Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen - Death and Digital Media-Routledge (2018)

DEATH AND DIGITAL MEDIA
Death and Digital Media provides a critical overview of how people mourn,
commemorate, and interact with the dead through digital media. It maps the his-
torical and shifting landscape of digital death, considering a wide range of social,
commercial, and institutional responses to technological innovations. The authors
examine multiple digital platforms and offer a series of case studies from North
America, Europe, and Australia. The book delivers fresh insight and analysis from
an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on anthropology, sociology, science and
technology studies, human–computer interaction, and media studies. It is key
reading for students and scholars in these disciplines, as well as for professionals
working in bereavement support capacities.
Michael Arnold is Associate Professor and Head of Discipline in the History and
Philosophy of Science Programme in the School of Historical and Philosophical
Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Martin Gibbs is Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information

Systems and a member of the Interaction Design Lab (IDL) at the University of
Melbourne, Australia.
Tamara Kohn is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social and

Political Sciences and Coordinator of Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the
University of Melbourne, Australia.
James Meese is Lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of

Technology Sydney, Australia.
Bjorn Nansen is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University

of Melbourne, Australia.
This page intentionally left blank
DEATH AND DIGITAL
MEDIA
Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn,

James Meese, and Bjorn Nansen
Afterword by Elizabeth Hallam

First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 main text Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese,
and Bjorn Nansen; afterword Elizabeth Hallam.
The right of Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese, and
Bjorn Nansen to be identified as authors of this work, and Elizabeth Hallam to be
identified as the author of the afterword, has been asserted by them in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-91795-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-91796-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68874-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
To all of us: The Future Dead
CONTENTS
List of figures viii

Acknowledgements ix
1 Death and digital media: an introduction 1

2 Pre-digital mediums, media, and mediations 16
3 The materialities of gravesites and websites 30
4 Death and social media: entanglements of policy and practice 52
5 Mixing repertoires: commemoration in digital games and online
worlds 75
6 The funeral as a site of innovation 98
7 Looking to the future of life after death 124
Death and digital media: an afterword 141
References 157
Index 170
FIGURES
2.1 Arthur Conan Doyle and ectoplasm in a ‘spirit photograph’ 21

3.1 Graves at Melbourne General Cemetery 32
3.2 DIY options offered by GonetooSoon.org. 48
5.1 Members of the guild, Pride of Stonewall, gather in the
gardens of Darnassus for a memorial service dedicated to
Elloric 76
5.2 A tribute to Sean ‘Vile Rat’ Smith 83
5.3 Selfie of the authors with Elloric in World of Warcraft (taken
using the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera MKII game toy) 95
6.1 Cemetery360 virtual reality – cemetery tours technology 117
8.1 Children’s graves in a Nottinghamshire cemetery, April 2017 143
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to many individuals and organisations we have engaged with over the
duration of the project that has led to the writing of this book. We would especially
like to thank Elizabeth Hallam, who has been a close collaborator and friend
throughout this project, working as a Partner Investigator, participating with passion in
various discussions, workshops, writing retreats, and fieldwork over the last four years.
We also offer our heartfelt thanks to Hannah Gould and Luke van Ryn, our
Graduate Research Assistants who contributed so much towards the execution of
this collaborative project. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Craig
Bellamy, Marcus Carter, Connor Graham, Mitchell Harrop, Alex Lambert, and Joji
Mori for earlier collaborations in the study of death and digital media. Amongst the
many other colleagues, as well as industry professionals and participants, who
played a valuable part in the evolution of this project by contributing to ideas and
discussions at various times, we would like to recognise and thank: Lanfranco Aceti,
Simon Allen, Tom Apperley, Amy Browne, Douglas Davies, Robbie Fordyce, Ray
Frew, Steine Gotved, Steve Howard, Larissa Hjorth, Tim Hutchings, Margaret
Gibson, Pia Interlandi, David Kirk, Tama Leaver, Jan Rod, Hannah Rumble,
Wally Smith, Patrick Stokes, Laura Stubbings, and Jacqui Weatherill.
We also acknowledge the research support provided by the Australian Commu-
nications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) and the Melbourne Networked
Society Institute (MNSI) in developing the project, and we especially wish to
thank Narelle Clark and Adam Lodders for their input and support at different
stages of research and engagement. We also acknowledge the Australian Research
Council (ARC) for its invaluable financial support (Discovery Project number
DP140101871) that made the research and production of this book possible.
And finally, thanks to Marc Stratton at Routledge for his editorial patience and
support; and of course, thanks to all the many research participants whose stories,
experiences, and expertise have informed the ideas and writing in this book.
1
An introduction
News of a friend’s unexpected death is received in a tweet; heartfelt messages are left on a
recently deceased friend’s Facebook page; an online memorial is created to allow people to
share their stories and their grief; a collection of avatars hold an in-game service for a departed
player in World of Warcraft; Facebook Live is used to stream the suicide of a teenager; selfies
are taken at funerals; millions of strangers use social media to mourn the death of a celebrity;
some memorial websites attract no visitors, others ‘go viral’, many carry advertising; at some
point in the future the number of dead Facebook account holders will exceed the number who are
living; social media memorial pages set up by family compete with pages set up by strangers;
the dead remain saved to our contacts list, and are not deleted; a start-up company is hoping
to replicate a dead person’s personality by processing their digital data; a remote-controlled
robot enables attendance at a funeral anywhere on earth …
Death and digital media have intersected over the last two decades in interesting,
sometimes confronting, and usually complicated ways. While digital media are
widely understood to be increasingly shaping our daily lives, people are now dis-
covering that these media also affect our death, and in particular, how we are
commemorated and remembered. This signifies something of a new terrain for
death practices and for digital and social media practices, as the two come together
to allow novel commemorative practices to both flourish and be contested.
Our book focuses on this important meeting point of death and digital media.
We provide a detailed account of these new forms of digital commemoration
across a variety of media, discuss how the funeral industry is reacting to these
developments, and consider how these emergent practices fit into a broader social,
cultural, and religious history of memorialisation and mourning. Taking this inter-
section as our point of departure provides a unique perspective on many important
aspects of humanity’s contemporary situation. We are able consider the variety of
ways people respond to death, how and why people use digital technologies at this
particularly significant time, and how this use shapes our experience. We consider
2 Death and digital media: an introduction
how technological innovation participates in reimagining the deceased and reimagining

relations between the living and the deceased.
Of course, it is not just death and digital media that are interacting in this space.
Long-standing practices continue to shape our responses to death and inform the
role digital media play in commemoration and memorialisation. Institutions of
considerable standing and history continue to play their part. Religious institutions
in particular are considering what role digital media might play in their policies and
rituals. To this we might add the spiritual and metaphysical beliefs of people who
might not be a part of an institutionalised religion, but expect to see a reflection of
spirituality in all responses to death, including the digital. Secular institutions also
overlay a framework of legislation and regulation that governs many aspects of a
response to death, and businesses that provide the products and services associated
with death are subject to this framework. In the developed world death is at the
centre of a very large industry sector, and the commercial imperatives and moti-
vations of funeral homes and digital application providers play an important part in
the dynamics of our changing responses to death, in turn energising innovation and
entrepreneurship in death products and services. And while this book’s focus is an
examination of digital technologies and practices of memorialisation and com-
memoration, we are mindful that this occurs against a backdrop of traditional
practices, emotional responses, institutional positions, metaphysics and spirituality,
legal and regulatory frameworks, and business and commercial interests, all of
which contribute to these still comparatively nascent digital interventions in the
experience of death.
Digital technologies
The proliferation of digital media across society in such a short and recent time-
frame has been remarkable. The mobile phone, for example, has reached more
people in a quicker time than any other technology in history, and its mobility,
computational power, networked synchronicity, and user interfaces are embedding
it in the daily life of billions.1 In a similar fashion, digital networks that were
experimental curiosities fifty years ago are now indispensable, have gone on to
transform numerous industries from finance to tourism, and are used by billions of
people.2 Moreover, the progressive development of the World Wide Web and
social media has affected interpersonal communication, altering how we socialise
with one another (see Baym, 2010). Similarly, the horizon of ubiquitous computing,
augmented reality, and the Internet of Things promises to dramatically impact the
experience of social life.
Considering these developments, it is not surprising that entrepreneurs and
innovators have attempted to transform the very conservative death industry, a
significant economic sector, worth an estimated US$16–20 billion per annum in the
United States, AU$1 billion per annum in Australia, and £2 billion per annum in the
UK, at the time of writing. These actors rightly identify the funeral industry as rich and
relatively unexplored territory, but funeral directors and funeral homes are relatively
Death and digital media: an introduction 3
resistant to new technologies, certainly in comparison to other service industries. In this

context, much of the digital innovation in this industry has not been at the instigation
of funeral homes, but is occurring as a consequence of developments in other areas
of digital media innovation and use, or through the interventions of ordinary
people who have suffered bereavement, or who are preparing for their own death.
Although the public at large does not use these terms, within the death industry,
the services and products offered are referred to as ‘pre-need’ (prior to a particular
death), ‘at-need’ (at time of death), or ‘post-need’ (after the death), and in this
introduction and the chapters that follow, we see how digital media act in all three
stage-related categories.
To take one example, funeral companies are starting to seek expert advice on
their use of digital and social media, and will use social media ‘pre-need’ to build
their profile in the market place. At the retail level, funeral companies are local
businesses (though the ownership structure is often global), and this use of social
media positions the funeral company as part and parcel of the local community and
in the consciousness of people who will inevitably become potential customers.
Digital media are also widely used by the industry in response to the occurrence
of a death, or as the industry terms it, ‘at-need’. At this time, the bereaved will
often use online sources to locate and research the services offered by funeral
companies, and funeral companies need to have a strong web presence to capture
these customers. At the time arrangements are made for the funeral, companies
often use large flat-screens running custom-designed software applications to display
and sell coffins, car hire, flowers, and other products. Alternatively, the bereaved
may be visited at home, in which case tablets may be used. These companies have
decided that digital media are a better form of product and service presentation
than brochures or product display rooms. At the funeral, digital products and services
are also prominent. Very commonly a relatively simple slideshow of projected
images backed with music prepared by a friend or family member will feature in
the service, but more sophisticated uses of digital media are also to be found. A
professionally produced, high production-value biographical video may be shown,
and retained in remembrance. Funerals are being live-streamed online to cater to
increasingly dispersed groups of families and friends, and digital kiosks are being
developed to allow mourners to ignore the condolence book and directly post to a
commemorative social media page from the funeral.
‘Post-need’, after the death and after the funeral, is a time of mourning and a
time for commemoration and memorialisation. Digital media are widely used fol-
lowing a death in ways that are sometimes a reflection of long-standing practices,
and are sometimes radical departures from what has gone before. In this context, it
is not uncommon for notifications of death to be received via social media, some-
times from the death bed, and sometimes months or years after the death. The use
of websites to construct memorials to the dead is now commonplace and Facebook
plays host to tens of millions of memorial sites for dead account holders. Virtual
worlds and digital games like World of Warcraft also now play host to memorials and
commemorative ceremonies, whilst several novel digital products, such as
memorial holograms and services that enable social media posts to be made in the
name of the dead long after death, are emerging.
One way of understanding commemoration and memorialisation is as a set of
practices that in different ways maintain social and material relations between the
living and dead. The eulogy, for example, gives expression to the significance of a
person’s life on behalf of those still living, and the headstone does not allow a
person’s life on earth to pass unmarked. Digital memorials also maintain relations
between the living and the dead, but in significantly different ways. Digital memorials
on websites and social media sites often extend the social interactions between
mourners indefinitely and certainly well beyond the funeral. This continues the
commemoration of the dead and thus continues relations between the dead and
the living, and shifts these relations from acts of private contemplation and intimate
expression to public declarations.
Larger publics are also invited to share in the commemoration of the dead. In
the case of popular social media sites, commemorative participants and witnesses
could potentially number millions of people. These new technologies change what
previously might have been thought of as the separate domains of death as an
intimate experience, and the public expression of death. While communing with
the dead through a soliloquy delivered at the graveside implies a sense of intimacy,
communing with the dead through a post to a publicly accessible website implies
the interpolation of witnessing and the construction of a public. This moves grief
from the private realm to the public sphere. These acts also collectively provide a
context for a new form of posthumous biography to be created. This biography
unfolds over time rather than being fixed in the eulogy, is authored by many
people – intimates, friends and strangers alike – and animates a dynamic and
ongoing relation between the living and the dead.
Through these digital media, the dead maintain a presence in the lives of the
living. The dead often remain our Facebook friends, as contacts on our phone, or
as search results in Google. The dead also persist on digital memorials. Mourners
will converse with one another but also with the dead in a way that gives the dead
an ongoing and active social life in the media-scape of the living. Our under-
standing of the relationship between biological death and social death is challenged
by media that enable the living to animate the dead through online conversation –
or computational processes such as algorithms that directly animate the dead by
automating the dead’s social media posts.
As well as challenging the link between biological death and social death as
necessary and concurrent, the application of some of these digital technologies also
challenges our understanding of the sacred and the profane. Is it profane to send
notification of a death to intimates via a Facebook status update? Is it necessary to
convey the sad news in person, even though many of the deceased’s intimates may
have used digital communications almost exclusively? Is it profane for the funeral
altar to be draped with a football scarf rather than religious iconography; for the
coffin to exit the catafalque and enter the cremator to the strains of AC/DC’s
‘Highway to Hell’; for shrines and memorials to breach the confines of the
cemetery and to spring up on highways and suburban streets all over the world; for
pre-recorded videos of long-dead relatives to be viewed on occasions such as a
great-great-granddaughter’s twenty-first birthday; for funeral ceremonies to take
place on beaches and in public parks and forests; for cremains (‘cremated remains’)
to be turned into jewellery; for the body to be composted and used to fertilise
plants; for crematoriums to capture residual heat from their furnaces to heat schools
and swimming pools?
Digital technologies are part and parcel of this move away from the institutionally
mandated and sometimes rigid protocols that have governed the funeral ceremony,
the conduct of mourners and the final disposition of the body, towards what is
often referred to as a ‘more personalised’ ceremony and form of body disposal. A
response to death that purports to recognise the individuality of the deceased rather
than the requirements of traditions or institutions, and purports to reflect the
characteristics of the deceased’s life and their values, is a response that is authentic
to some, but profane to those who take the view that hyper-individualised
responses to death trivialise the event and lack the dignity and gravitas of tradition.
Where the deceased led a life entwined with digital technologies one might expect
these technologies to play a part in a response to their death, but like the football
scarf, rock-song and compost, this part is likely to be contested.
Understanding digital commemoration

From the mid-90s, as the internet became increasingly popular, scholars from a
variety of disciplines have studied how the dead have been commemorated and
remembered through digital media. Early studies focused on private com-
memorative pages that started to appear on the pre-web internet, as well as on
bulletin boards, news groups and chat rooms, which were also used by the
bereaved to gather around the deceased and seek mutual support (de Vries and
Rutherford, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000; Veale, 2004). Carla
Sofka, for example, noted that the interconnected nature of the web supported
national and transnational mourning practices, like the creation of an internet
sympathy card, ‘for victims and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing’ (1997:
560). However, the most prominent and notable finding amongst this early literature
was that online memorials were not designed and used according to the traditions
of formal obituaries, but were used by individuals to communicate either to a
perceived audience of like-minded grievers, or directly to the deceased (de Vries
and Rutherford, 2004). The sites also functioned as a ‘returning’ space, allowing a
continual ‘point of contact between the bereaved and the afterlife’ (Socolovsky,
2004: 474). These studies identified new forms of memory and commemoration
that were being created, and indeed, some of these practices are still in evidence
today (see Marwick and Ellison, 2012).
The emergence of social networking in the early to mid-2000s only intensified
these engagements as it provided a new communal space for intimacy between
friends and family (Hutchings, 2012; Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, and Pitsillides,
2011). This online intimacy did not stop once an individual had died, with scholars
finding that the bereaved expressed feelings of loss on numerous social networking
sites (Aitken, 2009; Brubaker and Vertesi, 2010; Carroll and Landry, 2010; Kasket,
2012). Myspace and Facebook pages were turned into a space for public mourning
and, in a similar fashion to memorial webpages, the bereaved often returned to post
to profiles of the deceased year after year, as well as update the deceased about their
own life events, such as the birth of a baby or a wedding (Brubaker and Hayes,
2011). People were looking to maintain some sort of connection with the dead
and, as Jed Brubaker and Janet Vertesi note, ‘the dead [were] assumed to still be
active “in heaven” and continuing to amass experiences’ (2010: 3). These memorials
were also regularly accessed by strangers who noted through comments on pages
‘that they either had also lost a friend, they did not know the deceased but were
saddened by the loss, or they distantly know the deceased’ (DeGroot, 2014: 79).
These studies reveal one of the most interesting things that have been found
around these emergent practices of online memorialisation: the bereaved seek to
maintain ties with the dead. While this phenomenon of establishing ‘continuing
bonds’ is not new (Moss, 2004) (consider, for example, individuals who return to a
loved one’s gravesite year after year), what is novel about these online memorials
and social media profiles is the ease with which these bonds can seemingly be
maintained, and the new forms of commemoration and engagement that emerge
through this process. Social media profiles have also been shown to be tightly
linked to the identity of the deceased, and thus the decision to remove a profile
can be a particularly fraught act. Within this broader literature around death and
digital media, a subset of scholars has specifically attended to the ontological issues
around these active posthumous lives online, with many arguing that while
numerous people are biologically dead they are very much socially alive and
somewhat ‘present’ online (Kasket, 2012; Meese et al., 2015; Stokes, 2012).
The above body of work has provided important insights around the com-
memoration of the deceased online, outlining some of the common practices
individuals are undertaking as well as the ongoing issues in the area. However,
there has not yet been a comprehensive survey of how these interactions between
death and digital media have progressed over time, or indeed an overarching study
of how these emergent practices should be understood in relation to wider cultural
and social changes around commemoration and memorialisation. This book is as an
attempt to do so, providing the first substantial review of death and digital media.
In addition to this, the monograph also details a range of newly emerging com-
memorative practices in digital games, through the application of data-mining and
artificial intelligence, and on social media. Finally, the book offers an in-depth
account of how the funeral industries in the US, the UK, and Australia are
responding to the challenges and opportunities digital media offer. With much of
the extant literature around death and digital media ignoring these commercial
elements of death (Sanders, 2012 is a notable exception), this book offers an
important account of how commercial practices work in tandem with emergent
social practices to shape the commemorative digital landscape.
We position the aforementioned literature and our own research in relation to

