Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age

After the death of a loved one, the incoming messages seem scrambled for a while. At times, closeness with our deceased loved one feels incredibly visceral, as though they are present in the room, here and now. At other times, the string seems to have fallen off the board — not shorter or longer than it was before, but simply stolen from us entirel... See more

After all is said and done for our present pandemic, many thousands of people will be dead and the living will be burdened with a deep recession. Cheap solutions for end-of-life services will be sought and many will turn to the cheapest infrastructure they know of: the web. Streaming services and asynchronous rites will be used to pay the dead thei... See more

By continuing to pursue these lines of thought, we develop new ways of framing our interactions with the dead online, and may find pathways for breaking our calcified archival imaginaries and reimagine new ways of living with the data bodies we construct, inhabit, and inherit.