, are analysed. One aim of the study is to investigate what is set in motion when the relationship between wolves and children is discussed and which underlying patterns emerge as part of that discussion. Another aim is to allow for narrative elements to create a base for discourse about the dangerous wolf. The analysis covers peoples’ comments on websites where the discourse is both defended and challenged and where negotiations about the prerogatives of the animal are made visible. Ever-returning narratives about the dangerous wolf are part of a legend process, where one goal is to convince the audience of the truth of the stories. One way of doing so, throughout the years, has been to present what could be called ‘the bloody list’, a list that consists of the name and age of the dead children, the circumstances under which they were killed and what was left of their bodies. In the stories, there was no way to protect the children, and there is nothing the parents could have done once the wolf got hold of their child. The message in these stories from the 1880s is that there is no rescue from the wolf. This message is passed down to parents and further to the children of today, creating a child-eating beast of (every) wolf. Another goal is to keep the stories alive for future generations, since the events are viewed as so important that they are not to be forgotten. The stories have a somewhat emblematic character, since they reflect an original myth about the genesis of modern Finland, freed from untamed nature and the chaos of wolves.

scholarly journals The Living and the Dead Entwined in Virtual Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damien Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Public Outreach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Audiences ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
The Dead

Teaching and public engagement with the results and implications of bioarchaeological research have increasingly attracted more varied and social media-savvy audiences. Since 2010, the social media platform Instagram has also flourished, with millions of users forming untold numbers of communities of practice. Here, I seek to address the intersection of bioarchaeology and the virtual “stage” that social media represents. How is the discipline of bioarchaeology and the act of being a bioarchaeologist represented on Instagram? How do practicing bioarchaeologists (and enthusiastic supporters of the field) communicate about their own and others’ research, fieldwork, laboratory work, et cetera? With ever-greater amounts of scientific communication and public outreach conducted over social media (e.g., Gura 2013; Kling and McKim 2000; Wheat et al. 2013), it is worth investigating how the living who study the dead interact with each other, form community, and engage online audiences that increasingly contain descendants of the dead being studied. The review below is short; hence, the nature and depth of inquiry is restricted. Nevertheless, enough data are available to allow broader speculation and to suggest that there is space for more concerted future research.

Sharing Is Not Always Caring: Social Media and the Dead

2019 ◽  
pp. 299-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Errickson ◽  
Tim J. U. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Dead

scholarly journals BURYING THE DEAD (USERS): A LIFE OF DATA WITHIN LIMITS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Welsh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Material Consumption ◽  
Continuous Growth ◽  
Direct Competition ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Sustainability Model

Technological innovation depends on earthly resources. As such, the drive to continuous growth that has propelled technology forward is also in direct competition with a planet that is reaching capacity. This expansion and consumption model has both supported and neglected the data of the dead, which both proliferates and languishes. For example, as researchers across disciplines have noted, the dead may soon outnumber the living on social media. Questions about digital remains should attend not only to social media profiles but also to the life cycles of data. This paper considers environmental and resource-related questions about the traces we leave when we depart. To do this work, a theoretical methodological approach following the Computing within LIMITS model (Nardi et al, 2018) is employed to consider the accumulation of data that remains after users have departed from their earthly (and digital) lives. LIMITS is a sustainability model that asks researchers to (1) question growth, (2) consider models of scarcity, and (3) reduce energy and material consumption. That is, this paper questions the life of digital data that can be maintained and can even grow after a user passes on. In addition to questions about mourning, memorializing, and archiving the dead, the LIMITS model prompts ethical questions about how to bury our dead data responsibly and sustainably in the face of exponential growth.

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