the wider body of work situated in death studies. In the next chapter, we discuss
this field in more detail, but it is worth noting at the outset the broader trends
emanating from this area. Scholars of death and commemoration have observed
that there has been a shift away from mourning, with commemoration increasingly
functioning as a celebration of a life lived (Sanders, 2009), and religion now plays a
diminishing (but not entirely absent) role in this process (Walter, 2011). The
growing tendency of public mourning (Brennan, 2008) and the production and
maintenance of vernacular memorials (Hartig and Dunn, 1998) has also been
described. These social and cultural developments provide a broader context
for this monograph and directly inform our examination and interpretation of
commemoration online.
Key themes
Several key themes have emerged as we have examined the relationship between
death and digital media. Taken together these themes constitute what might be
thought of as the strands of interconnection that bring death and digital media
together and enable them to lock into one another: the themes are personhood,
relationality, materiality, and temporality.
Important among these are notions of just what it is to be a person, and the ways
in which digital media are challenging and reshaping concepts of ‘personhood’. To
be a person is not a matter of unproblematic biological fact. Indeed, persons are
social, cultural, and legal constructions rather than just biological entities. In many
places and at many times not all humans have been accorded the status of persons,
and not all persons are biological humans. For example, it is clear from the beginning
of the etymology of the Latin persona that personhood did not refer to a singular,
biological human being, delimited by the body. Roman law allowed some humans
to possess multiple personas (citizen, landowner, father), whereas other humans
(slaves, non-Romans) were not afforded the status of personhood at all. Inter-
twined with the ontological status of personhood is the agency of being afforded
that status or denied that status. Persons have agency that non-persons do not have,
and so in the United States, for example, the Supreme Court has afforded corporations
the status of persons in regard to free speech, whereas prisoners, though biological
humans, are not persons in this regard, and so may not, for example, have social
media accounts. Important in the agency expressed by persons is the performance
of social interaction. Persons have social standing, and may interact with other
persons even in the absence of a living biological human. Anthropological research,
for example, illustrates many instances of situations in which dead persons continue
to interact meaningfully with living persons and continue to play a part in the lives
of their living intimates and their community. In this context, where personhood
and a living individual human are not isomorphic contexts, we discuss the impli-
cations of digital media. As we explore, avatars are capable of materialising personas
at a distance from an individual human and can act in digital worlds with humans
and non-humans in ways that have significant social import. We describe numerous
software applications and digital environments which were designed with the
ambition of extending the personhood of individual clients well beyond the death
of the person. The person may be dead in a biological sense, but the social life of
the person continues via pre-recorded social media interventions, and in some
cases, via social media interactions authored by AI technologies. We suggest that
the technology imaginary of these projects redraws the boundary between the
living and the dead in ways that aim to become increasingly indistinguishable, and
at particular points even inconsequential – although, as we explore, these ambitions
are often unrealised, or only partially so, and in a number of ways are not unpro-
blematic. If the persona of the dead can still act in the world through the same
forms of technical mediation that maintain the social life of the living, how can that
entity be thought of within frames and understandings of ‘person’?
A second theme important to our analysis is the relationality of responses to
death, technologies, persons, publics, cultures, laws, social practices and norms, and
all of the other actors that come together around death and digital media. None of
these actors are privileged as driving change, or essentialised in a way that determines
their effect, but rather, change and effect emerge in response to the interactions of
all actors. So we do not argue that digital media by its nature shapes the experience
of death in any particular way, or that changed social norms are driving technological
innovation. Teasing out the intricate threads that connect the actors in a mutually
shaping relationship offers a more interesting and productive approach than
attempting to arrange them in a hierarchy of cause and effect. An example of this
approach is the use of the ‘affordances’ concept – a term perhaps not familiar to
some readers. In brief, the affordances of a given technology refer to the manner in
which the technology acts, contingent upon context. A mobile phone, for example,
may act as a baby monitor, depending upon where it is placed, if a baby is present,
if the phone-plan enables unlimited connection, if the phone battery will last
through the night, and so on. This affordance is relational to all of these things, and
is not the same as the decontextualised technical functions of the phone, such as
the ability to send text, capture images, send and receive the spoken word, and so
on. A closely related concept is the notion of ‘mediation’. Mediation is a concept
developed in science and technology studies and is used in this book to signify a
form of relation in which the mediator reshapes those entities with which it is in
relation, while at the same time reshaping itself. So, in examples to follow
throughout the book, technologies such as newspapers, television, smartphone
apps, social media, and commercial funeral services are not simply expressing our
experience of death in a faithful way, but through their affordances, are actively
shaping our experience of death, while at the same time, our experience of death is
shaping what these technologies are, what they do, and what they mean to us.
Third, we a take a material approach to our analysis of death and digital media.
Death certainly has its ephemeral or abstract elements, most clearly manifest in the
emotions associated with death and with the spiritual or metaphysical interpreta-
tions of death and responses to it. However, death is also an irreducibly physical,
material phenomena, involving a dead body; the final disposition and decomposi-
tion; and among the living, material memorials, legacy artefacts, embodied com-
memorations, and face to face encounters. The materiality of death and the
important immateriality of death come together in commemorations such as the
committal, and in memorials such as one sees by the roadside, or on a website.
Digital media of all kinds are similarly constituted of immaterial elements – symbols,
semiotics, iconography, aesthetics, and meaning, for example, all taking form
through what Hayles (1999) called the ‘flickering signifier’. But these media are
also importantly material, with affordances that depend in part on glass, silicone,
plastic, and ultimately the laws of physics and chemistry. Our analysis is concerned
with meaning and with aesthetics, but is also concerned with bodies and semi-
conductors.
The final element that joins personhood, relationality, and materiality in our
analysis, is the temporal element. Temporality plays a central role in our under-
standing of death and our responses to it and in the relations between actors at the
intersection of death and digital technologies. The memorialisation of a dead
person is a pivotal point in time, oriented to the past – to the story of the life that
has been led, to the biography of the deceased, and to the history of her times, but
it is simultaneously an orientation to the future – to the legacy of the deceased, to
the mark made in the lives of those still living, and to a future in the absence of the
deceased. Digital media participate in this pivotal role, looking backwards and
looking forwards, but do so in a way that in some respects differs from their non-
digital alternatives. Social media memorials, for example, are temporally oriented to
a multi-authored cascading presentism in which a biography may unfold over
years, and is in a sense never complete. Mourning is also extended in a publicly
declared way, and is similarly unfinished. To the extent that digital media afford a
constant present, the death and its memorialisation becomes something other than
a pivotal point gesturing to a past and to a future.
Mapping the field

Responses to death across the globe are spectacularly diverse. Body disposal tech-
niques include fermentation, sky-burials, composting, burning, and embalming.
Funerary practices range from no ceremony at all through to large-scale, month-
long public festivals. Bereavement practices are diverse and include the use of
professional mourners, the wearing of special clothes, and the foregoing of parti-
cular foods. The use of digital technologies is also diverse, and many factors such as
differences in lifestyles, differences in commonly used applications, availability of
infrastructure, technology marketing and pricing, social motivations for commu-
nication and so forth, create different socio-technical landscapes across the globe.
To deal with even a cross-section of global death practices and digital technologies
would be an encyclopaedic project, and so this book responds to this diversity by
focusing on the particular cultural and technical milieus observed in the United
Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. These milieus are very familiar to us,
will be very familiar to many of our readers, have been available to us for extensive
empirical research, are the source of most of the digital applications we discuss, and are
the primary markets for most of the death related digital technologies we examine.
Death itself is also experienced in diverse ways and a key factor in responses to
death, digital or not, is the nature of the death itself. That is, a ‘good death’,
occurring as a consequence of natural causes at an appropriate time – that is, in old
age – is quite different to a violent death, a young death, the death of a celebrity, a
death that is unexpected, or that occurs as a consequence of catastrophe. These
latter forms of death are much more inclined to draw a broadcast media response, a
public response, and sometimes a political response, and in digital terms are much
more likely to ‘go viral’ than a ‘good death’. In this book our examples are in the
main drawn from ‘good deaths’ that intersect with digital technologies, though
some examples of deaths that have occurred in spectacular circumstances are too
prominent to be avoided. In this sense we have not focused on sensational examples
of death and digital technologies, and though some readers may well argue that
some digital innovations are bizarre, we have been more interested in tracking
what is emerging as accepted practice, or may plausibly be argued to become
accepted practice in the medium to long term.
An interdisciplinary approach
There is often confusion about approaches to research and scholarship that are
identified as disciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or interdisciplinary,
and as this book is avowedly interdisciplinary, a word of explanation is warranted.
Disciplinary approaches benefit from the evolution of research and scholarship
that has taken place over many hundreds of years, an evolution that has been
marked by ever increasing specialisation of fields of inquiry, methods, and techniques.
So, for example, what was once ‘Natural Philosophy’, a field of inquiry that included
all of nature and the universe, and used a common collection of broadly applicable
methods such as empirical observation and induction, formal logic and deduction
across this entire field, has now bifurcated into dozens and dozens of disciplines
(chemistry, physics, biology, cosmology, geology, and so forth), which have in turn
bifurcated into still more specialised disciplines such as organic chemistry, solid-state
chemistry, industrial chemistry and so on, each with their own particular fields of
inquiry, their own particular methods, and their own specialised techniques. In the
context of this book, a disciplinary approach might have used the fields, methods,
and techniques developed specifically in cultural or material anthropology, or
media studies, or science and technology studies, or studies of human computer
interaction. An anthropological approach might focus closely on sense-making
among those with experience in death and digital media, and might use techniques
such as extensive periods of participant observation. A media studies approach
might focus closely on the format or semiotics of the media content of memorial
sites, using techniques such as content or discourse analysis. A book using approaches
derived from science and technology studies might be particularly concerned with
the networks of technologies and people that come together through death and
digital media, and might use conceptual tools aimed at analysing the symmetrical
manner in which the technologies shape the experience of death, and the way in
which experience of death shapes the technologies. On the other hand, if the book
was firmly positioned in the human computer interaction discipline, the focus
might be on the design and the performance of the software applications associated
with death, using methods to explore say, the scenarios of use envisaged by the
designers, and the user experience of the technologies. Each of these approaches
may well have produced valuable findings and a useful book, particularly for those
working within the relevant scholarly field, but such a focused approach is not
what informs the present volume.
An alternative is to approach death and digital media from a multidisciplinary
perspective. A straight-forward way of achieving this would be to select one or
more examples of death and digital media, then devote each chapter of the book to
an analysis of the examples, each taking a particular disciplinary perspective, and
each maintaining its points of difference from the others. There is certainly value in
an examination of a given phenomenon from multiple perspectives, but once
again, that is not the approach we have adopted.
Instead, we take an interdisciplinary approach. This approach does draw upon
the multiple disciplinary backgrounds of the group of authors, but rather than
maintaining our disciplinary differences, seeks to problematise the boundaries
between our disciplines, to cross those boundaries, and to create disciplinary
hybrids with an analytic and descriptive power not available to any specific discipline.
The overarching aim here is to speak with one voice rather than multiple voices,
where that one voice has synthesised the mutually shaping interplay of our
respective background disciplines. Anthropology, science and technology studies,
media studies and human computer interaction thus shed their purity as each of us
incorporates different fields of inquiry, different methods, and different techniques.
Accordingly, fieldwork has been conducted at multiple sites that would probably
not be brought together were it not for the interdisciplinary approach. Launching
from media studies we examine the content and publics of online platforms and
memorial sites, but to do so, draw on the ethnographic techniques most closely
associated with anthropology. Anthropological artefacts such as headstones or soft-
ware applications are taken seriously but, influenced by science and technology
studies, are not only taken to be inert indicators of human sensibilities, but are also
taken to be actors that, whilst not human, express agency in their own right.
Human computer interaction allows us to look carefully at the interfaces and
modes of participation invoked by software applications, but also to look closely at
the myriad of actors that shape the experience beyond the user and the application.
And so, drawing from each discipline, some of our fieldwork has been conducted
at funeral industry trade shows held annually between 2014–2016 in the United
States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. At these trade shows we use methods
derived from science and technology studies and human-computer interaction
studies, such as semi-structured interviews with identified key informants and focus
group forums. But we also adopt methods more closely associated with anthro-
pology, and we simply ‘hung around’ with funeral directors, with entrepreneurs
that have developed applications and products, with the staff that work the cremators
at crematoriums, and with funeral celebrants, casually observing their daily routines
and engaging in informal conversation. Our fieldwork has also been conducted in
online memorial sites, at in-game memorials and commemorations, and has used
computational data collection methods related to commemoration practices within
mobile social media applications. Here, hybridising fieldwork and modes of analysis
from all disciplines, we in part perform a content analysis of the text, imagery, and
functionality of the sites, and we examine the user interface, and we extrapolate to
the affordances of the technology, and we link these examples of technologies to
other technologies and other media, and we interrogate the metaphysical and
spiritual underpinnings of the technologies, and we trace the sites back through
historical memorial antecedents, and we map the web of relations between the
people using the site and between the people and the technologies, all of which
provides for a rich and mixed evidence-base.
Important to achieving the hybridity of interdisciplinarity while at the same time
presenting a coherent account in a single voice, has been the simple process of
argument; arguing dialogically, and arguing through successive rounds of redrafting
the manuscript. We authors have argued long and hard about which sites to visit to
conduct fieldwork, which methods to use to capture evidence, which epistemolo-
gical principles to use to interpret that evidence, which examples to use to illustrate
the interpretation we draw, which conclusions to draw from these interpretations,
and which words to use from which discourses to express our account and our
conclusions. The purpose of this argument has not been to reach a consensus
through compromise, but to persuade one another of the value of the position each
of us begins from, and in the process, shifting that position from its disciplinary
origins. To put it more simply, achieving interdisciplinarity is not limited to shaping
and reshaping the words that go on the page, but extends to shaping and reshaping
the application of our own disciplines and our understanding of other disciplines.
Overview of chapters
Our book examines a range of contemporary and historical sites, which allows us
to capture the different ways that death and digital media are interacting today but
also to place these interactions in a meaningful historical and cultural context. In a
similar fashion, our key themes of personhood, materiality, temporality, and rela-
tionality have not just emerged out of our current research but are also being
developed in reference to the emerging body of scholarship focused on online
commemoration, and the extensive scholarly studies of death and commemoration
more generally. Therefore, in the chapters that follow, we report on our findings
about how death and the digital are constituted on social media, websites, in online
games, and in the funeral industry proper, but we also offer a detailed critical
overview of the current state of scholarship in this area.
We begin with Chapter Two, which uses the phenomena of nineteenth century
spirit mediums to introduce the history of a relationship between death and media,
and then goes on to analyse the mediation of death more broadly through attending to
the development of a specialised ‘death industry’. We contextualise the recent popular
narratives around the awkward interactions between death and social media by
showing how new technologies have always carried spiritual resonances, using a variety
of examples, from the telegraph to funeral phonography to make our case. This over-
view also provides a contemporaneous socio-cultural history of commemoration
through which we explore the shift from institutional to vernacular methods of
commemoration, the gradual commercialisation of the death ritual through the
growth of the funeral industry, and the phenomenon of public mourning.
We first engage with digital media in Chapter Three, where we examine the
emergence of online commemoration. This chapter analyses how people used the
World Wide Web from the mid-1990s onwards to remember the dead, and draws
out the features of these websites by comparing websites with gravestones and
headstones. Through this comparative reflection we see the bereaved move from
the brief biographical statements found on gravesite markers to intersubjective and
emotionally charged statements on online memorials, a process that directly impacts
on the personhood of the dead. We also see how the materiality of these different
technologies (from stone to computing) directly shapes the commemorative possi-
bilities available to the bereaved and indeed changes the scope of the potential
commemorative act. This chapter begins the process of exploring the public nature
of online commemoration and examines how a global audience interacted with
these commemorative sites. However, this chapter also attends to the continuities
between these two technological artefacts and so we also show how people were
repurposing funerary traditions and rituals very early on in the life of the web.
Chapter Four continues and extends these conversations by examining one of
the most notable issues surrounding the topic of digital media and death: the
interactions between social media, the deceased, and the bereaved. This chapter
begins by exploring the phenomenon of people dying public and networked
deaths using case studies of two deaths that were deeply intertwined with social
media platforms: the death of Anna Svidersky who was famously memorialised on
Myspace, and the death of Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, who was commemorated
on a variety of social media platforms. Through these studies we see how these
networked forms of commemoration raise important questions about how the
memory and legacy of the deceased is established and indeed ‘policed’ following
death, which in turn hinges on important issues about an ‘authentic’ biography and
the construction of the digital identity of the dead. This leads us to a discussion of
concerns that have emerged in this area, such as the phenomenon of RIP trolling
(where a public commemorative space is defaced); how social media platforms, and
in particular Facebook, manage the digital legacies of the deceased; and how social
and mobile media is incorporated into formal ritualised spaces like funerals.
In Chapter Five we focus on digital games and virtual worlds and show that this
profitable and popular cultural industry has played an important role in extending
commemoration practices through digital media. The chapter outlines a significant

number of commemorative practices that have been undertaken in these spaces:
fans of particular video games are commemorated in the game as a new character,
players of online games create their own memorials for the departed, and many
even hold services for deceased players in the game world. Once again we see a
reinterpretation of familiar funeral traditions as well as clear evidence of players
forming communities and engaging in the sort of ritualistic behaviours around
death that define a community. However, interestingly, these behaviours also pre-
sent a real challenge to existing routines and habits in games and can subvert or
even derail existing understandings of how a game should operate. How, for
example, should players react in an online game organised around violent combat
between clans, when a funeral service occurs mid-game?
Chapter Six examines the funeral industry and outlines how customers and
businesses are incorporating digital media in a variety of different ways, drawing on
extensive ethnographic and interview data sourced from funeral industry con-
ferences in the US, Australia, and the UK. We see how start-up companies are
finding it hard to enter a conservative market where funeral directors still retain a
significant amount of power when it comes to selecting what services are offered to
customers. However, customers are also driving innovative practices by asking for
digital media to be incorporated in their funeral rituals and adjacent com-
memorative practices. Through a discussion of the various stages of funeral plan-
ning – pre-need, at-need, and post-need – we see how death and digital media
goes beyond the terrain of social media to incorporate a wide range of technology
from 3D printed urns to novel forms of disposal, which numerous industry players
see as being the key future site of innovation.
Finally, Chapter Seven looks ahead to the future via emerging technologies that
are pushing the boundaries of commemoration. We consider start-up companies
that aim to produce a life-like avatar of deceased friends and family members, the
use of augmented reality to overlay information on gravestones, in-coffin sound
systems that can be updated through Spotify, and companies that aim to facilitate
sending messages from beyond the grave. These examples tell a compelling story of
innovation around death and digital media, but also more aptly, about what
innovators think commemoration does (or should do). Each invention tells us
something interesting about what could be kept or remembered, and in many cases
raises interesting ethical questions around what should be kept and the level of
interaction we want to maintain with the dead. These innovations are not just
simply narratives of technological advancement but also significant interventions in
our existing understandings of our key themes: personhood, materiality, tempor-
ality, and relationality. We will see how these analytical themes are woven through
all the chapters in this book. They will help us understand how the past informs
present ideas about what it is to die and how relations are managed around death
through a range of ever-changing media and materials. We will arrive at a future
facing point where such changes – from simple elaborations on current practices to
fanciful and quite radical physical and digital innovations around death – keep us
ever hopeful and oriented towards new possibilities, new immortalities, new ways
of being remembered.
Notes
1 blog.cartesian.com/the-rise-of-mobile-phones-20-years-of-global-adoption
2 www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/
2
PRE-DIGITAL MEDIUMS, MEDIA, AND
MEDIATIONS
In 1921 Mr. R. N. Speight, a well-known photographer working out of Bond Street in

London, took a photo of a ghost. This was prompted by one James Douglas, who was very
interested in spirit photography and wanted to know if spirit photography was in fact real. He
thought that Speight was the perfect candidate to conduct this experiment as an ‘expert photo-
grapher’ with no previous experience of spirit photography (Speight, 1926: 2). Intrigued, Speight
agreed to attend a séance at the British College of Psychical Sciences, along with Douglas, an
unnamed Member of Parliament, a Mr. Hope (one of the most successful spirit photographers of
the time), and a medium. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a Lady Grey sent their apologies.
Speight’s conditions were ‘that the whole of the operation should be performed by [him …]
and his conditions were accepted without discussion’. He was then given a small camera that
the group claimed had obtained some of the best spirit photographs. Speight examined the
camera and concluded that it was sound and in precisely the same state as when issued by the
maker in 1896. The photographic plates were also examined and found to be sound, and
Speight noted that he was the sole person to handle them during the experiment. Mr. Douglas
was the subject for the photograph and took his position in front of an ‘ordinary’ grey back-
drop. Before the photograph was taken, the spirits needed to be invoked, which involved hand
clasping and singing hymns. Mr. Hope then made the exposure, with Speight’s consent,
before Speight developed the photograph in the dark room.
While he was watching the photograph develop in the dark room, Speight saw that in
addition to the presence of Douglas in the photograph, a faint but distinct outline of a face
repeated in the background of the image three times. He then attempted to take the photo-
graph again, this time using his own camera and performing the exposure himself. However,
no spirits were evident when he developed these photographs. Reflecting on the event some
years later, Speight noted that the phenomenon had occurred when using a particular camera,
but he did not feel that he was being tricked or deceived. He resolved to keep an open mind
about spirit photography, but also noted that he became increasingly mystified the more spirit
photographs he examined.
Pre-digital mediums, media, and mediations 17
This history of spirit photography illustrates the numerous ways that the dead
have long been mediated through technologies. The recent turn towards digital
commemoration and memorialisation can be seen as a new stage within a longer
term process through which cultural rituals, personal practices, and emotional
experiences of death in the Western world have utilised ‘new’ technologies. This
chapter examines the mediation of death through print, photography, the tele-
graph, film, recorded sound, and television. It attends to shifts in death related
practices since the mid-nineteenth century, including the changes associated with
the mediation of death through increasing professionalisation, medicalisation, and
secularisation. This overview provides an historical context for the chapters that
follow.
Dead encounters with print and photography

Media have been long used in a range of ritualised ways to commemorate and
memorialise the dead: obituaries are printed and circulated in newspapers; cards,
pamphlets, and booklets are circulated around the time of the funeral ritual; and
recently audio and video recordings have become important commemorative pro-
ducts. It appears that Ariès is correct: ‘death loves to be represented’ (1985: 11; also
see Linkman, 2012).
We begin with the example of the newspaper obituary, which developed to its
contemporary form via a variety of discursive forms, before the modern narrative
register was established (Barry, 2008; Starck, 2006). In the seventeenth century,
printed accounts commemorating notable lives and deaths were expansive and
graphic, in some ways foreshadowing today’s tabloid newspapers. For example, in
the early seventeenth century, accounts of deaths appeared in the form of pamphlets
offering ‘lurid’ accounts of ‘witches being tortured and burnt’, introduced by
headlines such as ‘Two most unnaturall and bloodie Muthers’ [murders] (Starck,
2006: 3). By the 1620s, however, a different way of reporting notable deaths
emerged. A 1622 newsbook (a form of popular press that predated newspapers)
narrated the life and death of Captain Andrew Shilling, offering readers a ‘richer
dossier of a life lived than […] the simple chronicling of a death died’ (Starck,
2006: 5). This sort of writing moved beyond the shock and titillation of earlier
writing and sought to give a fuller public account of a life and a death. Another
precursor to the modern obituary saw the production of commemorative elegies of
the deceased, which were not only published in a memorial volume, but were
sometimes attached to the hearse during its procession to the grave for the benefit
of those attending and witnessing (Thomas, 2009: 244).
In each of the seventeenth-century examples above, the obituary provided
something of a biography of the deceased, but also offered religious instruction
drawing out moral lessons from the life of the deceased (Thomas, 2009). Obituaries
were also used as a form of political propaganda. For example, in the 1660s, during
a period of political conflict in England, Royalist supporters of the King were
granted ‘posthumous recognition’ (Starck, 2006: 13). These discursive records of
18 Pre-digital mediums, media, and mediations
their deaths functioned as continuation of Royalist propaganda, and were not

simple descriptive records of a life that had been lived. Through the early eight-
eenth century, an overtly moral and educative tone continued. The publisher John
Dunton, for example, used his periodical The Post-Angel in 1701–1702 to inform
people about death in ways that encouraged ‘spiritual improvement’ (Barry,
2008: 266).
By the 1730s obituaries were regularly being placed in magazines and news-
papers marketed to the middle-class of England, and features common to the
contemporary obituary were in evidence: the telling of a life well lived; a need to
account for the lives of Royalty and other notables; and the narrating of unex-
pected, sensational, or interesting deaths (Barry, 2008). These newspaper and
magazine obituaries made public a narrative that would otherwise be confined to
family and community. While notables like Royals might be well-acquainted with
living a public life and dying a public death, the newspaper obituary broadened the
scope of this public narration to include those whose death would otherwise
remain a matter for the family and immediate community.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, developments in media
further reconfigured relationships between the living and the dead. The development
and subsequent use of the daguerreotype camera (1835–1860), had wide-ranging
implications not only for practices of commemoration and memorialisation, but
also for perceptions of dying, death, and the dead. Perhaps the most notable was
the practice of post-mortem photography, which became common in nineteenth-
century American homes, and to a lesser extent in the UK, with photographs taken
of the dead appearing in frames on many parlour walls (Hallam and Hockey,
2001). The practice of post-mortem photography consisted of professional photo-
graphers commissioned by family members producing a photographic memento of
a recently deceased relative naturalistically propped-up and posed in the home, or
on occasion, moved to a studio to be photographed against an evocative backdrop
(Linkman, 2006). The practice was common across all classes and allowed families
to maintain a concrete visual link to the deceased and to memorialise persons at the
final stage of life, at a time in history when photographs of the living were rare (Le
Goff, 1992; Hallam and Hockey, 2001).
Post-mortem photography thus took its place among a variety of domestic
practices and rituals associated with death. A good Protestant death involved dying
in a Christian home surrounded by loving relatives (Linkman, 2012). After a death,
friends and family would continue to interact with the recently deceased in the
home before burial (Jalland, 1996; Linkman, 2012). People would commonly pay
visits to the deceased, ‘talk to them, pray for them, touch them and say goodbye’
(Linkman, 2012: 17) and children were also important participants in these prac-
tices. As Linkman (2012) suggests, in addition to the memorial functions outlined
above, post-mortem photography allowed individuals who could not attend the
home and participate in these rituals vicarious access to the deceased.
Through the nineteenth century the practice of post-mortem photography
gradually declined and by the mid-twentieth century the practice had almost
entirely abated (Linkman, 2012; Ruby, 1995). After World War I, rather than
images of the dead, images of people in life became the stuff of family memory – a
preference made actionable by the development and run-away popularity of the
box camera, film (to replace glass plates), and commercial developing services.
Funeral photography, however, still takes place through smartphone technology
and social media trends (Gibbs et al., 2015 and later chapters in this volume), and
the display of the body for a ‘viewing’ (in the UK and Australia), or a ‘final visi-
tation’ (in the US) is commonly practiced – though this is now more likely to
occur in a funeral home or chapel rather than in the domestic place of residence.
Communications media, mediums, and the dead

