Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm

Maggi Savin-Baden

• Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367564629
• eBook ISBN: 9781000486414
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

Few religious leaders have examined the potential for the positive impact of digital media and digital immortality creation in religious contexts. It is evident that there have been recent moves away from traditional funeral services focusing on the transition of the deceased into the future world beyond, towards a rise of memorial content within funerals and commemorative events. This has heralded shifts in afterlife beliefs by replacing them, to all intents and purposes, by attitudes to this life.

Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm explores the ways in which digital media and digital afterlife creation affects social and religious understandings of death and the afterlife.

Features

• Understands the impact of digital media on those living and those working with the bereaved
• Explores the impact of digital memorialisation post death
• Examines the ways in which digital media may be changing conceptions and theologies of death

For many people, digital afterlife and the spiritual realm largely remains an area that is both inchoate and confusing. This book will begin to unravel some of this bafflement.

Chapter 1 Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm

DOI: 10.1201/9781003098256-1

Introduction

Afterlife, digital afterlife and the spiritual realm tend to be couched in mystery. Philosophical and theological discourse cannot explain the resurrection or reincarnation of the body, because the human body itself is not reducible to a simple description or ready comprehension. New practices suggest that the possibilities of ‘living on’ through technological innovations have the potential to change the religious landscape radically. Recent developments suggest that there will be socio-political and psychological effects that will have an impact on understandings of embodiment and death, and create new forms of post-mortem veneration. This chapter explores a range of views about digital afterlife and the idea of the spiritual realm in relation to this. It begins by examining the concept of symbolic immortality and then presents the diverse interpretations of digital afterlife. The second section of the chapter explores depictions of the spiritual realm in terms of places, spaces and relationships.

Overview

Whilst there has been some research into digital afterlife perceptions about the ways in which digital media affect how we see living and dying remain complex areas for research and discussion. It is also not clear whether changed perceptions of living and dying in the light of digital media practices are affecting religious views about illness and notions of afterlife, heaven, hell and salvation. In the 21st century, death is integrated into life for many people through social media so that the dead reside in our machines and phones. Recent developments seem to suggest shifts in understandings about embodiment, death and afterlife (Walter, 2017). For example, digital media are currently being used to expand the possibilities of commemorating the dead and managing the grief of those left behind, complementing and sometimes replacing the well-established formal structures of faiths and belief systems.

The concept of digital afterlife is defined here as the continuation of an active or passive digital presence after death (Savin-Baden et al, 2017). Other terms have been used to describe digital afterlife including digital immortality. ‘Afterlife’ assumes a digital presence that may or may not continue to exist, whereas ‘immortality’ implies an everlasting presence. The area of digital afterlife research is a growing field, and work initially began by exploring ways in which the dead were seen to be kept alive by the living. For example, Howarth (2000) presented ways in which afterlife was being managed over 20 years ago such as anniversaries, the creation of self-help groups. Other forms of communion and communication with the dead have been in use for a long time, such as talking to a loved one at their grave as well as spiritualism and clairvoyance. Examples also include what is now referred to as a durable biography (Walter, 1996) that allows survivors to continue to integrate the deceased person into their lives and to find a stable and secure place for them. More recent phenomenon includes cenotaphization (Kellaher and Worpole, 2010), whereby the remains are dislocated from places of memorializing (discussed in more depth in Chapter 8) and the creation of dynamic biographies. Dynamic biographies are when parents create biographies for deceased children, often through life stages and sometimes building a portrait of their achievements (Hockey, 1996). Amidst this varied landscape, the digital has begun to overlay many of the current physical practices, some of which sit side by side, whilst others replace grave spaces as ways of reconstituting the dead. What we see in cyberspace is the collision of worlds of the dead and living which not only overlap but tend to collide with one another and appear to offer misplaced hope, as Mosco argues:

The thorny questions arising from all the limitations that make us human were once addressed by myths that featured gods, goddesses, and the variety of beings and rituals that for many provide satisfactory answers. Today, it is the spiritual machines and their world of cyberspace that hold out the hope of overcoming life’s limitations.

(Mosco, 2004: 78)

The debates in the field of digital afterlife are complex and wide ranging. Whilst perspectives in the 2000s tend to focus on robotics, memorialization and the creation and maintenance of digital beings, the 1970s focused more on the nature of immortality.

Forms of Immortality

Symbolic immortality (Lifton, 1973) is the idea that individuals seek for a sense of life continuity, or immortality, through symbolic means. This term was used by Lifton (1973) to describe ways of avoiding death through four different ways, namely biological, social, natural and theological. However, symbolic immortality could also include the concepts of assisted immortality (Kastenbaum, 2004) and one- and two-way immortality (Bell and Gray, 2000).

Biological immortality is the belief that through transmitting our genes via our descendants we continue. The idea is that family heritage continues both genetically as well as by passing on values, philosophies and memories from generation to generation. Thus, there is a sense that someone lives on physically – and possibly spiritually, through one’s children and grandchildren.

Social immortality is the idea that we live on by creating artefacts or creations that survive us, such as books, arts or even the influences we may have had on friends or students. Thus, we live on beyond death through artefacts we have created or acts we have undertaken – such as benevolence, so that we will be remembered for generations and possibly centuries.

Natural immortality is the recognition that as one’s body returns to the ground it becomes part of the earth’s life cycle. Thus, our bodies, returned to the earth become part of the life and death cycle of nature.

Theological immortality is the immortalization of the soul after death and, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, is central to a number of different religions. The afterlife, with an immortal soul, is an ancient mythological theme involving death, rebirth and resurrection. Life after death, however, is not a traditional view in Jewish or humanist religious philosophies.

Assisted immortality was introduced in 2004 by Kastenbaum to capture the idea of technology-assisted survival. His proposition was how people could delineate what might be a meaningful form of survival if they made use of any available technological assistance.

One- and two-way immortality was established by Bell and Gray (2000). One-way immortality is where someone’s ideas and digital profile have been preserved or memorialized. Two-way immortality is the idea that there is the potential for the creator to interact with the living world; this interaction could come in a wide variety of ways, from two-way text or even voice and video conversations by creating a robot that accessed previous posts and text messages.

There has been a shift away from the term ‘immortality’ towards the broader and more inclusive term, ‘afterlife’. The notion of afterlife includes a wide variety of ideas and practices, as presented in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 Features of Digital Afterlife (Adapted and Developed from Savin-Baden and Mason-Robbie, 2020)

Term	Definition	Example/s	Related research
Digital traces	Digital footprints left behind through digital media	Playlists Blog posts Website searches	Mayer-Schonberger (2009)
Digital legacy	Digital assets left behind after death	Things that are static once the user has died	Maciel and Pereira (2013)
Digital death	Either the death of a living being and the way it affects the digital world or the death of a digital object and the way it affects a living being	The impact of left-behind digital traces on family or the need for people to delete digital media because of its impact on everyday life	Pitsillides, Waller and Fairfax (2012)
Digital after...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Endorsement
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm
• CHAPTER 2 Religion and Afterlife
• CHAPTER 3 Impact of the Digital on the Bereaved
• CHAPTER 4 Digital Theologies and Theologies of Death
• CHAPTER 5 Death Spaces
• CHAPTER 6 A Good Digital Death
• CHAPTER 7 Death and the Liminal
• CHAPTER 8 Symbols and Memorialization
• CHAPTER 9 Perspectives on Digital Afterlife
• CHAPTER 10 Digital Legacy
• CHAPTER 11 Ambivalence and Spectacle
• CHAPTER 12 The Final Cut
• REFERENCES
• GLOSSARY
• INDEX