A fascinating exploration of the social meaning of digital death
From blogs written by terminally ill authors to online notes left by those considering suicide, technology has become a medium for the dead and the dying to cope with the anxiety of death. Services like artificial intelligence chatbots, mind-uploading, and postmortem blog posts offer individuals the ability to cultivate their legacies in a bid for digital immortality. The Digital Departed explores the posthumous internet world from the perspective of both the living and the dead.
Timothy Recuber traces how communication beyond death evolved over time. Historically, the methods of mourning have been characterized by unequal access to power and privilege. However, the internet offers more agency to the dead, allowing users accessibility and creativity in curating how they want to be remembered.
Based on hundreds of blog posts, suicide notes, Twitter hashtags, and videos, Recuber examines the ways we die online, and the digital texts we leave behind. Combining these data with interviews, surveys, analysis of news coverage, and a historical overview of the relationship between death and communication technology going back to pre-history, The Digital Departed explains what it means to live and die on the internet today. In this thought-provoking and uniquely troubling work, Recuber shows that although we might pass away, our digital souls live on, online, in a kind of purgatory of their own.
eBook - ePub
The Digital Departed
How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Digital Departed
How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: From Digital Self to Digital Soul
- 1. News Coverage of Digital Death and the Birth of the Digital Soul
- 2. Absent Presence, Death, and the History of Communication Technologies
- 3. Suffering, the Self, and Narrative Freedom in Blogs of the Terminally Ill
- 4. Self-Destruction as Self-Commemoration in Digital Suicide Notes
- 5. Race, Racism, and Mnemonic Freedom in the Digital Afterlife
- 6. The Reenchantment of Technology and the Quest for Virtual Immortality
- Conclusion: COVID-19, Collective Memory, and the Limits of Digital Transcendence
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- References
- Index
- About the Author
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Yes, you can access The Digital Departed by Timothy Recuber in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Media Studies. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.