Research linking the realm of the dead with mid-nineteenth century media has
also focused on the role played by mediums and spiritualism (e.g. Sconce, 2000;
Sterne, 2003). The spiritualist movement was first evident in the United States in
the mid-nineteenth century and not long after, in Europe. Spiritualism reached
something of a peak in popularity during the late nineteenth century, but it was
active until the early twentieth century, and certain practices continued well into
the middle of that century. An early and influential example was the 1848
‘Rochester Rappings’ case in which two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, claimed to
be able to communicate with the spirit world through a series of sharp raps (Bennett,
2007). While there had been much conjecture about the possibility of communicating
with spirits throughout the nineteenth century, and many examples of lectures and
public statements recounting stories of contact with spirits, this was one of the first
examples of spirit communication that seemed to be based on evidence (see
Moore, 1972; Delp, 1967), and led to an ‘explosion of interest in spirit commu-
nication’ (Bennett, 2007: 6). The media used by mediums to communicate with
the dead ranged in sophistication from rapping to séances, in which spirits wrote
things down or vocalised their thoughts through mediums who claimed to com-
petently channel the dead (Bennett, 2007; McGarry, 2008; Noakes, 2002; Owen,
2004). At the most extreme, a medium could claim to command a full body
apparition, or produce ectoplasm (Bennett, 2007), a supernatural substance, which
as Arthur Conan Doyle revealed in a 1926 lecture, was a refined form of matter
that needed to be used by the dead whenever spiritual beings wanted to contact
the living (‘Did Raeburn paint Burns?’, 1926: 4).
Spiritualists in the US and the UK also believed that the dead could commu-
nicate through a range of new media, such as the telegraph. The rapping used by
the Fox sisters to communicate with the dead was thought to be similar to the
Morse code, introduced in 1844 only four years before the ‘Rochester Rappings’,
and spiritualists commonly referred to their services as a celestial or spiritual telegraph
(McGarry, 2008; Noakes, 2002; Owen, 2004). Further reinforcing the link, spiri-
tualists also claimed that the telegraph itself was ‘an inspiration from the spirit
world, a gift presented to humankind in order to facilitate communication among
the living and the dead’ (Stolow, 2006: 12).
The telegraph was a potent analogy through which to explain the otherwise
inexplicable connection between the arenas of the living and the dead (Stolow,
2006; Noakes, 2002). For the first time, the telegraph enabled global communication
(Standage, 1998) mediating the presence of distant others. In order to communicate,
one needed to ‘read media traces’ emanating from an absent individual, rendered as
signals not unlike rappings, referred to in the case of the telegraph as dots and
dashes (Peters, 1999: 142). Spiritualists drew a direct link between the telegraph
and the practice of communicating with spirits; ‘talking with the dead through raps
and knocks, after all, was only slightly more miraculous than talking with the living
yet absent through dots and dashes’ (Sconce, 2000: 28). Like the telegraph, med-
iums were positioned as a point of connection between two parties, and like the
telegraph, mediums themselves were understood as media ‘technologies’. Their
bodies needed to be specifically attuned to the communication of the spirits
(Stolow, 2006) and specific conditions for séances were required so that reliable
communications between terrestrial and spiritual intelligences could occur (Noakes,
2002: 129).
As illustrated in the opening vignette, it was also believed that spirits could make
their presence known through spirit photography, a practice which occurred across
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The practice emerged following a
claim by William Mumler in Boston in 1863 that he could photograph spirits
(Natale, 2012: 128). Mumler subsequently opened up a studio and offered people,
for a fee, ‘the opportunity to be photographed in the company of the spirit of
deceased relatives and friends’ (Natale, 2012: 128). Mumler was put on trial for
fraud, but later acquitted (Kaplan, 2008). Spirit photography spread across the
United States and Europe, despite ‘a continual onslaught of dismissals from pho-
tographic experts, scientists and journalists’ (Schoonover, 2003: 36). As Daniel
Wojcik explains, ‘photography was readily accepted as an apparitional technology,
as it allowed spirits to be documented visually, and not merely felt or heard’ (2009:
111) and the spirit photograph joined a growing set of media practices around the
séance room. As technical photographic methods advanced through the nineteenth
century, spirit photography moved from static portraits of the living unmoved by
the presence of the dead, to early twentieth century photographs, which depicted
the body of the medium exuding ectoplasm – a material substance thought to
be the spirit of the deceased, and which manifested proof of the spirit’s presence
(Schoonover, 2003).
The telephone was also viewed as a type of media capable of communicating
with the posthumous world. The ‘unearthly static’ heard by early users of the
telephone ‘presented a dilemma for early listeners, as these noises seemed to be real
acoustic events yet they did not refer to any original sounds in the outside world’
(Enns, 2005: 13). Spiritualists suggested a possible solution: that these noises were
messages from the dead, and that the telephone was a spiritual medium as well as a
medium for voice (Enns, 2005; Kittler, 1999; Peters, 1999). For example, Thomas
Watson (Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant and also a spiritualist) believed that the
telephone was a ‘spiritual machine’ (Enns 2005: 15). He fervently believed that the
FIGURE 2.1Arthur Conan Doyle and ectoplasm in a ‘spirit photograph’.

Source: © The British Library Board. (Source: Cup.407.a.1/ Shelf mark: Cup.410.g.74).
telephone was ‘possessed by something supernatural’, and Bell himself attempted to

communicate telepathically ‘by coiling an electric wire around his head’ (Enns,
2005: 18).
The wireless, or radio, was also enrolled in this connection between unexplained
noise, communication at a distance, and communication with the deceased.
Indeed, Peters has suggested that spiritualism was ‘key to the medium’s very
development’ (1999: 106). Like the telegraph, the radio could transfer sound across
the air through the mobilisation of invisible waves, and it therefore seemed possible
to some that other invisible waves could potentially transfer information between
two subjects (Peters, 1999). The telegraph, telephone and wireless provided
exemplars which served the spiritualists’ aim to provide some sort of scientific basis
for their supernatural engagements. An early spiritualist and pioneer of the wireless,
Sir Oliver Lodge, suggested that the scientific principles underpinning radio could
also be applied to a method by which the living could contact the dead. Motivated
by the death of his son in World War I, he embarked on a series of public lectures
to argue his case: namely, ‘that radio can provide proof of existence with the spirit
world’ (Squier, 2003: 295; also see Douglas, 2004). A more direct method was
proposed by Arthur Conan Doyle who, in 1922, expected that spirits would use
the radio to contact the living ‘in the next three or four years’ (‘Doyle says ghosts
may use radio for spirit messages’, 1922). It was also suggested that mediums might
be able to source ‘private facts about the dead or living’ through telepathic means,
rather than ‘communication with the dead’ (Peters, 1999: 105–106).
The development of the gramophone moves us from the spiritualist movement
and the supernatural per se, but does not take us far from the question of com-
memoration and memorialisation through media. Indeed, as Friedrich Kittler
reminds us, the gramophone was supposed to function as a commemorative
medium from its point of invention. He notes that the phonograph’s inventor,
Thomas Edison, suggested a key use of the gramophone would be to record ‘the
last words of dying persons’ (Kittler, 1999: 12). This technological ideal was also
replicated in popular culture, with the gramophone company ‘His Master’s Voice’
featuring a dog ostensibly listening to the words of his deceased master (Kittler,
1999). During the early years of the gramophone, the novel possibility of hearing
the voices of the deceased, or being heard after death, ‘demanded commentary’
(Sterne, 2003: 289). The telephone and the radio enabled a voice to exist sepa-
rately from a living body, but this voice existed only in real-time as the words were
spoken, whereas the gramophone afforded the possibility of a voice persisting
through time. In this context ‘performers felt obliged to contemplate their own
deaths’ as they performed for ‘the not yet born’ (Sterne, 2003: 297). In this sense,
recording ‘embalmed’ the voice, and we can view it as performing a tripartite
commemorative, historical, and ontological function. The recorded voice became a
way to remember someone, a piece of archival material, and a way for an individual
to maintain their presence following death.
Perhaps the most notable example of the uncanny interactions between this new
recording technology and death was the short-lived practice of funeral phono-
graphy, in which deceased preachers presided over their own funerals. One of the
earliest examples of this practice involved the Reverend Thomas Allen Horne lis-
tening ‘to the singing of his deceased wife on a phonograph and then [recording]
his own funeral ceremony, complete with hymns and sermon’ (Sterne, 2003: xx).
At his funeral his recording was played, but once he had given a eulogy on behalf
of himself and his wife:
The voice of the deceased had evidently broken down, and from the instru-
ment the terrible sound of a strong man weeping and unable to restrain
himself broke out with realistic force and caused a shudder of horror among
those who were present
(Sterne, 2003: 303).
Funeral phonography did not catch on, but recordings of various kinds are now
commonplace and their longevity means we have become inured to hearing the
voices of dead singers, actors, and public figures. These experiences are no longer
uncanny, although recordings of deceased intimates maintained on telephone
answering machines or on video recordings are emotionally charged for many.
Whether uncanny, commonplace, or emotionally charged, each highlights in its
own way how death and new media have become entwined in both our everyday
and ritualised practices.
Spiritualist practices and associated beliefs declined from the early twentieth
century onwards, in historical parallel with the emergence and the gradual rise in
screens as important cultural mediators. The popularity of film and then television
meant that people now had to reckon with death in relation to the moving image,
and media and death interacted in a rather different fashion through the rest of the
twentieth century. Vivian Sobchack (1984: 284), building on the work of Geoffrey
Gorer (1955), makes the polemical argument that people no longer engage with
‘natural’ death experienced in the course of life, but rather with death as repre-
sented in film and television. Through the twentieth century our everyday media
consumption was typified by televised news reports and movies featuring ‘[a]ssasi-
nations, snipings, mass murders, civil violence [and] terrorism’ (Sobchack, 1984:
286). However, when it came to more intimate pictures of death, the cessation of
life tended to be represented by ‘iconic and symbolic signs’ that do ‘not move us to
inspect it’ (Sobchack, 1984: 287).
Foreshadowing our discussion of social and cultural changes around death,
Walter, Littlewood, and Pickering (1995) offer an important counter to Sobchack’s
argument. They note that death is a common feature of the mass media and
so, there can be no real rupture between death and everyday life. They also suggest
that there is a strong emotive element to these representations, which challenges
the claims of Gorer and Sobchack to symbolic representations, and argue that a real
connection can be made between the representation of death on screen, and the
feelings and emotions of viewers at home (Walter et al., 1995). Emma Wilson
(2012) develops this position further through an examination of death and the
moving image. She offers a detailed analysis of feature films, documentaries, videos,
and installations that respond to the dying of loved ones and suggests that rather
than engaging in symbolic acts, these works stand as ‘shifting monuments and
living, ongoing love relations’ (Wilson, 2012: 14).
These examples, drawn from across media history, sketch out a contextual
background from which to examine contemporary interactions of death and digital
media. Media can become central to how people understand, represent, and
engage with their own mortality and with the mortality of others. Our analysis
focuses on significant periods of transition, where ‘new’ media move from being
unfamiliar and strange to a naturalised part of everyday life. Questions of the

supernatural and the role of media in the broader spiritualist movement provides a
stark example of the extent to which media are more than simple tools of com-
munication. Media directly shape how people conceptualise and understand the
world and their place in the world and it is in this sense that media are existential
and not simply communicative (see Sconce, 2000; Sterne, 2003; Peters, 1999).
If media participate in shaping our world, wider social and cultural changes also
shape media, and we turn in the next section of the chapter to outline a series of
important social and cultural shifts in the management of death in Western society.
Mediating death: from institutional to vernacular commemoration

Historical and anthropological studies have debated a range of broad shifts in the
management of death and bereavement since the late nineteenth century. The key
changes addressed by this scholarship relate to the development of institutionalised
medicine and the ‘medicalisation’ of death, the development of a commercial
industry providing professional services associated with death, as well as a turn
towards secularisation and its implications for how people remember and com-
memorate the dead. As a consequence of these changes, the way death is variously
experienced, managed, and marked is mediated by medical institutions such as
hospices, and commercial institutions such as funeral homes, as well as by families,
communities, and religion.
Philippe Ariès’ historical study of death and dying identified a point around the
mid-nineteenth century where society at large started to avoid ‘the disturbance and
the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the ugliness of dying and by
the very presence of death’ (Ariès, 1974: 87). One of the key indicators Ariès
associated with this phenomenon was the increasing proportion of people dying in
a hospital rather than at home, a figure which rose rapidly between 1930 and 1950.
As the twentieth century progressed, this social and cultural change could also be
identified through increased medical intervention in the process of dying, the use
of advanced medical technology, and early disease detection (see Lofland, 1978); a
broad societal shift often referred to as ‘the medicalisation of death’. One of the
core values of scientific medicine is saving and prolonging life, and some argue that
the medical establishment had come to reframe death ‘as an enemy to be defeated’
(Moller, 1996: 26), rather than as an inevitable part of life. Corresponding to this
institutional framing was the way in which the general populace (not just the
medical profession) had come to understand many aspects of life in terms of
avoiding or delaying death. Zygmunt Bauman, for example, has argued that
modern life strategically reconstructs the inevitability of death: ‘Mortality is ours
without asking – but immortality is something we must build ourselves’ (Bauman,
1992: 7).
Central to the growing significance of scientific medicine and its intersection
with death is the development of the medical institution. Throughout most of
recorded human history death occurred most commonly in the home, an
arrangement that changed through the twentieth century to a point where a sub-
stantial majority of people in Western societies die in hospitals, nursing homes, or
hospices. In the UK, for example, approximately 77% of deaths occur in medical
and care institutions while 23% occur at home.1 At a broad societal level, for most
people the home was no longer the most appropriate place for death to occur, in
contrast to the domestication of death in previous centuries. Dying was thus relo-
cated to institutional spaces professionally equipped to deal with dying, and from
there, the dead were most commonly transferred into the hands of another group
of professionals, this time working in the funeral industry. In this institutional set-
ting professionals arranged for transport of the body, a coffin, temporary storage in
a funeral home, display of the body if required, a funeral ceremony at the funeral
home or a church, burial or cremation, and finally a memorial if required.
The gradual professionalisation of the funeral industry also served to distance
death from intimate confines. In the eighteenth century, a perfunctory funeral
was a common experience in Britain featuring ‘overcrowded burial grounds,
drunken gravediggers, body-snatchers … and the sight of bones being carelessly
thrown up from yawning graves’ (Curl, 1972: 22). However by the Victorian era,
an increasingly ceremonial approach to funerals was common (Zelizer, 1978) and
while opulent funerals were common in the past (see, for example, the funeral of
Wellington, or Prince Albert), it was only during this period that the care and
disposal of the dead became ‘a financially rewarded occupational speciality’
(Zelizer, 1978: 594).
By the twentieth century it was common for funerals to take place away from
the home, either in churches, where services were organised by funeral homes and
presided over by a religious celebrant, or in chapels directly associated with funeral
homes themselves, and the more ad hoc arrangements described by Curl (1972)
above became rare. It was now possible for individuals of reasonable means to
receive a professionally run funeral attended by friends, family, and community to
mark the death in a formal fashion. A commercial logic thus entered the organi-
sation of a ritual that was previously mediated by family, religious and community
requirements, and these commercial arrangements led to a growing cultural distrust
of the now professionalised funeral industry. For example, in 1919 the Prudential
Insurance Company funded, published, and distributed a book warning US. con-
sumers of exploitative sales tactics in the funeral industry (Sanders, 2009) and the
rising costs of commercial funerals were placed on the public agenda in the United
States. This was followed up by a 1928 Bureau of Labour Statistics report, which
called for reform within the industry and for a public change in attitude to ‘the
ostentation involved in needlessly high-priced funerals’ (Kopp and Kemp, 2007:
174). However, the most significant critiques of the funeral industry occurred in
the 1950s and 1960s, with a number of popular films, articles, and books directly
challenging practices within the industry, of which Waugh’s novel and MGM’s
film The Loved One and Mitford’s The American Way of Death are probably the best
known satirical examples. Similarly in non-fiction, criticism and suspicion of the
industry was also voiced. For example, Bill Davidson and Roul Tunley ‘accused
undertakers of raising and fixing prices’ (Kopp and Kemp, 2007: 156) and received
significant public support in response.
Despite these concerns, the predominance in the funeral industry of small,
family-run, locally based businesses meant that a relatively intimate, customised
service could still be delivered. However, the organisation of the industry in the
US, the UK, and Australia changed dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s. The
‘largest funeral provider in the world’ (Sanders, 2012: 269), Service Corporation
International, started to purchase a number of small firms in the United States
where the company was based, and in overseas markets such as Australia. Other
large corporations followed, notably the publicly listed Co-op Funeralcare, InvoCare
and Dignity Funerals, leading to a concentration of ownership in this multi-billion-
dollar industry. As a result of these shifts in ownership, a handful of transnational
conglomerates such as the above currently run a significant majority of funeral
homes in the Western world under thousands of locally known brand names. The
commercial reality therefore is that the needs of family, friends, and community at
the time of death sit alongside the ongoing institutionalised need to maximise value
for shareholders.
This commercialisation of the industry has also been associated with a broader
change in religious affiliation and participation and different repertoires for formulating
their ritualised responses to death. While many people have ceremonies at churches
and other religious locations as they have for hundreds of years, contemporary
ceremonies are increasingly secular and are commonly viewed as celebrations of life
rather than occasions to grieve, mourn, and seek solace through religion (see Sanders,
2009). Perhaps the high point in this intermingling of secular and religious ritual
practices was the 1997 funeral of Princess Diana, held in Westminster Abbey, the
very centre of the Anglican Church, presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury,
the head of the church. The religious status of the ceremony is clear, and yet in the
middle of the Anglican funeral liturgy, Elton John performed. To the contemporary
reader this is perhaps unremarkable, but in terms of tradition, to feature a secular
celebrity performing a pop-song as a key element in a Royal funeral in the Abbey,
the centre of the Church of England, was indeed remarkable. These shifts in ritual
and commemorative practice suggest that we are now much more likely to engage
in vernacular rather than entirely religious forms of memorialisation during a funeral,
with biographical anecdotes adding to, if not replacing, Bible readings; the deceased’s
favourite music accompanying, if not replacing, hymns; and coffins adorned with
personal effects rather than religious icons.
These shifts challenge traditional Christian approaches to funerals, which seek to
commend a soul to God and pray for the departed – who was a sinner – rather
than engage in fulsome celebration of earthly lives (Walter, 1997: 170–171). A
more celebratory tone to death is informed by secularising tendencies in Western
society, but is also linked to changes in the visibility of death and the emphasis on
life in ritualised practices surrounding the dead. ‘Dying’ gives way to ‘passing’;
mourning a death gives way to celebrating a life; reflection on a soul’s journey and
tenure in heaven gives way to reflections on a life well lived; and, a ceremony
structured and conducted by clergy according to rituals standing for centuries gives
way to idiosyncratic plans and performances concocted by lay individuals.
Another way of thinking about this move from religious to more secular and
vernacular frameworks is to consider the wide societal shift towards individualisa-
tion. A number of sociologists (Bauman, 2001; Giddens, 1991) have argued that
the construction and maintenance of one’s own biography and hence one’s self is
now constituted as a reflexive individual project. In contrast to earlier social for-
mations, one’s identity and future is no longer firmly tied into family, class, and
community and fixed at birth, but emerges and is shaped as an individual engages
in the life-long work of self-actualisation and self-realisation. People are posited as
individuals who can, and are expected to, determine their own position in life
through these processes of self-actualisation. To the extent that this is true, such a
broad social shift helps to situate these individualistic funeral arrangements as yet
another event in the process of self-actualisation. Indeed, it is perhaps the most
important project, as planning one’s funeral is the ultimate and final way in which
an individual may define their ‘self’ to the world at large.
This does not mean that religion and religious belief are absent from con-
temporary understandings of death. Indeed, Walter (1997: 166–167) argues that
death is now ‘characterised by tension and accommodation between Christian
ideals and secular, rational processes’. He suggests that one way to chart these
interactions is to consider the common cultural presence of angels in vernacular
memorial practice and narratives (Walter, 2011: 30). In a detailed analysis of the
commemoration of British reality TV star Jade Goody, Walter argued that the use
of the term ‘angel’ signalled a significant shift in vernacular understandings of
Christian heaven, and how the dead are constituted as part of this heaven. Namely,
contemporary popular discourse prefers use of the term angel in contrast to the
notion of the soul, which is how the dead have been traditionally positioned in
heaven in a theological and institutional sense (Walter, 2011).
Walter (2011) understands this shift to be significant for various reasons. First, he
suggests that the preference for thinking of the dead as angels rather than souls means
that people are ascribing the dead with a certain amount of agency. While souls rest
in heaven, angels ‘are traditionally messengers between heaven and Earth’ (Walter,
2011: 43). Therefore, it becomes possible through this vernacular formulation of
religion, for the deceased to look over loved ones and care for them, continue
bonds of love with the living, and guide the living. Walter suggests this phenomenon
is not just interesting because of its re-conceptualisation of the deceased, but
because it also points to a theological sophistication present in the largely working-
class readers of The Sun newspaper (Walter, 2011). The example highlights the
importance of attending to popular cultures of mourning as expressed in popular
media, as well as to nuancing this narrative of cultural secularisation across the
twentieth century. In this analysis, the cultural memory of Christianity is still strong
in Western culture, just as it is being reshaped in new and interesting ways.
The co-emergence of vernacular mourning practices and lingering religious
sensibilities has contributed to an increased visibility in mourning more generally.
While public acts of commemoration and memorialisation have always been

common, these were generally institutionally contained at a funeral, at a procession,
in a cemetery, at a church service, through a monument, in a condolence book, and
so on. In contrast, we now see members of the public move beyond these insti-
tutional frameworks to reclaim public space to mourn and commemorate the dead.
Famously, in the days before and during the institutional funeral of Princess Diana,
a range of memorial practices were occurring beyond the walls of Westminster
Abbey on a vast scale: over a million people lined the route of the procession;
millions of people in the UK and billions of people worldwide watched the funeral
on television; makeshift shrines were established in streets where flowers, condolence
cards, letters, poems, and teddy bears were piled metres deep (Brennan, 2008;
Merrin, 1999; Sumiala, 2014). These makeshift shrines included a mind boggling
‘50 million bouquets of flowers, weighing some 10,000 tons, that were laid outside
Buckingham Place and Diana’s London residence of Kensington Place’ (Brennan,
2008: 328–329). As Brennan suggests, the tributes to Princess Diana, along with
the Hillsborough stadium disaster, ‘appeared to mark the revival (and invention) of
half-forgotten customs and traditions’ (2008: 328) that have now captured popular
understandings of how to respond to public tragedy. As we will see in the chapters that
follow, vernacular commemoration and memorialisation continues to draw on these
popular understandings, but crucially, the revival and invention of customs and
rituals are also adapting and responding to the affordances offered by digital media.
Such public, vernacular mourning and commemoration is often extravagant, but
it is not limited to celebrities. The makeshift public memorial stands as a significant
example of a contemporary cultural practice, where, for example, the roadside is
used as a site for the commemoration of victims of road trauma. These memorials
have become common enough to warrant legislative control in some jurisdictions2
and are adorned with familiar markers – a cross, flowers, names and dates, messages
of grief, teddy bears and so on, but also with more controversial offerings, such as a
death resulting from a drink-drive crash memorialised with flowers, candles, and
bottles of beer.3 What is notable for our purposes though, is that these memorials
exist in public spaces outside of institutional structures, and they signal a return to
mourning processes that are more participatory, democratic, and individualistic
(Clark and Franzmann, 2006; Hartig and Dunn, 1998; Margry and Sánchez-Carretero,
2011; Sloane, 2005; Santino, 2006).
Creativity is central to vernacular commemoration and memorialisation. There
is, of course, a long history of religious and secular iconography and symbolism to
draw on and this creativity may be a simple case of strategically deploying existing
icons and symbols in new contexts. Many vernacular memorials feature familiar tropes
such as flowers, balloons, candles, teddy bears, stuffed animals, poems, photographs
as well as materials drawing upon religious symbolism and paraphernalia, such
as angels and crosses (Grider, 2001). These are not simply placed randomly on the
memorial, though, but are instead strategically organised to create an aesthetically
pleasing appearance (Grider, 2001). Vernacular memorials may also involve the
production of creative works such as drawings, written notes, banners, poetry, or
missives directed to the dead (Mori et al., 2012). As we will see in the chapters that
follow, these emerging approaches to memorials becomes increasingly public, with
social media platforms, video games, and websites playing host to a range of creative
memorial artefacts.
Publicly displayed vernacular memorialisation now occurs alongside and in dialogue
with institutional forms of memorialisation. Gravesites, as we see in Chapter Three, are
both institutional and vernacular, and the formal headstone and gravestone formally
mark the final resting place while also providing a platform for informal mementos
left by friends and family. Institutional and vernacular forms of memorial often
speak to different audiences and look to achieve different goals, issues that only
become more complex once we consider the emergent use of digital media for
commemorative, memorial, or ritual purposes.
Conclusion
This chapter has sketched out some of the historical practices associated with death
through the examples of mediums, early communications media, and the recent
institutional and vernacular mediation of commemoration and memorialisation.
Death is an intensely personal and private experience. Bleakly expressed, we all die
our own death, and we all die alone. But death is at the same time social and
public, and the way death is publicly and socially experienced mediates our
understanding of it.
It will come as no surprise that digital media have been mobilised to com-
memorate the dead in the twenty-first century, just as the media of the day were
mobilised in the preceding centuries. Beginning with a comparative analysis of
gravesites and websites in the next chapter, we track these emergent practices and
examine how new platforms and applications are contributing to the changing
practices and rituals of commemoration and memorialisation.
Notes
1 www.endoflifecare-intelligence.org.uk/data_sources/place_of_death
2 www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-04/roadside-memorial-restrictions-considered-by-vicroads/
6520452
3 www.walb.com/story/20163575/questions-are-raised-about-the-presence-of-alcohol-at-
teens-memorial
3
THE MATERIALITIES OF GRAVESITES
AND WEBSITES
Melbourne General Cemetery was established in 1850, covers 47 hectares of land, and
contains the remains of around 500,000 people. Although the cemetery is used as a walking
route, a minor tourist attraction, and occasionally as a film set, it is a site dominated by
memorials of many kinds, and is a space that appears dedicated to the dead. Yet at the
entrance to this fenced-off place occupied by the deceased, a prominent inscription –
‘Melbourne Cemetery. Honoring and celebrating life’ – redirects visitors’ attention
toward lives lived, and emphasises that this place for the dead is also very much for the living.
On one visit to the cemetery I pass through the northern gate and pause by a grave with a
particularly poignant inscription. It is dedicated to two Italian brothers, the Zappullas, who,
the inscription informs, were born four years apart but died in their thirties on the same day –
May 30, 1965. Their conjoined black marble headstones are further inscribed, one in Italian,
the other in English, with an identical epitaph – ‘No mother had two better sons, who
worked together, and died together, each for the other’. Who were these men, what was their
work, and how did they die?
To the left of this evocative memorial is the grave of someone named Harper, also evocative
but in a different way. We know Harper is buried there because the name is inscribed in
marble – but there are no further words; whereas the Zappullas’ inscription provides a fleeting
glimpse into their lives, Harper’s provides no first name, no dates, no family affiliation – just
the stark, circumspect identifier – Harper. Georgie Day lies nearby, and beneath a carved
marble lamb I read that he was killed at the age of fifteen by compressed-air at Melbourne’s
Newport Railway Workshops.
Further down Northern Avenue I pass something quite different – Walter Lindrum’s
grave, quite noticeable as the gravestone is a marble rendering of a billiard table, complete with
cue-ball, billiard balls, and cue-stick laid on the table in the position players use to concede.
Lindrum was several times world billiard champion, and visitors to his grave sometimes leave
a coin on the table’s edge, a common practice in Australian pubs to reserve a place in the
queue to play the ‘king of the table’. The lives of the Zappulla brothers, Harper, Georgie
The materialities of gravesites and websites 31
Day, and Lindrum are all invoked to varying degrees through their graves’ materials, forms
and inscriptions, and onlookers in the cemetery are drawn to notice and invited to reflect on
those lives now passed.
Memorial stones in Melbourne General Cemetery are deliberately made of
robust materials such as granite, marble, and bluestone. Plaques attached to the
stones, in bronze, stainless steel or ceramics, are riveted, screwed, and glued firmly
in place. These are materials selected for their durability, their capacity for enduring
through time, and for carrying inscriptions into the future. The inscriptions are
often highlighted with gold-leaf – the most enduring of metals. Yet cemetery
memorials also age and those made of materials such as brick, cement, or iron show
signs of decay; they have often begun to break down, and stand as a warning of
entropy. These artefacts, which are designed, made and used, materialise or ‘crys-
tallise’ the desires, fears, values, and priorities of particular people in particular
places at particular times (Ihde, 1990). Artefacts – including, and perhaps especially
those produced and used in practices relating to death – are material forms through
which cultural meanings, expectations, and politics are made powerfully manifest.
These artefacts make material, and thus in some sense legible, the otherwise perfor-
mative and abstract contours, patterns, and politics of any given culture. We can
look to these artefacts to interpret or understand how they materialise socio-cultural
and historical meanings, norms, ideologies, practices, and values.
Gravestones and headstones are formed from materials that vary in texture,
weight, colour, malleability, stability, and fragility. Materials are worked into shape in
relation to one another within particular environments and are co-opted in the ser-
vice of memorials whose explicit purpose is to last in perpetuity. Grave memorials,
such as those in Melbourne and in many cemeteries in the UK and USA, have
clearly been designed and constructed to last for a long time – far longer than a single
lifetime. The material obduracy of granite, likely to have been formed over a billion
years ago, stands in contrast to the unstable, frail body buried below, which was once
alive but is now long decomposed. These grave markers are positioned to counter
the transience of the life they mark. A life that has come to an end, but a life that is
intended to be memorialised for generations to come by stone, in a fixed place
within the cemetery at the site of the body. Graves are often not, however, faithful
to human desires for monumental longevity. Granite may exist for a billion years,
but the granite memorial will disintegrate over time. Many of the nineteenth-
century graves in Melbourne General Cemetery are made of less hardy materials:
cast-iron set into hand-made bricks laid with lime-mortar, and though they have
persisted to some degree, they are now crumbling. If not actively maintained, they
decompose in parallel with the decomposition of the deceased body.
This chapter compares these cemetery gravestones on the one hand with the
more recent emergence of online web memorials on the other, tracing the differ-
ences and relations between these forms.1 Web memorials, which are now widely
deployed in Western contexts, currently coexist with gravestones, ash urns, and a
widening array of other memorials to the dead. By comparing these forms, we
analyse the relationships that they entail as well as the ways in which they help to
32 The materialities of gravesites and websites
FIGURE 3.1 Graves at Melbourne General Cemetery.

Source: Photo: Michael Arnold.
constitute ideas around personhood and the dead. Our analysis of these memorials
attends to the social relations in which they are enmeshed and the relationships that
shape the meanings of memorial materials as well as being themselves inflected by
those memorials. Here we recognise that materiality and sociality are always
entwined and mutually constituted.
In the discussion that follows, online web memorials are compared with cemetery
memorials in terms of their performativity, inscriptions, engagement of publics, and
their articulation with or of place, as well as their architecture and design. There
are, of course, significant differences among gravestones and among website
memorials; their variability is important from instance to instance, through time,
and from place to place. Not all memorials in Melbourne General Cemetery are
made of stone, many feature religious imagery and many do not, some memorials
are horizontal, others are vertical, some are very large and imposing, others
minimalist. Many grave plots are now devoid of visible markers, and some are
poignantly marked with home-made wooden crosses, which are especially vulnerable
to decay and may also disappear in decades to come. Hallam and Hockey (2001)
examine varied and changing cemetery memorials in the north of England alongside
the development of highly personalised, distinctive displays whose potency is derived
from their perceived close connection with the deceased. These gravestones – and
especially the displays of material objects, visual images, and written texts that are
composed around them – vary according to historical periods, the age and gender
of the deceased, and also change according to the time of year that relatives and
friends visit to lay flowers or to place small mementos.
Web memorial pages are also varied, for example in their size and particular
visual and textual aspects. Such variation is testimony to the flexible aspects of both
gravesite memorials and web memorial pages, both of which are contextually
adapted and tailored in order to memorialise particular persons. Indeed, there are
significant similarities between these physical and digital memorial forms. Both
websites and gravesites reference the deceased, for example by recording biographical
details. Each form affords interactivity; for example, written messages are left to the
deceased on the grave and on the web, and digital or physical flowers and other
offerings may be deposited on the grave or on the web. Each form also references
places – the gravesite memorial through its positioning and inscriptions, and the
website through references to the time and place of the death, the funeral, the
location of the grave, the place of birth, and so on. Each form is dynamic and
subject to change, either through ongoing intentional modification or through
entropy, and each requires maintenance for its upkeep. Each makes use of text,
image, and architectural features.
However, by focusing on the characteristics that provide website memorials
with their family resemblance, and by comparing and contrasting these
characteristics with those that provide gravesites with their family resemblance,
we are able to concentrate on what we contend to be the important characteristics
and implications of web memorials, and against the background of gravesites,
bring these characteristics to the fore. Digital-age technologies of memorialisation
have now taken their place beside stone-age technologies, and focusing on dif-
ference rather than continuity, in this chapter we explore implications for
meanings and memory making associated with death; how web memorials make
death present to us in a personal way while at the same time institutionalising it;
how the social identity and personhood of the dead are constructed in relation to
the living; and how such social relations are maintained and dissolved after death.
By placing website memorials against the backdrop of graveyard memorials
we intend to draw out the differences that material difference makes, and how
these reflect in particular on our sense of temporality and the construction of
personhood.
The ephemeral and the enduring

Web memorials first appeared in the 1990s through personal sites created and
hosted by families and friends of the dead. These pioneering sites were set up by
those familiar with HTML and with web-hosting protocols, and like a lot of
content on the web during this period, were established by people with a personal
interest in the content, often following the loss of a family member, without a
view to profit. For example, the Virtual Memorial Garden was established as a free
site in the mid-1990s after the death of the founder’s father, and consisted simply
of alphabetically listed user-submitted memorial texts. Similarly, HeavenAddress
was established following the death of the founder’s father. Jonathan Davies, the
founder of the early UK-based site Much Loved explains:
In the mid and late 1990’s I lost both my brother and mother in quick succession.
My brother’s death at the young age of 21 was in particular sudden, unexpected
and overwhelming in shock. I was keen to create some sort of online memorial to
him, a legacy that could show many of his happy years and make it easy for his
school and university friends in particular to view, make contact and to maybe
help develop by sending in pictures and thoughts of their own.2
These early vernacular sites have since grown in popularity and diversified in form,
and now include tribute pages and memorials hosted on specialist commercial
memorial websites.
Some sites remain free of charge (e.g. NeverGone), many sites provide a free
service in which memorials carry advertising or a subscription service that is free of
advertising (e.g. iMorial), and while some sites are financed entirely by subscription
(e.g. HeavenAddress), others are charitable trusts (e.g. MuchLoved). Tributes.com
is one of the more commercially successful sites and is used by hundreds of US
cemeteries and funeral homes, and hundreds of thousands of end users directly.3
Tributes.com web memorials are an example of what is offered by this kind of
commercial service. To quote their website, for a payment of $50, a cemetery,
funeral home, or family can publish ‘unlimited text and photos; custom music;
stunning full-screen backgrounds; enhanced guestbook and social features to connect
with family and friends’, they offer ‘custom video integration; web links, and more;
tablet and mobile friendly viewing’, all of which claims to be ‘permanent – [it]
never expires’.4
These new forms of memorialisation soon attracted the attention of ethno-
graphers and historians, media and cultural studies scholars, and thanatologists more
generally. Roberts began studying what she called ‘internet cemeteries’ from the
mid-1990s (Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000) and Sofka (1997) drew
attention to how online sites could be used for commemoration and social support,
while de Vries and Rutherford (2004) explored the emergence of new rituals and
practices associated with online commemorative sites. Others have examined
online grieving (Falconer et al., 2011; Moss, 2004) and social support (Walther and
Boyd, 2002). Alternatively, interaction designers are increasingly interested in
addressing the many design challenges presented by the development of online
memorial practices (Brubaker and Hayes, 2011; Massimi and Baecker, 2010; Odom
et al., 2010). More recently, scholarly attention has turned away from web memorial
sites, and towards the use of social network sites for memorialising, with particular
focus on the practices of teenagers (Williams and Merten, 2009); a topic we turn to
in the next chapter.
This wide interest suggests that there was something different going on in this
use of new media, despite the continuities evident in the mobilisation of obituaries,
candles, flowers, condolences and the like, sourced from an offline environment
and re-presented in a web environment. One of the important points of difference
recognised from an early period relates to the capacity of the respective materials to
endure over time. For if the stone of the gravesite memorial gestures to material
intransience in defiance of the transience of life, the electronic signals of the web
memorials are transient by their material nature. Web memorials are in that sense
ephemeral and stone memorials intransient, but paradoxically, this energetic, transient
way of being is the very thing that opens possibilities of permanence.
Transience is evident on the web at a number of levels. In contexts that celebrate
‘the New New Thing’ (Lewis, 1999), over 100,000 new websites appear per day,5
while many are discontinued and disappear, despite assurances given to the contrary
by their makers. Heartland Hills Memorial, The Web Memorial, The Garden of
Remembrance, Dearly Departed, Memorial Online, and Remembering the Children
are among the many that are no longer ‘live’ and are now only available, if at all,
through sites that archive the internet. Others are online but have been repurposed
(for example, 1000memories – now a genealogical site rather than a memorial site).
The digital world now inhabited by memorials is technologically and commercially
impermanent by its nature, as the sociotechnical landscape is constantly terraformed
by startups, mergers, bankruptcies, software versioning, hardware upgrades, super-
seded device drivers, unsupported operating systems, new storage devices, new
interfaces, new applications, genuine innovation, and old-fashioned hype. Internet
Service Providers and other internet hosts go out of business, domain names expire,
network protocols change, mark-up languages such as HTML come and go, and
once dominant applications such as AltaVista and Mosaic become redundant. The
software and hardware that provides the material foundation for web memorials are
human artefacts that have relatively short life-spans, and are certainly subject to
more frequent and radical changes than stone.
At another level, the look-and-feel of memorial sites and the affordances offered
by these are updated to reflect frequently changing cultural expectations and values
in the wider online environment, and to recruit new advertising and sponsorship.
On memorial sites there is also frequent change in the content of pages, with
continuously uploaded notes, photos or videos, postings to condolence books and
the addition of digital candles, flowers, and emoticons. Furthermore, although web
memorials might seem stable, the screen content is nonetheless intermittent, it is
composed up of what Hayles (1999: 30) calls ‘flickering signifiers’ – signs and
symbols appearing and disappearing many times a second as electrons energise
pixels. In this sense, the screen space is adaptable to anything, unlike the space of
the cemetery, and though the memorial might occupy the screen at this moment,
it is soon replaced with a video of a rock band, an accounts receivable spreadsheet,
or a YouTube clip of a cute cat.
In these ways, there is a relative impermanence, fragility, and energetic dynamism on
the screen, in some sense reflecting rather than denying the impermanence, fragility,
and dynamism of the lives marked by online memorials. Whereas cemeteries and their
stones aim to resist change in that they seek endurance over time, the screened
web memorials embrace frequent change; the affordances of the media allow the
content of web memorials to shift from moment to moment and from day to day,
and experiences of web memorials are mediated by the hardware and software used
to access them, as well as the vagaries of hypertext links that lead to and from them.
But herein lies something of a paradox. The restless, energetic performance of

digital media and its memorials exists not for the future, but for the here-and-now,
yet in this performance of the here-and-now it does come to exist for the future.
In this sense, it is a monument that is performative rather than declarative, and thus
(paradoxically), has the potential to outlast the stone. The stonemason’s declaration
is arduously performed as the stone is selected, cut, polished, inscribed, transported,
and assembled in place. This single but substantial investment in labour, now
crystallised in a cultural-material stone assemblage, seeks to ensure the legibility of
the memorial for many decades, and with occasional maintenance, for many decades
more. In contrast, the ongoing cultural-material legibility of a digital memorial,
indeed, its very existence, requires an ongoing continuous commitment to labour,
day to day, decade to decade. The unceasing labour of power-stations and the
integrated energies of many networked machines is required for electrons to flow
and for the web memorial to exist. In this digital environment, changing and failing
internet infrastructures, software applications, hardware and commercial structures
are all existential threats to the web memorial, and frequent intervention is required
in order to maintain the memorial’s compatibility and inter-operability in the land
of ‘the new new thing’. But this having been said, if infrastructure does remain
functional, if the digital memorial is translated appropriately and if its compatibility
with new hardware and software is maintained, the digital memorial has a working
life that is theoretically infinite. Unlike the stone, it requires constant refreshment,
and in being refreshed is able to resist entropy. If it is made to exist for the here and
now, here and now, it can be re-made and re-made, ad infinitum.
Inscriptions
Memorial stones and screens both provide sites for inscription. In the case of stones
inscriptions often comprise a name, a few words and significant dates, and at most,
a few phrases or sentences, and perhaps etched images, mounted photographs, and
religious imagery. Such inscriptions are therefore oriented primarily at identifying
the deceased, providing personal and familial names, dates of birth and death, and
perhaps religious affiliation. At Melbourne General Cemetery there are the graves
of those identified as gangsters, Prime Ministers, double-agents, pioneers, actors,
sports stars, and of course the many people whose lives have not been publically
visible but who nonetheless have noteworthy biographies – as indicated through
inscriptions such as the aforementioned ‘… killed by compressed air…’ and ‘…died
together, one for the other…’.
The relative austerity exemplified in inscriptions at Melbourne General Cemetery
emerged in the early twentieth century (Kearl, 1989: 46), when gravestones tended
to become more uniform and to simply bear brief ‘bureaucratic summaries’ of the
deceased (Kearl, 1989: 51). This was perhaps a response to death on an industrial
scale during World War I, and a desire for an expression of ‘equality in death’
made manifest in the designs adopted for war graves (Kellaher and Worpole, 2010).
Inscriptions on many present-day gravestones, sometimes reduced to a single word,
provide strangers to the deceased (but perhaps not a family member or friend) with
few clues, prompts, or props that might guide their response to the memorial and
thus to the deceased. In such cases, grave inscriptions provide links with the dead,
but offer relatively few details of the lives that they lived. However, this circum-
spection also defends the privacy of the deceased; by remaining silent on the lives
lived, graves and their inscriptions might signify much to friends and family, while
communicating little to strangers.
In contrast web memorials regularly consist of extensive inscriptions that range
across many media and genres. At their most extensive, web memorial sites may
present thousands of words of biography, images, poetry, extended narratives and
anecdotes, music, and video clips. Memorial sites buzz with sensory and emotional
stimuli that provide multiple invocations of lives lived.
An analysis of the inscriptions used on 276 North American or British web
memorial sites (Roberts and Vidal, 2000), and 244 British memorial sites (de Vries
and Rutherford, 2004) indicated that ‘storytelling’ was the predominant form of
textual memorial. In these stories, told through third-person narrative, the deceased
figured is positioned as protagonist. Though not as common, direct expression of
grief to the deceased using the first-person pronoun was also in evidence – a
practice much more common now on social media platforms, as detailed in the
following chapter. De Vries and Rutherford’s study (2004), though conducted only
a few years later, identified ‘letters to the deceased’ as the most common form of
web memorial text, followed by stories about the deceased, more formal obituaries,
and tributes both formal and informal.
The move towards using text in a direct, subjective, and personal form of con-
nection to the deceased was thus in evidence early in the history of web media.
Also evident at this early point in the development of the internet is the expansive
yet selective use of text and image to construct a biography, a media resource
extending well beyond that provided by a newspaper obituary or funeral eulogy.
Users of digital networks are accustomed now to expansive autobiographical practices
commonly referred to as ‘typing oneself into being’. This subjective and inter-
subjective phenomenon is most closely associated with social network sites, but
older web memorial sites were among the first to provide (semi)permanent, (semi)
public biographical media for the construction and representation of the deceased.
As a genre, stories about the deceased are directed at an audience made up of
friends, family, acquaintances, community and perhaps society at large, whereas a
message directed at the deceased in person through a first-person monologue may
well have in its sights a more restricted and intimate public – perhaps comprising
the author alone, and perhaps those witnesses known to visit the site, and known
to both author and deceased.
In this way, the message to the deceased is both self-consciously intimate and
self-consciously public. It represents, however imperfectly, one side of the ima-
gined inner-dialogue that might occur between a grieving person and the deceased.
But while intimate, it is also knowingly witnessed. Unlike the graveside thoughts,
but like the eulogy and the obituary, the witnessing of the web inscriptions by an
intimate public and perhaps by a broader social public, is important in the posthumous
construction of the deceased’s personhood. The intimacy of the first-person pronoun
so often found in online inscriptions and condolences reflects and reinforces the
writer’s personal construction of the deceased’s personhood, and the witnessing of
this personal construction also contributes to a public construction of this person-
hood. And as we shall see in the following chapter, this genre of intimate, public,
intersubjective inscribing has been carried still further with the appropriation of
social media affordances.
Recognition of visitation to a gravesite is not directly afforded by the memorial,
except that the gravestone and headstone provide a platform for marking visitation,
often through the placement of small stones or flowers, or in some cases, teddy
bears, bottles of whisky, and other items thought to be personally significant.
Recognising and marking visitation to a particular web memorial is encouraged
through direct solicitation to light a candle, give a flower or other emoticon, or
leave a message in the condolence book. Recording these traces of visitation is an
important affordance of the memorial site. In this way the web memorial positions
itself as a social centre for a particular intimate public; those who are grieving, and
those who would hope to console the grieving. Rather than a place where this is
internalised through quiet contemplation, the website invites expression, and
through its condolence books, word cloud presentations, messages and emoticons,
publishes answers to the questions of what others are thinking, and what others are
feeling.
Of course, not all web memorials do answer the questions. Indeed, a great many
web memorials have no content whatever, aside from the minimum information
required by site administrators to establish the memorial. This, one might think, is
the web equivalent of the grave simply marked ‘Harper’, but while Harper’s grave
might convey a sense of dignity in its austerity, there is something more poignant
in publishing to the world a condolence book with no condolences, a message
book with no messages, a visitor’s book with no visitors, a photo album with no
photos, and a candle display with no candles to display. The website affords the
sharing of stories, letters, condolences, photos and what have you, but when
absent, these same affordances frame their absence in a pitiable way.
The inscriptions on a gravesite memorial may be concise, but they too are
important, and serve to mark the personhood of the deceased, and often to position
the deceased in relation to social structures and institutions of long standing. Social
identity and social position is marked after death by the family’s selection of
inscriptions, grave design, grave decoration, and grave position. Like web inscriptions
they go some way to telling us, the visitor, something about what family members
value generally and, more particularly, what they valued about the deceased. The
inscriptions in Melbourne General Cemetery very commonly begin with the
affective phrase ‘In Loving Memory of’, or sometimes ‘Sacred to the Memory of’,
then name the deceased, refer to the deceased in relation to immediate family, and
then perhaps religious affiliation, place of origin, and ethnicity – often through
inscribing the place of birth and indirectly, through the choice of memorial
architecture. Date of birth and date of death is also very commonly inscribed. Less
common, but where relevant, membership of institutions such as the Masons, Rotary,
or the Armed Services may be noted, and occasionally the profession of the deceased is
recorded, particularly for members of the church, judiciary, and legislature.
The person is dead, but their place in society and its institutions and structures
remains marked on the grave. Social position continues after death, even if social
life does not. The inscription first marks the social place of the deceased by pro-
viding a name, and very often, a full name, presumably to reduce any ambiguity. It
is telling that where nicknames are also inscribed they are often in parenthesis, and
thus the name by which the person was affectionately known yields to the name
by which he or she was lawfully known. The inscription of the date of birth and of
death, often reinforced by also inscribing the age at death, provides an objective
and precise historical and temporal context for the life lived. Often occupying most
of the inscription is the deceased’s position in the family structure. In the case of an
older person, the surviving spouse is often named, along with the names of each of
any children and each of any grandchildren. Younger people are often positioned
in relation to parents, grandparents, and siblings. The deceased is positioned in
relation to institutionalised religion through carved iconography and/or quotes and
prayers from holy texts, by the grave’s denominational ‘compartment’ within the
cemetery, or by the absence thereof. The common inscription of place of birth and
sometimes place of death speaks of the significance of place and of displacement
among the deceased buried in Melbourne General Cemetery, almost all of whom
were migrants or the descendants of migrants. Inscriptions such as these speak of
the past world of the deceased – to family links now severed, dates and times now
gone, places far away, relatives who may also be dead, and sometimes to religious
institutions now gone, such as the Methodist or Presbyterian Churches. In so
doing, the grave’s inscriptions remind the present world of the deceased, and do so
in a way that is outward looking and objectified; outward looking and objectified
in so much as the inscriptions position the personhood of the deceased in the
context of important and ongoing social institutions not of the deceased’s making –
family, religion, place, and time. The defining characteristics of the memorialised
person do not inhere in the person’s subjectivities or intersubjectivities, unlike
many web inscriptions, but inhere primarily in the person’s objective social rela-
tions. If the web memorial inscribes the personhood of the deceased through
stories, letters and photos, the grave inscribes their personhood through name,
family, place, religion, and time.
Publics
Like gravesites, web memorials also pay due regard to family connection, dates of
birth and death, religion, and profession, but in addition to this objectified, struc-
tured orientation, web inscriptions serve to position the deceased in a network of
subjective and intersubjective relations. The deceased is not only linked to family
members in structural terms, in terms of a position in a social institution – as the
father of…, the daughter of…, the grandmother of…, born on this date, died on
that date, and so on – but is linked to family and to times in affective ways, sub-
jectively rather than objectively, through stories, anecdotes, and images. The text is
often dialogical rather than formal, particularly in ‘condolence’ and ‘tribute’ pages,
and as mentioned above, the deceased is often addressed directly, in the first
person, rather than simply being publicly identified and introduced. On one level
the first person address common on web memorials may not be so different from the
intimate, informal utterances of loved ones who may privately speak directly to
the deceased at a graveside, or the somewhat more public conversations they may
have about the deceased at the dinner table, but the way this is performed online
through publicly accessible condolence and tribute pages interpolates a sizable and
often participating living public, and is another difference that makes a difference.
The inscriptions on the web memorials will often be authored by many people.
Family and site administrators may well retain editorial control over the web
memorial, but family members, intimates, friends, workmates, acquaintances and in
some case strangers, will each be invited to contribute to the inscriptions through
condolence and tribute pages.
Web memorials that utilise affordances to interpolate public networks of friends,
workmates, acquaintances, and interested strangers through the condolence book,
and through anecdotes, biographical vignettes, poems, music and images, provide a
subjective and intersubjective context for representing the personhood of the
deceased. This sometimes extensive use of multimedia in memory of the deceased
is informal rather than formal, interpolates the social agency and biography of the
deceased over and above position in a social structure, and is in this way subjective
and intersubjective rather than institutional. For example:6
As the days go by I have had opportunity

to reflect on our life together.
There’s so much to tell.
Not much I can say.
We had some good times did’nt we.
What is known about us is’nt a fraction
of the shit we pulled off.
And we were reckless and there are hurt feelings,
but we could’nt make everyone happy.
But you always tried to make me happy.
We always knew we loved each other
and if anyone ever doubted that I’m telling it now,
we loved each other
and did’nt have to prove it to anyone.
Thank you Mike for a wonderful life
that I would’nt trade for anything.
As good as it got, it also got that bad, but the
make-up sex was worth it.
Headstone inscriptions are generally authored by next of kin, but at a funeral

others among the bereaved are often invited to make inscriptions in a condolence
book, and the web condolence book inherits this social and intersubjective function.
Indeed, web condolence books contain many messages expressed in traditional
form, such as ‘My sincere condolences to your family’ and ‘my thoughts, and my
prayers are with the family and friends’, and the like.
But this is not to say that the web condolence book is doing exactly the same
thing as the traditional condolence book, using a different medium. Utilising the
affordances of software, some web memorial sites offer algorithms to assist in the
semi-automated composition of condolence messages. The founder of HeavenAddress
explained in interview that its semi-automated condolence composer (and also
animated word-clouds, click-to-give flowers, candles, and the like), are convivial
affordances for a generation that is more comfortable with spontaneous expressions
of emotion and empathy, rather than the more laboured forms of expression evident
in original composition or material gifting. In this view, the site is not trivialising
condolences, but is providing a culturally specific means to express authentic
emotions.
Another point of difference is that traditional paper condolence books construct
at least two categories of the bereaved; intimates (close family and intimate friends)
and then others (friends and acquaintances), and in the case of public figures; inti-
mates, others, and members of the public. The paper condolence book gathers up
the consoling comments of others (and perhaps the public), and directs them at the
intimates of the deceased. It is the living intimates of the deceased that receive
condolences from living others, and bereaved intimates are the key readership.
Online condolence pages also do this, but in a departure from their paper ante-
cedents, and perhaps reflecting the broader social function of the web as a com-
munications medium, often direct condolences at the deceased, a point also taken
up again in Chapter Four:
Hey Anna, It’s so great to see how much love you have. You’ve touch so many
people, including ones who didn’t know you personally, like me. I’ve been going
back to your videos and myspace page every once in a while for almost 4 years
now. I feel like I know you and I’ve never even met you. You are a special girl
and will be remembered forever. Something about you, Anna, keeps everyone
coming back…Say hello to my grandma, would you? Lots of love, Micky
(Web Condolence Book, Anna Svidersky)
In another important departure, the web condolence book is open to the public
indefinitely, for both contribution and for perusal. In this sense, the web-based
memorial is a communal place that actively denies the notion of being alone. The
gravesite memorial has often been and in some cases still is a lively place, but a
grave at the Melbourne General Cemetery is for the most part treated as a place of
quiet contemplation, to be experienced alone, or in small intimate groups. The
web memorial on the other hand, with its open condolence book, tribute page,
guest book, photos, music, videos, candles and flowers, and on some memorial
sites, numerous advertisements for diverse services including charities, genealogical
sites, psychic support services, legal services, cemeteries, funeral homes and funeral
director services, is visually noisy and busy rather than quiet. Even after the flow of
new contributions slows down with time, many websites provide plenty to read
and see for the visitor, embedded, as it is, in a stream of links that may involve
other sites of the same type, or something else entirely. And yet, turning this on its
head, these otherwise busy places can in many cases be locked by privacy settings,
to be visited only by those with permission, and the memorial page itself is
uncluttered by the memorials of other deceased people, while with few exceptions,
graves are open to total strangers who can ‘browse’ the cemetery at will. Though
in principle every webpage is connected to every other webpage through a few
degrees of separation, the web memorial page is ‘disconnected’ in that it is
occupied by one memorial site at a time, and thus our metaphorical field of
vision is occupied by that memorial alone. From this one could suggest that the
online memorial page never stands for more than the person memorialised within
it, while the physical grave, along with our field of vision, extends itself well
beyond the individual life it memorialises. A person who has lost someone to
war, for example, might quietly contemplate a field of identical gravestones and
thus remember their loved one in the context of the war for which that person
and so many others died.
The architecture of the graveyard is materialised as each grave stands next to
another, and another, and another. The meaning of each grave is derived not only
from that grave and its personalised inscription, but also from its hermeneutic
relation to its neighbouring graves – a significance marked not only by the military
but also by the practice of dividing cemeteries into ‘compartments’, each representing
a religion or denomination. Most web memorial pages are not hermeneutically
contextualised as is the military cemetery, or the community cemetery, for although
linked to others through network architecture, the deceased’s memorial page is not
among others, and sits alone on the screen. Connected nodes are not co-present in
the sense that neighbouring graves are co-present.
HeavenAddress has responded to the relative individuation of the web memorial
page by presenting itself as a ‘memorial community’ and in interview, HeavenAddress
attribute their self-reported high repeat visitation rate (42%) to its community-
based ethos. Accordingly, though individual memorials have their own page, they
may also join and be semantically linked together in community groups, of which
there are many – Australian Defense Forces, supporters of the Australian Cancer
Research Foundation, the Indo-China Chinese Association of NSW, and so on.
According to HeavenAddress these ‘community groups provide an outlet for
families to share and move through their grief experience together’. For example,
photos posted by one member of a community (say, of a soldier among a group of
his comrades), may well be of emotional and historical value to others in the
Australian Defense Forces community. To facilitate this sharing the site thus groups
community memorials together, on a scrolling screen, and provides for messaging
and live chat among members of the community. In making this decision Heaven-
Address has turned away from the religion-based compartments that organise the
topography of Melbourne General Cemetery and many others, perhaps reflecting
the desire people have for community – particularly at a difficult time – and maybe
also reflecting the contemporary difficulties organised religion faces in playing a
bonding role at the centre of community.
Place
Gravesite memorials are of course fixed in geographic place, and this place derives
its considerable personal and cultural significance from the fact that the body or
ashes and the memorial are collocated. The body and personhood have been
collocated in life, and the place of disposal of the body or ashes inherits something
of the personhood formerly located in that body. Personhood may no longer be
materialised in the body, but may now be materialised in a place that, like the
body, can be visited and nurtured.
A related subtext of memorialising the actual place of burial or the place where
ashes are scattered is to memorialise the location for ‘a return to nature’, or more
abstractly, a return of a life to something much larger than a life (Kera, 2013).
There is a Christian tradition to this (‘from dust to dust’), but many other traditions
also return the body to nature, through burning, sky burial, water burial, fermen-
tation, dismemberment, and so on. The act of returning the body to nature may
vary in significance and form from case to case or culture to culture – it can be
shaped by ecological concerns (as in the example of increasingly popular woodland
burials) or religious edict (as in Hindu burning for rebirth). The contemporary
‘return to nature’ ethos that accompanies many other concerns at death would
seem to bridge religion and have survived secularisation, and for those who opt for
the burial of corpses or ashes, or the placement of ashes in a columbarium, the
memorial importantly marks the spot where this return has occurred. As suggested
earlier, in the case of web-based memorials the memorial and the body are radically
disconnected – they are not only in different places, they are in different spaces.
Though the place of internment derives much of its significance from the pre-
sence of bodily remains, still, the particular place chosen for a memorial may well
be important. Long-standing residents may be disappointed if the local cemetery is
full. Family plots co-locating multiple bodies and their memorials are valued.
Families transport bodies around the world, often at considerable expense, to be
interred in a particular place. Families also transport ashes from place to place, and
the mobility of ashes, together with their divisibility, may well be part of the reason
that cremation is as popular as it is in societies marked by mobility. Within cemeteries,
place also becomes significant. Some locations within the cemetery are more
desirable than others, and as is the case with many things, desirability is monetised,
and real estate with a view or with prestigious neighbours is valuable, even in
death. For example, properties (burial plots) at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los
Angeles have starting prices from US$4,200 in some sections, and US$24,000 in
others,7 with a family mausoleum in a prime location costing around US$825,000

per plot.8 In Melbourne General Cemetery a private section of the mausoleum
designed for an extended family and capable of housing twenty-four caskets has
sold for AU$1.1 million.9 Many cemeteries delineate internal neighbourhoods
according to religious affiliation, and some have done so on the basis of race.
Ashes may be kept in the home of a family member, or more recently, transmo-
grified into keep-sake jewellery to be worn on the body, or are scattered in places
significant to the deceased, to the family, or to the culture. In most cases travel is
required to visit these plots and special places, and indeed pilgrimage is often
encouraged by families, institutions, and cultural imperatives.
The journey to the memorial may in itself be significant, particularly if long
distances are involved. Visitation is thus ritualised though routine occasions that
require at least a small degree of planning. In past times and other places graveyards
were very much everyday places, visited routinely in the course of everyday life,
rather than ritually. Graves were in churchyards, and were visited not only in
mourning, but in the course of routine Church services and for joyful ceremonies
such as weddings and christenings. Cemeteries also functioned as parks, which
Victorian era families visited for picnics and for healthful walks, and today cemeteries
such as Highgate, Hollywood Forever, and Pere Lachaise are tourist attractions.
Indeed, Melbourne General Cemetery has regular guided tours and night walks
organised around themes such as crime, pioneers, or politics.
Similarly, website memorials take their place in the context of everyday life.
Indeed, memorials to the dead on early websites were not always marked off as
dedicated places but sat side by side with the profanity of everyday concerns and
events – as illustrated by the copious advertising carried on early memorial sites
such as MyDeathSpace.10
Certainly, MyDeathSpace was never known as a particularly respectful site, but
even so, advertising has been and still is part of the business model of some web
memorial sites that do have respectful pretensions. Using a person’s memorial as
‘click-bait’, then framing it with advertising is of course contentious, and Derek
Goh, the founder of HeavenAddress was motivated in part to set up HeavenAddress
when he found his father’s web memorial was used to carry advertising for teeth
whitening and weight loss products.
Even if memorial pages are not explicitly framed by profane and mundane
advertising, and even with a screen dedicated entirely to commemorating the
deceased, the memorial site is visited in the same place, that is, on the same screen
with the same browser window, as entertainment sites, worksites, chat sites, and so
on. With the click of a mouse the place which contained grandmother’s memorial
becomes the place that contains a porn video. The attempt by web cemeteries such
as Tributes.com, ForeverMissed, iLasting, or HeavenAddress to locate their memorial
pages within a place dedicated as a cemetery lacks obduracy and is subverted by the
transience implicit in its construction from electrons and its network architecture.
Although the gravesite memorial is also heterotopic, it is at least fixed in a place
dedicated to commemorative purposes. Memorial sites such as those mentioned
above attempt to reproduce the sense of a dedicated place through website design,
such that the memorial pages and their content appear in a context that is self-
reported as ‘peaceful’, ‘dignified’, ‘comforting’, and so on. However, the memorial
site itself lacks a dedicated frame and must take its turn to displace heterogeneous
content to occupy the browser window and to occupy the screen.
My screen is in a particular place at any given time, but a web-based memorial is
of course online, and is thus every place and no place. The site comes to me, no
travel is required to visit the site, and visitation may thus be casual or spontaneous
rather than ceremonial and planned. The notion of a ‘pilgrimage’ to a website is a
non-sequitur. And so HeavenAddress, Australasia’s largest web memorial site,
which mediates the presence of over 1.5 million pages of memorials, does so on a
mobile phone via an Android and iOS application. You can ‘keep your loved ones
by your side’, as well as in your pocket. The particular instantiation of ‘place’ in a
networked architecture also means that web memorial companies such as Heaven-
Address are able to increase market share by buying out other web memorial
companies and organisations (as is very common in the dot.com sector). Many
thousands of memorials have thus been transported overnight from their previous
‘place’ on the web, identified by its URL, its template colour-codes, site branding,
navigation methods and other affordances, and relocated to a new organisation, a
new URL, and with a new look and feel.
Not by coincidence, web memorials are also evolving concurrently with infor-
mal, relatively temporary vernacular memorials that are not located in cemeteries.
Many deaths are now not memorialised with a headstone or plaque, rather, family
and friends choose to scatter the person’s remains at a site that had some meaning
for them in life – a beach, a garden, or even the site of death (Clark, 2007; Doss,
2008). The site itself, the place where people lived or died becomes imbued with
significance, and following this logic into the online world, the sites where a
person ‘lived’ with their social network becomes the place of significance where
this social network chooses to remember – as will be further discussed in the
chapters to follow on social media, virtual worlds, and gaming sites.
It is also the case that web memorials often evoke geographic place, and gravesites
often connect to websites. Websites connect to geography through memorial
cemeteries that explicitly reference naturalistic real-world imagery of forests, beaches,
and so on as the site’s overarching aesthetic, and through individual web memorials
referencing events situated in place and time – the place and time of birth and of
childhood, the stories that are told of the deceased and the places they occurred, or
the specific and situated events that connect the mourner with the deceased. In a
material sense the web memorial may be anywhere and everywhere, but in a
semiotic sense many go out of their way to reference places. They are thus located
in the analogue world as well as the digital, and connect to a life that was embodied
and grounded in place even if it was substantially lived online. Anchor-lines of
connection also work the other way, and gravesites are connected to websites quite
explicitly, through the online indexes and databases that map and place particular
graves within cemeteries, and cemeteries within towns and cities; through
cemetery websites that advertise their services and their features; and, as we discuss
in Chapter Six, through forms of mobile and locative media technologies.
Architecture and design

Differences between graves and web memorials in material construction, inscription,
and location in place, are further reinforced by the relatively limited repertoire of
grave architecture and design, in comparison to the broader palette available to
web memorial designers. Even though in the cemetery a choice is offered in terms
of stone, stone finish, headstone shape, inscribed text and decoration, and inscription
font, and even though grave design draws on the language and aesthetics of different
cultures and the architectures of different historical periods – Religious, Gothic,
Greco-Roman, Neo-classical, Victorian, Art-Deco and so on – at Melbourne
General Cemetery, and more so at cemeteries with very strict protocols, a limited
range of stonework architecture and inscription occurs over and over again. The
cemetery memorial requires the participation of institutional stakeholders. In Australia
and the UK this is the trustees of the cemetery (in the United States, the owners of
the cemetery) and funeral directors, monumental masons, and so forth, many of
whom impose strict rules governing monumental styles and materials, similar to
those a body-corporate or council may apply to houses being built in the new
estate. Through advice and through regulation these institutions play a shepherding
and gate-keeping role, and the approval and the permission required of professionals
and administrators adds a further layer of constraint. Innovations in monumental
technologies have been important in opening up the options for the diversity dis-
cussed in Chapter Six, and for the individuation of traditional memorials, but have
been infrequent and relatively limited compared to changes in web memorials, as
would be expected given the relative formality and conservatism of most cemetery
memorials. Important innovations in the design and construction of cemetery
memorials in the twentieth century have been the introduction of electric tools,
sand blasted etching, CAD software design, composite stone, and laser cutting.
Each has facilitated and extended the range of customisation possible in gravesite
memorials, but the progress does not approach the very rapid rate of innovation in
web-based technologies, and thus the range of design options available for web-
based memorialisation. Personalisation of the grave would certainly seem to be
important for some; Walter Lindrum’s ‘billiard table’ grave mentioned at the
beginning of the chapter is a good example of this, and a degree of individuation is
important for all graves, even if only for the identification of the deceased.11 Yet,
despite the profound importance of the individuality of the deceased for family and
friends, with few exceptions, any given grave is common enough to be unre-
markable, most are mundane, and if not for the name on the inscription, are from a
design sense, interchangeable.
Constraint is also evident in website memorials, but arguably to a lesser extent,
where the online memorial is still novel enough in itself to be remarkable for
some, where traditions have not had time to bed down, and where socially
appropriate forms and styles are still emerging. Like the grave, the website memorial
also requires the participation of institutional stakeholders – in this case memorial
site administrators, web hosts, and domain name providers – but their gate-keeping
role is limited in comparison to graveyard memorials. Memorial websites draw on
the traditions of the funeral and the cemetery in many respects, but they also draw
on the architecture, design traditions, language, and aesthetics of website design
rather than building architecture. The earliest online memorial sites resembled
newspaper death notices in their presentation, in so much as they were alphabetised
lists of names of the deceased followed by a sentence or two of plain text. Through
the late 1990s as the use of HTML became more widespread, free HTML editors
were widely available, and then a ‘what you see is what you get’ webpage editor
was bundled with Netscape 3.0, the most popular browser of the day. These
sociotechnical innovations invited people to make their own webpages as well as
surfing other people’s pages, and webpage design and architecture became more
ambitious – in many peoples view, too ambitious. Tables enabled webpages to be
sectioned, uploading images became far easier, animated GIFs proliferated, Java-
Script libraries built into editors allowed forms to be more easily constructed, and
guest-books became a feature. Consistent with this, memorial sites moved from
plain text to sites that featured extensive text in multiple fonts, informal photo-
graphs of the deceased, sometimes garishly coloured backgrounds, clickable links to
other sites and other memorials, advertising, animated gifs of candles or flags,
intrusive music, video, emoticons, slide shows, and so on. In this way, some earlier
web memorials resembled the jumble of some roadside memorials and can be
considered as vernacular, and like the vernacular memorials discussed in the pre-
vious chapter, many memorial webpages were constructed by amateurs using the
affordances provided by the site (see Figure 3.2).
Professionals are not required, releasing individual memorials from some of the
institutional constraints that apply to cemeteries. Site administrators do however
constrain the design possibilities open to particular memorial sites, for example,
templates that overlay all memorials on a site provide a common look-and-feel for
content, and content likely to bring the whole memorial site into disrepute is not
likely to be permitted. However, should these constraints be considered too much,
the internet environment enables a memorial designer to simply register a domain
name and upload anything whatsoever to the memorial, subject only to laws governing
copyright, the publication of child pornography, and so on.
In some cases, grave architecture clearly marks wealth and social status by
virtue of the memorial’s size, position, and implied cost. In other cases, the
marking of social status is less obvious but may still be evident to the historian or
archaeologist. The deceased’s socio-economic standing in life is thus marked by
the grave after death. In comparison, it is difficult to mark socio-economic status
with a website per se, though the extensive content of the site may certainly
describe a person’s economic standing, political leanings, passions, and anything
else thought germane to the construction of the deceased’s biography. The
expansive nature of the content afforded by site architecture, and the portrait of
FIGURE 3.2 DIY options offered by GonetooSoon.org.

Source: Courtesy of GonetooSoon.org.
personhood presented through what can be richly descriptive, multi-authored

media, reinforces the marking of the social position of the deceased in relational rather
than structural or institutional terms. The affordances of site design allow for a bio-
graphy to be constructed of stories and anecdotes, letters to the deceased, images and
music, which at their most expansive, self-consciously place the deceased in
amongst the lives of friends and family and their times, and in relation to these lives
lived. Authorship of contributions to the site is also published, and through expli-
citly marking the contributions of ‘content providers’ (that is, biographers) the
architecture explicitly maps the deceased’s social networks and provides further
relational context to the life retold.
Conclusion
The differences and the similarities that we have observed between the character-
istics of the web memorial and the characteristics of the gravesite memorial go well
beyond a consideration of death, memorialisation, and mourning rituals per se. In
several ways they speak to the broad themes that run through this book: materiality,
relationality, temporality, and personhood.
The memorialisation of a dead person is important in and of itself and the concurrent
use of radically different technologies in the memorialisation process is interesting in
and of itself, even without using this phenomenon to make a more general point.
However, the important position of death in personal, social, and cultural life suggests
that the decisions made about memorialisation do have a significance that extend
beyond memorialisation. Decisions made about memorialisation are not, at this point in
time, about choosing between the two memorialisation forms that are the subject of
this discussion. We dare say all persons now memorialised online are also memorialised
in some way at a physical site, which suggests that while these types are usefully dis-
tinguished in terms of their materiality, inscriptions, publics, places and design, in
contemporary lived experience they may jointly serve the interests of the bereaved.
In terms of a significance that extends beyond memorialisation per se, we suggest
that each of the two types of artefact materialises a different construction of social
and intersubjective relations. In its orientation to family, community, and society
the gravesite memorial’s materiality, inscriptions, publics, places, and architecture is
organised to position the deceased in relation to social institutions (in particular
family, religion, and ethnicity) and is in this way outward looking to a generalised
public and its long-standing deeply embedded social structures. The web memorial’s
orientation to family, community and society is more informal and intersubjective,
and overtly mediates distributed participation in constructing and reconstructing
the online memorial itself, and thereby records the ongoing performance of com-
memorating in the course of recording the biography and the subjectivity of the
deceased. In these ways, the web memorial looks inward to the deceased and to
the deceased’s sociality, to the personhood of the deceased and the subjectivities of
the grieving, and is in this way organised more around social agency and social
networks than structures and institutions. From this perspective, the web memorial
is not a public artefact held in common, legible to all even in its particularity, but is
a private performance that looks inwards and speaks first and foremost to the sub-
jectivities and experiential flows of the participants in the performance. It is more
private than public, more individualistic than common, more nuanced than defi-
nitive, more subjective than objective, more performative than structural, more
transient than obdurate, and more emotive than restrained.
In its orientation to time and place the gravesite memorial’s materiality is organised
territorially whereas the web memorial is not, and must gesture to place if it is to
do so through its content, that is, through its semiotics rather than through its
concrete spatial position. Giddens (1981) refers to three layers of time in modern
societies: (1) the existential time of moment by moment experience, (2) the longer
rhythms of a human lifetime, and (3) the much longer periodicity of institutions and
social forms. It has been argued that the gravesite’s orientation to time is around a
logic of stability, obduracy, and historical and geographic position, in Giddens’s terms
bringing (2) the lifetime of the deceased together with (3) the social institutions of
that time. Being fixed in place, the ambitions of those who construct the gravestone
are that it be fixed through time, whereas the website is organised around a logic
which is more presentist, performative, and fluid, and in Giddens’s terms, recon-
structs (2) the lifetime of the deceased in terms of (1) the moments and the experi-
ences of existential time. The complementarity of this arrangement is evident. The
gravesite memorial speaks to and of a culture that privileges place (through its mate-
riality, through its signification of structured social context, and through fixing a time
in space), whereas the web memorial speaks to and of a culture that privileges time
(through its presentist discursive action and interaction, and through its subjectivity).
Consistent with this relation to time, in its orientation to personhood and the subject,
the gravesite memorial has a valence for formality, whereas the web memorial is
more informal. The gravesite memorial speaks more objectively of the personhood
of the deceased through formal and often circumspect identification of the deceased’s
name, dates of birth and death and position in the family, whereas the website’s
invitation for extensive, multi-authored biographical content in multiple mediums
speaks more informally and expansively of the personhood of the deceased and of
their relations. The gravesite is also likely to be reflective of normative social stan-
dards even as the architecture, inscriptions, and position of the gravesite also speaks of
the individuality of the deceased, whereas the website’s more expansive content and
more various media, and as yet unsettled aesthetics and protocols, produce memorials
that are often more subjective and individualistic.
And so the gravesite memorial uses its carved stone, inscriptions, and position in
place to imply a mode of relations that is more structured around social institutions, and is
more objectified, formal, and intransient. In so far as this is so, the gravestone is a con-
struct that speaks to and speaks of a culture that values stability, obduracy, familial and
social institutions, and restraint. On the other hand, the web memorial implies a mode
of relations that is somewhat different – a mode of relations that gives voice to social
networks and publics of various kinds, is focused on individuals (both the deceased and
the mourners) and their subjectivity, and at a number of levels is energetic and fluid. It
is a medium that speaks to and of cultural values, change and responsiveness, personal
interaction, and expansiveness. A cemetery memorial that is constituted largely within
the matrix of social position thus exists alongside the website’s dialogical network of
intersecting subjectivities and intersubjectivities – shifting, and sometimes contested,
forms of relationality we explore further in the next chapter on social media.
Notes
1 This chapter builds on and departs from some of the material discussed in Graham, C.,
Arnold, M., Kohn, T., & Gibbs, M. R. (2015) Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison
of Memorialisation, Visual Studies, 30(1), 37–53.
2 www.muchloved.com/gateway/muchloved-background.htm
3 Tributes.com is a top 50 website in the United States with nearly 35 million visitors to the
website each month, and is the largest memorial website in the US. In May 2015, Tri-
butes.com was acquired by Legacy.com in a commercial move common among .com
companies in all industry sectors. The takeover was controversial in the US death-care
industry, if the response of ConnectingDirectors.com is anything to go by: ‘Yesterday’s
announcement that Tributes.com was acquired by Legacy.com just screwed thousands of
funeral homes’ and ‘Tributes.com sold to the Devil’. The takeover was unpopular in
these circles because Legacy.com simply ‘scrapes’ and republishes obituaries from more
than 1,500 collaborating newspapers for their website, thus bypassing cemeteries and
funeral homes, rather than working with and through cemeteries and funeral homes to
provide a ‘value added’ service.
4 www.tributes.com/obituary/create_options
5 www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
6 www.virtualmemorialgarden.net/showmemorial.php?memorial=1429128525
7 www.forestlawn.com/glendale/properties/
8 www.forbes.com/2007/10/26/celebrity-wealth-funerals-biz-cx_tvr_1026cemeteries.html
9 www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-property-first-as-grave-site-passes-1m-mark-
20150708-gi6zrw
10 MyDeathSpace is a website, established in 2005, which archives the profiles of deceased
social media users.
11 The tomb of the unknown soldier found at many war memorials is a notable exception
to this.
4
DEATH AND SOCIAL MEDIA:
ENTANGLEMENTS OF POLICY
AND PRACTICE
In separate incidents in early 2010, two children from Queensland, Australia met untimely
and violent deaths. Relatives, friends, and strangers turned to social media to express grief,
solidarity, intimacy and community, and to remember, mourn, and share condolences for
the young lives that had been lost. However, within hours, these online commemorations
were defaced. On Facebook, memorial site abuse was directed at the deceased and the
bereaved, and links to pornographic sites and images that showed scenes of murder, race-
hate, and bestiality were also posted. Outrage ensued along with condemnation of so-called
‘RIP-Trolls’ – anonymous posters of negative online messages – flooded social media. The
Australian Prime Minister commented publicly; the Queensland Police Commissioner
promised prosecution; and the Queensland State Premier demanded an apology from
Facebook. Facebook responded by emphasising user responsibility. The RIP-Trolls justified
their actions as a critique of the vacuous and vicarious expressions of sentiment manifested in
‘click-through grieving’ by strangers (Phillips, 2011), whereas their adversaries called for
respect for the dead.
This incident indicates how, in the developing and shifting processes of online
commemoration, there are emerging practices and tensions between cultural and
social conventions of mourning and the technical and regulatory operations of
social media platforms. At the intersection of the private and the public, the traditional
and the emergent, the vernacular and the institutional, such practices continue to
shape and be shaped by the digital contexts and socio-cultural environments in
which they are enacted. As discussed in Chapter Three, people are increasingly
using web technologies to commemorate the dead, and people are now turning to
social media to ensure continuing engagement with those who die before them,
and also to prepare for their own post-mortem memorialisation. Within these
developing patterns of digital-social interaction, the dead are more frequently
encountered and made more powerfully present. When users of social media die,
their digital traces linger on, and through these persistent bodies of data, the dead
Death and social media 53
retain a certain social presence, and can to some extent continue to play interactive
social roles in the lives of those left behind.
This chapter examines how the dead are remembered online, attending to the
ways in which they are mediated and provided with modes of post-mortem exis-
tence via the properties of social media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and YouTube – and also explores the practices of those who engage
with those platforms. We are also concerned with how online memorials are
materially constituted and discursively governed, and we analyse these issues
through two case studies, which draw on research previously published by some of
the authors (Mori et al., 2012; Nansen et al., 2015). These examples map onto
larger historical trends in the popularity of particular social media platforms (see
boyd and Ellison, 2008), with many people migrating from Myspace to Facebook,
but also to historical shifts in how the dead have been commemorated on social
media. The first focuses on the death of a young American woman, Anna Svidersky
in 2006, and the second on the death of a young Australian man, Aziz Shavershian
in 2011. Through these case studies, we examine how the deceased have been
commemorated and thereby persist on different social media platforms. The
unfolding digital practices of memorialising is a central issue in our discussion,
especially how the social identities of the dead are formed and animated over time,
and the ways in which intimate publics of relatives and friends, alongside larger
online publics comprised of strangers and audiences, gather around the deceased
through different social network sites. We then examine how social media platforms
and digital services accommodate the deceased and their legacies, and outline the
different ways that people appropriate social media to refashion rituals of mourning
through the use of mobile media and digital photography. We ask how the mate-
riality of platform architectures and policies both shape and complicate digital forms
of remembrance, relationality and personhood, and in turn how social practices of
memorialising unfold and change over time through users appropriating the material
functionality or affordances of social media.
People, publics, and platforms

Digitally networked forms of commemoration emerged and developed as the
World Wide Web helped to make the internet an integral part of people’s com-
municative practices, as discussed in Chapter Two. Such web-based memorials,
however, remained relatively uncommon throughout the late 1990s and early
2000s. Since the mid-2000s, social media platforms have made online forms of
commemoration both more accessible and more popular, with people appropriating
the general-purpose resources of social networking sites to memorialise the dead.
Social media profiles may be refashioned as online memorials depending on how
they are preserved, curated, and understood. Many of those grieving the loss of a
friend continue to visit and post to a deceased friend’s social media profile after
their death. Social media sites, in turn, have developed memorial policies to formalise
these practices. These networks of the bereaved reduce the need to gather the
54 Death and social media
grieving together as a public to physically visit dedicated memorial sites. Yet, the
development of memorial sites within online spaces for communication among the
living has given rise to new forms of ritualised practices surrounding death.
Scholars, from a range of different disciplines, have examined the distinctive
nature of commemoration on social media, outlining how the dead are mediated,
remembered, and curated on these platforms (e.g. Gibson, 2014; Odom et al., 2010;
Stokes, 2012; Veale, 2004; Walter et al., 2011–2012). Hutchings, for example, notes
that with a shift of focus to social media, online memorials are no longer created
within virtual cemeteries or as stand-alone websites, which have ‘clear parallels
with the role of the physical cemetery, relocating the deceased to a place which is
accessible but separate from the spaces usually occupied by the living’ (2012: 51).
Instead, social media platforms, such as Facebook, allow users to convert the profiles
of the living into far more dynamic memorials for the deceased by integrating
mourners’ ‘practices directly into their ongoing social relationships’ (Hutchings,
2012: 51). Within these digital spaces, the networks of people that gather around
the dead include relatives and friends, or what Hjorth and Arnold (2013) characterise
as ‘intimate publics’, as well as acquaintances and strangers.
Offline, the deceased are often located within institutional spaces, such as
mortuaries, funeral homes, or cemeteries, which are restricted in terms of either
accessibility or geographical location. Social media memorialisation, however,
celebrates a repositioning of the dead very much within the everyday flow of daily
life. This parallels wider cultural shifts in mourning and memorialisation practices in
which the dead are sustained in ongoing relationships by the living. Commemorative
social media profiles continue to be appended and modified through collaborative
expressions, actions, and interactions. These forms of inscription are dynamic in
ways that other memorial forms are not and they therefore offer different memorial
possibilities to, for example, the gravestones and online web memorials discussed in
the previous chapter. Cemeteries, mausoleums, and other offline memorial sites
also involve collective modes of maintenance – when people visit them to place
flowers and small gifts, for instance – but as this chapter highlights, social media
profiles of the deceased generate and extend social relations between the living and
the dead, and among the living.
Social media memorials, stored on the servers of commercial platform providers,
continue to be accessible to a network of intimate publics comprised of relatives
and friends, who collectively contribute to their memory. By continuing to post to
a deceased person’s profile and engage with the intimate public of mourners that
gather around it, these commemorative practices raise issues with regard to the care
of and responsibility towards the deceased in digital spaces as well as the govern-
ance of these spaces. In our case study of the murdered American teenager, Anna
Svidersky, we address the theme of relationality by examining interactions between
friends and strangers in commemorating and representing Anna after her death. We
explore the interpersonal relationships that were posthumously maintained with
her. We also consider the impact of the multiple publics (including RIP trolls),
which gathered around her deceased digital presence.
Anna Svidersky’s commemorative publics

Anna, a student at Fort Vancouver High School, Washington, was murdered six
days before her 18th birthday on the 20th of April 2006. Her murderer, David
Sullivan, was unknown to Anna. He entered the McDonalds restaurant where she
worked and stabbed her while she was sitting in a booth on a break from her
evening shift. Her death resulted in an outpouring of condolences from around the
world, most notably on her Myspace page. Not all those who die in tragic or
dramatic circumstances will garner such a response. However, Anna’s was an
unexpected, premature, and violent death, which produced a particular post-death
response online. Furthermore, as this case was an early instance of social media
memorialisation, Anna’s death drew wider public attention. This was a collective
response to a person’s death, and different kinds of death are accommodated differently
on and through social media, as we discuss below. Moreover, this case highlights the
ways digitally networked technologies can lead to increased opportunities for the
gathering of multiple publics – from close friends to wider sets of strangers unknown
to the deceased – which participate in memorialising the deaths of others.
Anna had updated her Myspace page the day she died to state that she would be
‘LEGAL IN 6 DAY’. In her ‘about me’ profile she noted: ‘make me smile. i’m a
foreign girl from RUSSIA♥ and i’m definitely your type’. In her profile she indi-
cated her location as: ‘I hate VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON’. The privacy
settings on Anna’s Myspace page were set to publicly visible, so that anybody could
view her profile, however, only her ‘friends’ were able to post messages.
Anna’s Myspace account remained active after her death – no platform memorial
policies existed at this time – and her friends continued to post numerous messages
on her page. Postings by Anna’s friends were characterised by first-person address
to Anna, as well as vernacular forms of expression common to Myspace conversa-
tions. These gave an impression of familiarity and intimacy, especially when friends
posted updates about everyday plans or activities: ‘scarf weather is upon us. let the
sweater shopping begin’. In-jokes and nicknames were also used, conveying a sense of
social proximity with Anna that also served to distinguish those who knew Anna
well from those who did not. The social identity of the dead can be seen to persist
online through these practices of visiting, posting, and commenting. By sharing
thoughts, memories and images, people maintained connections with Anna, often
addressing her directly. Thus, such early instances of social media memorials to the
deceased reveal how they are formed, and how they evolve over time through
collective interactions that are integrated into ongoing social relationships and
digital networks (Carroll and Landry, 2010; Williams and Merten, 2009).
Research by Brubaker and Hayes (2011) into comments made on Myspace
shows that social media inscriptions do not just involve grieving for and remem-
bering the dead among the living, but also involve communicating with and
addressing the deceased directly, often in informal rather than formal tones, talking
to the deceased rather than about the deceased as might be expected in other kinds
of commemorative text, such as headstones or condolence books. Through both
the technical affordances and social conventions of social networking sites, inter-
acting with the profile pages of dead loved ones has increasingly come to be seen as
ordinary rather than extraordinary behaviour. Social media shift memorials from a
place for monologic tribute to one of continued (sometimes seemingly dialogic)
conversation, with the dead persisting as integral actors in ongoing social relation-
ships long after their physical bodies have perished. For Anna’s friends, this was not
just about the community of the living representing the dead. Rather, social media
brought together a community of users that maintained communication with Anna
over time, continuing to address Anna as an active yet deceased person within their
ongoing social networks.
After Anna’s death, the people who visited her Myspace profile expanded to
include those who were not friends with her in life: strangers drawn to the story of
her murder. However, for many of Anna’s friends, the intimacy assumed by
strangers was unwelcome, as were their effusive expressions of sentiment. Rarely
did Anna’s friends address this wider public, however whenever someone in the
outer circle of Myspace Friends made postings – people not recognised by the
insiders as being close to Anna – they were brought to wider attention:
ummm. How are those people posting comments? Wtf.

So what’s with all these comments from people who didn’t know you?
But as Anna’s friends actively spread news of her death on Myspace they became
inundated with messages of condolence and ‘friend requests’ from further strangers.
Eventually the friends posted requests to not be contacted by and not to post for
strangers on Anna’s page.
This attempt by existing friends to manage what became Anna’s Myspace
memorial was not as successful on other sites. It is a common though controversial
practice for online content posted on one site to be copied and reposted on
another. MyDeathSpace, for example, aggregated memorial content posted to
Myspace, including Anna’s memorial, and did so without maintaining the privacy
settings that offered a degree of protection on the original site. As a consequence,
strangers were able to post to Anna’s MyDeathSpace site. One such stranger
questioned attempts made by Anna’s friends to exclude a wider public participation
in the memorialising of Anna, writing in the comments section of the article about
Anna on MyDeathSpace: ‘Why would they publize their friends death then act like such
bitches?’
While many social media memorial profiles are only accessible to and usable by
friends and family of the deceased, others can be publicly viewed and the content
shaped by strangers. As a result, the dead are opened to ‘networked publics’ (boyd,
2010), or wider collectives of people that are restructured by digital networks – and
conflict as well as collaboration can emerge from this. Consequently, some
researchers suggest a need for posthumous profile and impression management.
Marwick and Ellison (2012), for example, note that memorial pages persist and
spread through networks in ways that allow for a large audience of family, friends,
and strangers. Indeed, such ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011), in which
social media platforms collapse multiple and previously distinct audiences into single
contexts, is central to our contemporary experience of the online world. The some-
times jarring diversity and multiplicity of online audiences is particularly notable in
the case of a death where different publics may clash in a commemorative space.
Yet, just as publics determine the content and audience of different platforms, so
the affordances of different platforms participate in shaping distinct forms of expres-
sion. In the case of Anna, there were additional sites beyond her Myspace page and
her MyDeathSpace entry established for commemoration. Her brother created and
uploaded a memorial video to YouTube a few weeks after her murder. The video
played music from her favourite band and featured images of Anna, news footage
about her death, and video footage from her funeral. Other people also posted
videos on YouTube featuring images harvested from her online presence, such as
images from her Myspace pages. An online condolence book was also created.
These memorial artefacts were open to the public and served a wider audience
interested in commemorating Anna. YouTube, for example, is organised in a way
that encourages serendipitous discovery in addition to purposeful searching,
through algorithms recommending more videos to view based on those already
watched. Therefore, not only were these memorial videos made public, but the
YouTube platform facilitated their discovery. The condolence book was similarly
publicly accessible through a dedicated domain name, though it required users to
seek out the site by either typing the URL into a browser, entering key terms in a
search engine, or using links embedded in webpages or emails. YouTube practices
that recommend videos, rate videos, and allow anyone to comment on videos,
encourage many different users to participate, whilst the more discrete nature of
the condolence website, and the culturally embedded understanding of the form
and purpose of a condolence book, mean that while anyone can potentially con-
tribute, this tends to be materially and discursively constrained. The affordances of
these different platforms thereby provided for both extensive visibility and public
participation in the death and commemoration of Anna online, and also helped to
shape that participation in terms of the modes of expression directed or sanctioned
by such networked publics.
Analysis of the inscriptions posted to the profiles of users who have died raises
questions about authorial voice as much as audience. On one level the use of first
person address may not be so different to the intimate, informal utterances of loved
ones at a graveside, where it is common to privately ‘speak’ directly to the
deceased, and it may not be so different from the more public conversations people
have about a deceased family member at a wake. However, social media provides
different communicative resources for sharing and archiving expression than are
available through verbal expression at the graveside. Moreover, different commu-
nicative genres, utilising different grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, have emerged
around online communication. This can be understood through the concept of
‘platform vernacular’ (Gibbs et al., 2015), which recognises that shared forms of
social media expression, such as hashtags, emoticons or truncated text, have
emerged from the affordances of particular social media platforms and the ways
they are appropriated and performed in practice. The Twitter hashtag stands as a
paradigmatic example of a form of expression that was established ‘through wide-
spread community use and adaptation’ rather than being ‘designed-in’ (Bruns and
Burgess, 2011). This approach focuses on how everyday forms of communication
operate within the constraints and allowances of the platform architecture, but in
turn how such limitations, such as the 140-word character limit on Twitter, are
creatively accommodated for particular modes of expression and interaction.
This social media platform vernacular is shown in the modes of expression
commemorating Anna on Myspace, which adopted a more intimate, personal tone
that reflected the communicative conventions of online social networks at that
time and place. In contrast, the condolence book remediated older forms and more
formal conventions of commemorative expression. Nevertheless, the blending of
interpersonal communication and mass communication online means that what
was once largely private communication, at a graveside, for example, becomes
increasingly public. Indeed, it is because of the social network’s ability to gather
multiple publics and collapse various social contexts that many memorials have
been subject to forms of hostile communication or defacement; so-called ‘RIP
trolling’ (see Kohn et al., 2012; Phillips, 2011).
Trolls, strangers, administrators

‘Trolling’ is a controversial form of public participation in social networks, where
deliberately provocative comments are posted to gain attention, to disturb the
network, to offend, to impress a public of fellow trolls, and sometimes to amuse
(see Phillips, 2015). There is a long history of trolling on the internet – dating back
to the bulletin boards of the 1980s internet and Usenet News postings of favourite
cat recipes to cat-lover discussion groups – but this long history does not diminish
its shock value today. The internet enables trolling through possibilities for anon-
ymity, and among a connected public of billions, antagonism makes itself present.
For example, parts of the contemporary message and image board websites 4Chan
and Reddit act to make certain forms of ironic irreverence, bad taste, sexism,
racism, and so forth, a recognisable and acceptable norm. Research on trolls suggests
they operate to negate the imperative for authentic identity performance implied
by the model of user participation on popular commercial social networking sites,
such as Facebook’s real name policy. In doing so, they highlight both the constructed
and managed nature of online identity, and seek to challenge its privileging within a
network of heterogeneous users and norms (Karppi, 2013b).
When cemetery gravesites are deliberately damaged or defaced, this is distressing
to those with a connection to the grave and disturbing to the local community and
to wider society. It despoils, as Michael Taussig (1999) would suggest, something
broadly valued, even amongst the most secular citizens, as precious. As illustrated in
our opening vignette, similar defacing acts also occur online. Vandalised memorial
sites are defaced with text and images that abuse the deceased or mourners;
threaten violence and make prolific use of swearing; mock and satirise the deceased,
the way in which they died, and the expressions of grief posted on the site (Phillips,
2011). RIP trolling has prompted public debate about privacy, crime, security,
rights, and responsibilities associated with online communication, as well as debates
about the moderation, administration, and legality of user-generated content
(Kohn et al., 2012).
In Anna’s case, offensive comments on YouTube were flagged as inappropriate
and removed, although they persisted for some time before action was taken, and
the site today still remains open to further offensive messages being posted in their
place. On Myspace postings were only possible within, and moderated by, Anna’s
friends’ network. The limiting of the network of friends able to post to a subset of
the much larger public of readers, however, created problems of its own, with
people among Anna’s intimate public feeling harassed by requests for contact and
to post on other people’s behalf. Given the interest from a wider public who
maintained an interest in the case, the migration of content and publics from the
more closed Myspace memorial, to more open memorials on YouTube and
the MyDeathSpace site is not unexpected. In the case of those who administered
the condolence book, offensive messages were deleted, although the site did not
appear to have been targeted by sustained trolling. However, spam was a recurrent
problem on the site. Over time the condolence book frequently attracted spam
messages, which were only cleared every few days. Moderation in this sense can be
considered akin to tending a gravesite in a cemetery, tidying rubbish, pulling
weeds, and refreshing cut flowers.
While spamming or trolling are overt examples of socially inappropriate conduct
in practices of online memorialisation, further questions emerge regarding the right
of strangers to express grief online, and in what ways. For example, site adminis-
trators have reported to us instances where the family of the deceased have been
aggrieved at otherwise innocuous postings on the basis that they have been
authored by people they consider complicit in the death of the deceased – for
instance, an ex-lover of the deceased, the driver of a car involved in a fatal crash,
and a fellow drug user in the case of an overdose.
As these examples suggest, responses to deaths are both enabled and constrained
by the technical affordances of different social media platforms, and the socially
negotiated relations that form through them. They show how the deceased are
maintained within the social interactions of the living though the development of
social media over time. Anna’s case highlights how new social media platforms
overlay or replace previous forms, as when many Myspace users moved over to
Facebook as the dominant platform, or when MyDeathSpace ran into decline as an
active site. This raises questions about what should happen to the older accounts of
those who have died and do not have a presence on new platforms. Anna’s
Myspace page represented the life of a vivacious young woman on the cusp of
adulthood. The liveliness evoked by the page, along with her youth, beauty and
sensationalised death, no doubt fuelled interest in her memorial page and its
growth as an internet phenomenon. However, in the years following Anna’s death,
her page also slowly withered and lost its vibrancy as changes to the Myspace
platform and the way pages were formatted and configured resulted in the carefully
crafted and personalised page descending into a generic collection of images and
unformatted textual remnants.
Myspace relaunched in 2013, removing numerous features including comments
and posts, and having the effect of curtailing Anna’s page’s ability to service her
friendship network. Memorial pages to Anna can now be found on Facebook,
whilst a Wikipedia entry documents Anna’s death and the process of her memor-
ialisation. This repositioning, reformatting, and recontextualising has erased her
original page in a way that many would find unacceptable should it occur to say, a
gravesite memorial. The slow waning and erasure of Anna’s Myspace presence
raises questions not only about the persistence of one person’s posthumous profile
but also more broadly about the persistence and longevity of platforms that currently
archive massive volumes of data on people’s lives. Similarly, around a decade after
Anna’s death, the condolence book website was closed to comments, and a couple
of years later, vanished completely (at the time of writing, the URL led to a page in
Chinese for recruiting nurses). Thus, in some ways the deceased are made to persist
through networks of online collectives after death, but at the same time are subject
to relatively rapid decay through both social forgetting and technology change.
Remembering and reconstructing Zyzz

Our second case study examines the death of Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian
(‘Zyzz’), in 2011, and its online manifestations. It shows how memorialising is
shaped in significant ways by collaborative, distributed digital platforms and practices.
A single social media memorial page, as discussed here, is a site of collective
inscription, in which a public gathers and participates in negotiating what is to be
remembered there. Yet, memories are often contested, and these contestations
are played out across many different networks each with variously constituted publics
and regimes of governance, and each of which changes over time. By analysing the
workings of one person’s (albeit spectacular) case, we can get a closer sense of the
complexity of online memorialising. Here, we examine questions of materiality
through the architectural spaces of the internet that both locate and disperse mem-
ories of the dead, and we consider questions of personhood in relation to the ways
the identity of the dead are governed and contested in these spaces.
Zyzz was a Russian-born Australian who gained a degree of social media
celebrity status within the subculture of amateur bodybuilding. Through hours of
daily weightlifting he transformed in a few years from a ‘skinny high school kid’
into a young man with a muscular and ‘shredded’ body; a particular physical
appearance described within the subculture as obtaining ‘aesthetics’. While trans-
forming his body he also transformed his online presence. A social media persona
called ‘Zyzz’ was created, and Aziz dedicated himself to a bodywork, self-
presentation, and branding project by regularly posting pictures and videos online
(see Fuller and Jeffery, 2016).
Zyzz first came to prominence in mainstream media following the arrest of his
brother, Said Shavershian (also known as ‘Chestbrah’), for the possession of anabolic
steroids. This media coverage pointed to an explosion in the illicit sale and use of
steroids within certain young male circles, and especially within the culture of
amateur bodybuilding. Shortly after these events, in August 2011, Zyzz was found
dead from a cardiac arrest in a Bangkok sauna. The circumstances of his death were
unclear. This fit 22-year-old man, who pushed his body to extremes had, unknown
to himself (but revealed at autopsy), a congenital heart disorder. Although publicly
associated with steroid use, this was never proven. Following his death, the already
widespread coverage of Zyzz intensified in both social and more traditional media
(e.g. TV and printed newspapers). The coverage focused on his untimely death, his
status and internet celebrity, and the growing use of steroids amongst amateur
bodybuilders. Numerous threads devoted to Zyzz appeared on dedicated body-
building forums, such as Simplyshredded and Bodybuilding.com, whilst multiple
public Facebook memorial tribute pages were created. In March 2012, his brother
Said released ‘Zyzz – the Legacy’, a 19-minute tribute on YouTube. Such deployment
of digital media constituted Zyzz’s death as an extraordinary one that was due a high
degree of public visibility and commemoration. Like the digital treatment of Anna’s
death, the manifestation of Zyzz’s death online was intensified by the use of media
platforms and their associated public gatherings.
The comments posted on bodybuilding forums were predominantly pitched as
tributes to Zyzz, expressing admiration and feelings of loss. These posts remarked on
how Zyzz had personally inspired others within the amateur bodybuilding community.
The comments were composed in a lexicon that combined more widespread forms of
online vernacular with slang from this subculture. The language used close relationships
and solidarity within this public space, but it also served to actively govern who was a
legitimate participant in the space – whether through implicitly restricting outsiders
who lacked proficiency in the vernacular, or by more explicitly excluding unwanted
participation though anticipating and warning against disrespectful posts or trolls:
Forever mirin in your name brah! reps in peace

(Simplyshredded)
Zyzz got me on the right path to lose weight, get lean and look AESTHETIC
AS FUARRKKKKKKKK
(Simplyshredded)1
everyone fell free to post pics and vids of him to memorialize him … im sure
he would have wanted that. anyone disrespecting the srs tag or trolling will be
negged(srs)
(Bodybuilding.com)2
Here the use of vocabularies particular to a certain public, and warnings about
modes of legitimate participation, highlight the ways certain modes of memorial
conduct can be encouraged and policed. Memorialising on ostensibly participatory

platforms such as Simplyshredded or Bodybuilding.com utilise particular expressions
or subjects of remembrance based around a culture of shared interests that are
expressed through a shared vocabulary on niche social media sites.
On the so-called official Zyzz RIP Facebook memorial page, public outpourings
of loss and grief were posted that resembled the tributes, admiration, and expres-
sions of personal inspiration that appeared for Zyzz on the bodybuilding forums.
Yet, as more publicly visible than bodybuilding forums, the Facebook tributes
appeared to come from a wider public as well as from known peers within
the bodybuilding community. This was reflected in the still persistent but less
pronounced use of the lexicon of the amateur bodybuilding culture:
RIP zyzz he died for our gains we shall honor zyzz by becoming aesthetics as fuck
(‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)
I will shred 4life thanks to zyzz

Expressions of fandom on the Facebook memorial were further reinforced with

visual tributes, such as images of tattoos and drawings, dedicated to Zyzz and his
muscular physique.
Whilst Zyzz’s pre-existing Facebook profile remained publicly inaccessible, at
least eight separate public Facebook memorial pages were created after he died.3
Unlike the modification of a deceased person’s existing accounts into memorials, a
dedicated memorial page is usually created after the person has died and is open to
the public for participation (Kern et al., 2013). Facebook’s popularity amongst the
living, as well as its policies for memorialising the deceased, which we discuss
below, affords a diverse mix of publics and diverse forms of participation. For Zyzz,
memories of him were narrated by multiple participants on Facebook pages, and
these included intimate and direct forms of commemoration expression juxtaposed
with aggressive and provocative posts from strangers. For example, a post from
Zyzz’s brother Said was followed by an accusation of steroid abuse:
Come back to me baby brother, I dont think you know just how much I love
you. I’ve always looked out for you all your life and protected you … I’m soo
sorry I coulnt be there and save you this time. My heart is broken and I can’t
stop crying. You weren’t just my brother, you were my best mate too. Love
you with all my heart and soul and will never forget you. Rip Aziz Sergeyevich
Shavershian -Said Sergeyevich
(Brother of Zyzz)
its not sad! what would you think was going to happen when taking too
much roids and drugs ? think the heart wont stop sometime ! feel sorry for the
family ! may he rest in roids and coke as he will be remebered !
The openness of Facebook RIP pages allowed for such competing impressions to
be shared and reduced the capacity of Zyzz’s friends or relatives to determine how
Zyzz was to be remembered. However, commemorative participation was still
policed by site administrators in an attempt to shape the construction of Zyzz’s
biography:
Your a selfish cold hearted person. Regardless of what he did or what people
thought, its not for you to say or judge! Keep your opinion to yourself. Its sad
over the fact he was young to pass away. If you read the recent news update
he also had a heart defect! No one is perfect!
Thus, we can see how the material infrastructure of different online spaces locate
and disperse memories of the dead in different ways. Memories of the dead
articulated on more visible and public social media sites such as Facebook memorial
pages may more easily be contested, and are shaped through argument rather than
the forms of intimate social and subcultural relations more prevalent on niche sites
such as those dedicated to bodybuilding.
By contrast, other kinds of infrastructural social media spaces, such as YouTube,
expand memories of the deceased to a potentially wider public of people that may
include intimate publics of mourners, as well as grief tourists, strangers, and trolls.
As briefly discussed already in the case of Anna Svidersky, uploading a video to
YouTube is a decision to make this content openly accessible, allowing anybody to
view and contribute comments. On YouTube, innumerable memorial videos have
been uploaded, with examples of personal videos, such as those of family and
friends scattering the ashes of a loved one, sitting alongside professional productions
such as promotional videos from funeral directors’ firms, celebrity memorials made
by fans, clips of memorial scenes from films, recordings of public memorial cere-
monies, and events commemorating lives lost in wars and disasters. With personal
memorial videos embedded within the heterogeneous public YouTube archive and
entangled with YouTube’s search algorithms, they not only mix with a whole
range of different forms of content, but exist within a platform in which content is
readily found, consumed, shared, and commented upon (Burgess and Green,
2013). The visual and participatory aspects of YouTube have ensured that the
platform has generated a large quantity and scope of contributions in shaping
memorial videos and biographies, and a large and diverse audience for their view-
ing. For Zyzz, a memorial video titled ‘The Legacy’, posted by his brother, reveals
how this public and participatory platform facilitated a greater volume and diversity
of public interaction than other social media sites.
A number of platform affordances helped to shape the messy proliferation of
contradictory posts in the memorial practices focused on Zyzz. In the bustle of
YouTube memorial comments there were tributes, expressions of loss, admiration
and fandom, and so on. And like the Facebook memorial, we saw a diverse and
conflicting set of publics. What was novel to YouTube, however, was the breadth
and intensity of conflict around the representation of Zyzz’s public memory, and the
manner in which any collective coherence became unmanageable. The many posts
that argued for respect for the dead in general and Zyzz in particular, and inscribed a
memory of Zyzz as a personal inspiration, were drowned out by the cacophony of
comments that sought to de-value the celebratory discourse and cultural significance
of Zyzz through references to his ‘decadent’ lifestyle and ‘use of steroids’:
All faggots who do roids should die. Get big like a real man you pussy. I’m
gonna go stomp on your grave
(Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)
thank you zyzz for dieing. now we have one less steroid junkie on this earth
and one less person to pass abysmal genes (mental and physical genes) to future
offspring. RIP where you belong
(Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)
Such vitriol starts to blur distinctions between participation and trolling in the
collective memorialisation of Zyzz, some posts clearly operating to provoke, yet
also acting to contest the authenticity of his image. Rather than attempting to
negate the performance of identity, these forms of participation can be seen as part
of its distributed and contested co-construction of personhood. In the case of Zyzz,
memories of his life and death were constructed and consumed by different
(though overlapping) publics, and through this process Zyzz multiplied. Zyzz was
variously remembered as an inspiration to a tight-knit subculture and its defining
normative values, as a vulnerable and imperfect person who died far too young,
and as a decadent narcissist fuelled by illicit drug taking. Thus, Zyzz’s example,
though not ordinary, reveals how the memory of the dead more generally may be
shaped within some platforms to create a more or less coherent narrative, but this is
always a partial one, open to challenge thanks to the proliferation, dispersal, and
disaggregation of memories across digital networks. These conflicting memories are
collaboratively constructed and shared, blurring the distinction between personal
and public, individual and collective (Hoskins, 2009; van Dijck, 2013).
This distribution of memorial traces can be understood through notions of per-
sonhood, which no longer reside with a subjective self but with the projection of
an identity and its negotiation in wider political and social contexts. Belk (2013)
describes this as an ‘extended self’, which emerges through the digital traces and
detritus left behind by the deceased; traces that continue to act in the world by
representing a self, but also operate as forms of communication that others continue
to interact with through, for example, posting, commenting, and sharing. Such
interactions relationally co-construct identity, but as we see in the case of Zyzz, in
ways that are often contested. This posthumous personhood, then, emerges
through diverse networks of friends, acquaintances and strangers, who are in turn
embedded within the material architectures, curatorial functions, and corporate
logics of social media platforms (van Dijck, 2007).
The example of Zyzz also questions some common assumptions about the role
of social media in mediating the dead. While memories inscribed on social media
may appear to be persistent and durable, differentiated platforms and their publics
can also fragment memories; they are replicable and dynamic, yet also often messy,
incomplete, and subject to repurposing and revision; and they are spreadable and
participatory, yet can also be restricted through platform policies, architecture, and
social moderation. As we saw with Anna, some memories can also disappear
entirely, if a platform provider alters their market strategy or closes down. Here, we
see again the importance of impression management for moderating the content of
memories about the deceased discussed earlier (Marwick and Ellison, 2012), but
also, as we detail in the next section, we see how the material architecture, affor-
dances, and policies of internet platforms shape online legacies. Following this, we
turn to the ways social media networks are increasingly bound up with specific
places and events through the use of mobile media, remediating established and
institutionalised rituals through the vernacular uses and understandings of social
media at events such as funerals and wakes, and at places such as cemeteries.
Digital traces and legacies

As we have seen above, the networked nature of digital media environments
means that when someone dies, they leave digital traces on various social media
platforms. However, individuals also leave behind a number of important digital
artefacts, which need to be managed when they die (see Carroll, 2014; Carroll and
Romano, 2011), from email accounts and PayPal accounts, to social media profiles
and repositories of images and videos. This brings us to one of the most pressing
contemporary policy issues around death and digital media: the management of a
digital legacy. People are both deliberately and incidentally assembling a personal
digital legacy of considerable volume and detail. Therefore, the question of how
this data is managed, stored and indeed, whether it should be accessed by family
and friends at all, is a significant social and regulatory issue, and a range of social
media platforms and commercial operators have emerged to offer services to help
manage this problem.
Several digital media companies have provided facilities to download personal
data from various online accounts for local storage and safekeeping. Facebook
allows individuals to download all the information they have shared on their timeline
including photos, status updates, and comments. People can also download and
archive their entire Twitter archive, or every video they uploaded to YouTube.
Google now offers a similar service called an ‘inactive account manager’. At the
Google Dashboard, a user can set a maximum period of inactivity, after which
automated algorithms will locate a person’s entire Google account, from their Gmail
and Picasa images to their Google Docs, and either delete them, or alternatively,
distribute them to a list of trusted others, depending on the person’s instructions. A
range of third-party service providers (such as My Social Book) offer to do this for
a fee on your behalf, with the data then bound in hardcopy book form.
There are also numerous commercial operators who offer targeted digital estate
management services, largely focused around three key (and occasionally over-
lapping) service areas: proof of life services, which allow you to contact friends and
family posthumously (e.g. Dead Man’s Switch), the protection and organisation of
digital assets and personal archives from wills and advance directives, to information
for important online accounts (e.g. Everplans), and dedicated sites for the memor-
ialisation of the deceased online (e.g. Legacy), as discussed in the previous chapter.
Collectively these websites have carved out a series of innovative commercial
markets within the wider funeral industry. Instead of engaging directly in processes
of preparation, ritual and burial, they present a set of new commercially-oriented
practices around death, such as the online organisation of one’s estate, the ability to
contact relatives and friends posthumously, or the maintenance of one’s digital
inheritance and memory.
These sites position themselves as more sensitive to the specific contexts of death
and memorialisation than afforded by platforms like Facebook, which include
options for the deceased but are oriented to a broader living public. Yet, many of
these services are visually organised and materially operate in ways that more often
resemble homepages from the 1990s. There are examples of more ‘social memorial
websites’, such as funeralOne’s ‘f1Connect website platform’ and HeavenAddress’s
‘online memorial community’, that are utilising the affordances, features, and
functionality of social media sites in a number of ways. FuneralOne, for example,
draws heavily on the aesthetics and platform vernacular (Gibbs et al., 2015) of
Facebook in their memorial pages, with the timeline of posts organised in a reverse
chronological order on a ‘Tribute Wall’, which is easily scrolled through rather
than linked to a separate page like on older memorial websites. HeavenAddress
memorials include features such as a ‘memory cloud’ generated from aggregated
user posts, sharing buttons in order to connect the separate memorial site to social
networks and ‘miss u’ and ‘love u’ buttons, which visitors can click on to express
their feeling in ways that resonate with the abbreviated forms of affective expres-
sion such as the ‘like’ button common to social networking interfaces (Gerlitz and
Helmond, 2013).
These digital commercial products also represent a new arm of the funeral
industry and intersect with traditional funeral providers in a number of interesting
ways, which we analyse further in Chapter Six. They have to navigate the
‘gatekeeper’ role of the funeral industry, historical tensions within the industry
around commodification and death, and a longstanding distrust of the role of the
funeral industry and the scope of commercial activity surrounding a death (Sanders,
2009; 2012). As a result, it is not surprising that whilst many of these services aim to
work with or complement the funeral industry, others such as the end of life social
media tool and legacy planner site DeadSocial draw on a DIY ethic rooted in
digital culture that works to circumvent the funeral industry to some extent.
DeadSocial provides online resources and information to assist people to manage
death and commemoration for themselves by providing relevant and free advice,
tips, and tools.
These different services speak to the growing phenomena and significance of

digital legacies being left by the dead. When people share things online, and in
particular on social media, they produce an autobiographical account of their lives
and contribute to the online biographies of others (for example, through com-
menting, tagging, or retweeting). This extended self (Belk, 2013) incorporates data
and digital ‘clutter’ along with ontological markers for an individual composed of
the material traces of personal possessions, such as books, clothing, and other arte-
facts. Like a posthumous social media profile, an individual’s digital legacy can
similarly continue to represent a person after death. Many families and friends want
to retain and access this data, in order to engage in this sort artefactual remem-
brance. The maintenance of this legacy could also be used to contribute to family
histories as well as the historical record more generally. At the individual level,
managing one’s digital legacy allows a person to avoid the issue of identity theft or
indeed reputational damage after death (Bellamy et al., 2013a). But despite the
range of services currently in operation to assist in this management, most indivi-
duals know little about the process. Adding to the problem, some digital assets
cannot in fact be owned by an individual and passed on to others. For example, we
do not ‘own’ music purchased on iTunes, but instead are granted a license to use it
for the span of our lives (Bellamy et al., 2013b). Posthumous digital legacy man-
agement, therefore, remains an ongoing discussion at both a familial and inter-
personal level, but also at a broader policy and regulatory level, particularly for
large social media platforms such as Facebook. This includes the management of
dead people’s accounts within a platform’s terms of service, which we now discuss.
Remaining live
By 2012, Facebook had over 1.3 billion active users and an estimated 30 million
dead users, with a further 19,000 people with a Facebook profile dying each day
(Kaleem, 2012; Lustig, 2012). It has been estimated that, providing the platform
still exists, dead people on Facebook will outnumber the living before the end of
this century.4 Subsequently, Facebook’s design and management teams need
to create, maintain, and adapt software controls to deal with this enormous and
ever-growing ‘dead population and their networks of living ‘friends’.’
Facebook’s policies on how to manage the profiles of the dead have shifted over
time through both planned development of the service and in response to various
events. For a long time the only options were to leave the profile as it was when
the person was alive, or have an account deleted, which required a family member
to provide a death certificate, court document confirming power of attorney, birth
certificate, or last will and testament. Then, in 2009, amongst various other changes,
Facebook introduced a set of algorithms that monitored interaction among friends
and prompted people to reconnect with friends they had fallen out of touch with.
However, an unintended consequence of this was that people were prompted to
reconnect with dead friends, which caused many users considerable distress. Despite
the public relations disaster, Facebook claimed that they had been thinking about
alternative approaches for some time and soon after launched the ‘memorialised’
profile:
When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network.
To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialized’ profiles as a place
where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed
(Chan, 2009).
Since 2015, Facebook policy has allowed the next of kin of the dead to ‘memor-
ialise’ the profile, in which case the text ‘Remembering’ appears before the
deceased’s name on the profile (Facebook, 2015). Automated prompts and public
links to the profile are deactivated, and while new friends are not permitted to join
in, existing friends may continue to post in accordance with privacy settings. From
late 2014 Facebook also enabled profile owners to nominate a ‘Legacy Contact’
who would assume responsibility for the profile on the occasion of the owner’s
death, recognising the need for a stewardship function in the management of the
deceased’s data and relations online (Brubaker and Callison-Burch, 2016).
Alternatively, people can set up a Facebook memorial that is open to the public.
The memorial page is rather different in its construction and tone: it is far less
personal and often established for celebrities or to communicate around tragic
deaths captured by the media (Kohn et al., 2012). Anyone can set up a memorial
page or group for anyone, and in the case of high-profile deaths (such as Zyzz), it is
not uncommon for more than one to be set up in competition or in collaboration.
Such pages have the potential to attract vast publics that gather physically and/or
virtually after death and commonly extend far beyond family and friends to include
strangers and, as discussed above, sometimes, malevolent trolls (Phillips, 2011).
Facebook’s preferred policy is to memorialise profiles of the deceased. Such
memorialised accounts cannot be used to make new connections, and the dead
person’s Facebook social circle is thus effectively closed:
It is our policy to memorialize all deceased users’ accounts on the site. When
an account is memorialized, only confirmed friends can see the profile (time-
line) or locate it in Search. The profile (timeline) will also no longer appear in
the Suggestions section of the Home page. Friends and family can leave posts
in remembrance
(Lucas, 2012).
Some argue that the memorialised profile option is preferred by Facebook, as the
data-bodies of the memorialised dead are perfectly preserved, allowing Facebook
to continue extracting value from data-mining interactions with and through
memorialised profiles (see Karppi, 2013a).
While the memorialisation of profiles may be Facebook’s preferred option, there
are two alternative possibilities to memorialisation or deletion. Neither are officially
supported by Facebook, but family and friends can leave the profile ‘live’ by not
reporting the death, in which case automatic features will continue to function,
and the profile will be open to posts, prompts, advertising, and so on. The ‘live’
profile option can even be taken a step further if friends or family access the dead
user’s profile with their password (contravening Facebook’s terms of use agree-
ment) and post on the deceased’s behalf. In this case posts will appear in the name
of the deceased, not in the name of the poster; the profile, and in a sense the
deceased, maintains a living voice on social media.
For Facebook’s 30 million (plus) dead users, at the time of writing, only around
three million profiles have been memorialised. The remaining 27 million or so have
therefore been deleted or remain online in one of the two ‘live’ states noted above.
Given that remaining ‘live’ is the default position (if nothing is done to the contrary),
and given the barriers Facebook have created for deletion, it follows that many of
the 27 million profiles remain present to the deceased’s social networks as they were
when the users were alive. The implication is that the deletion or memorialising of
posthumous profiles is not servicing the wishes of many users, including living
persons preparing for their ‘after life’ on Facebook. Instead, posthumous profiles are
increasingly being repurposed, often kept open through proxy users and inter-
mittently buoyed and transformed by their continued engagement with the living.
An example of a dead person’s profile remaining open and active, with on-going
posts made on behalf of the deceased, was publicly presented in the case of film
critic Roger Ebert. Roger died of cancer in April 2013, but remained active on
Twitter well after his death. His wife Chaz Ebert ‘operated the account on her
husband’s behalf, posting links to old reviews and photos and using the account to
publicise a documentary about her late husband’ (Meese, Nansen et al., 2015). This
did not happen without forethought; prior to his death Roger made his wife pro-
mise to nurture his Facebook and Twitter accounts and Chaz committed to do this
to keep Roger’s digital identity alive. Roger Ebert may be dead, but his online
activity means that both his digital persona and posthumous socially active identity
are very much alive. ‘Ordinary’ people also engage in this sort of proxy account
use. For example, one participant in our research noted how she felt about
appropriating her deceased partner’s profile, which allowed her to post messages of
bereavement to his distributed social network:
I want to say when he initially passed away; it was a way of notifying people
that I wasn’t as close to, but that he had relationships with. These may have
been friends of his from high school or college, that lived in different parts of
the United States or Australia, that he had kept in contact with via Facebook, or
that I may have never met. That was a way of being able to reach out to them.
Also, I was lucky enough that I had access to his Facebook account for at least a
while in the beginning, and was able to go in there and post on his behalf,
almost. Instead of me being a friend who was going in and posting something, I
was actually like, ‘How did Jim feel today?’ Then I could do it that way, and
then everyone that he was connected to, would see it. That was the initial way
of interacting with it. Then after a while, I didn’t go into it that much …
In another reported case in Auckland, New Zealand, Greg Murphy maintained his
wife Natalie’s Facebook profile after she died of breast cancer, updating it regularly
(Russell, 2014; see also Meese, Nansen et al., 2015). He ‘used her profile to con-
tinue what he saw as “her” advocacy work, raising awareness for breast cancer
prevention and networking for related fundraising events’ (Meese, Nansen et al.,
2015: 413). Russell (2014) notes that some ‘friends were shocked when Natalie
appeared in their newsfeed but most have greeted it with positivity’.
As we have noted elsewhere, the notion of a digital afterlife emerges from an
implicit rhetoric of connectivity present in digital media (Meese, Nansen et al.,
2015). Other scholars have discussed this connection rhetoric but have also noted
that there are moments when disconnection might be a more viable or useful
option (Karppi, 2013b; Light, 2014; Light and Cassidy, 2014). While biological
processes allow the dead to disconnect from the living, questions remain about
how and when the dead should be disconnected from their online lives, if at all.
Facebook offers users the chance to connect with lost friends and also sustain dis-
tant ties. This can also apply to the relationship between the living and a dead
Facebook friend. After the initial grieving period, the profile pages of the deceased
are typically only engaged with during landmark dates, such as birthdays or at the
anniversary of a death (Brubaker and Hayes, 2011). In short, like old high school
friends or workmates, the dead become distant ties, and one can check in at key
moments of their (past) life.
Designers of social networks and websites have over time factored the mortality
of their users into the architecture of their platforms, amending and updating
policies and affordances to accommodate the shifting demographics and demands of
both living and deceased users. Similarly, users of social media platforms have over
time developed their own vernacular responses to these functions and their limita-
tions and have thereby been co-participants in shaping practices of online memor-
ialisation. Nevertheless, this history also points to tensions and conflicts between
commercial platforms and their users, which continue to emerge. In late 2016, for
example, Facebook’s protocol for memorialising accounts accidentally converted
roughly two million live profiles, including Mark Zuckerberg’s, into a memorial
status. News of the error quickly spread across social and mainstream media, with
people bemused about their premature demise, though Facebook quickly restored
accounts. Nevertheless, this incident highlighted the dependency of one’s digital
presence on platform providers, both in life and death, and in turn perhaps meta-
physically pointed to the fragility of both biological and digital existence.
Such events and tensions are not unique, and increasingly common in the con-
texts of algorithmic organisation (Gillespie, 2014), such as when Facebook started
to algorithmically curate user data as part of its 10-year anniversary. As part of the
celebrations, Facebook rolled out its ‘Look Back Video’ feature. The Look Back
Video offered users the option of auto-curating, downloading, and sharing a one-
minute slideshow video composed of photographs and screen-shots sourced from
‘highlights’ on their timeline. The auto-curation of ‘highlights’ was based on an
algorithmically determined sorting and selection process using analytics such as the
number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. A Facebook user named John Berlin took to YouTube
to request access to his deceased son’s Look Back Video, soliciting mass support
from fellow users. In late 2014 Facebook rolled out a similar offering, the ‘Year in
Review’, in which users were presented with a scroll down graphic combining text
posts, photos, and other life events captured by Facebook over the previous year.
Soon after, Eric Meyer (2014) posted on his blog a widely read and circulated
criticism of the ‘inadvertent algorithmic cruelty’ of the feature, which depicted
images of his recently deceased daughter alongside statements from Facebook
saying, ‘It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it’. Shortly after the launch,
Facebook responded by providing an app that enabled the video to be edited. Both
examples highlight the problems with using analytics to curate collections of con-
tent associated with social media profiles, especially when that content includes
representations of the dead within the digital networks of the living.
Media mobility, funeral vernaculars

Social media platforms and use are now commonly accessed and deployed on
mobile devices, such as smartphones and iPads, which feature cameras networked
through wireless connectivity to image-sharing software platforms like Snapchat
and Instagram (Tifentale and Manovich, 2015). Such mobile social media use is
reshaping memorialising practices in ways that are not just online but embedded in
physical places and social events, organised around more visual forms of networked
communication and commemoration, and appropriate social media platforms in
vernacular refashionings of mourning rituals (see, for example, Cumiskey and
Hjorth, 2016). This is particularly evident in the use of mobile media as part of
funeral practices, which this section discusses based on published research by the
authors.
The immediacy and the reach of the networked camera at funeral services allows
participants to move beyond the industry-directed digital representations of death
rituals and commemoration we discuss in later chapters. Certainly, the function of
these images and the interactions that take place online around them diverges sig-
nificantly from the historical use of memorial photography (as described by Hallam
and Hockey, 2001) for remembrance or reflection.
In order to explore this vernacular practice, we researched practices of social
media photo sharing in the context of funeral participation. We collected and
analysed public photographs tagged with #funeral shared on the social media
platform Instagram. We were motivated by the media furore that surrounded the
‘selfies at funerals’ Tumblr blog (Feifer, 2013a and 2013b) as well as the famous
images of President Obama posing for a selfie with the Prime Ministers of Denmark
and the UK at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in late 2013. We examined
the moral panics raised around the presumed narcissistic and sacrilegious use of such
social media in relation to death (Gibbs et al., 2015; Meese, Nansen et al., 2015),
and we also looked at how selfie-taking as an everyday casual leisure practice
becomes understood within a unique, formal, and sombre context (Kohn et al.,
2017). We also considered the implications of this vernacular mode of visual

communication for mediating funerary events, as well as observing the historical,
cultural, and material forms that take shape around death and commemoration.
From this research, we found that sharing images at funerals using mobile social
media was less about the facilitation of memorialisation and more about commu-
nicating an affective presence that co-located the ‘person’ at the funeral within
their social network and their social network at the funeral (Gibbs et al., 2015).
In our study of commemorative and mourning practices occurring around the
funeral hashtag on Instagram we found that the most frequent photographs labelled
with #funeral were individual selfies. That is, a self-portrait, sometimes taken in a
mirror or with the camera held at arm’s length or with a selfie stick. In these
images and their associated text there was a clear tension between the casual,
mundane and ubiquitous photo-sharing vernacular, and expectations about how
one should behave within a ritual focusing on the deceased, and vestiges of formality
that remain strong, despite the ritual’s increasing deinstitutionalisation. Many of
these selfies at funerals conformed to conventions of self-presentation found in
everyday selfies, emphasising, for example, the appearance of the user. However,
photographs were often captioned with comments about trying to maintain a brave
face, or composure, often for the benefit of others, which suggests an awareness of
the profound emotional charge of funerals and a tension between inner affect and
external presentation. Moreover, the majority of the photographs were not taken
at the actual funeral but rather captured the taker’s pre- or post-funeral dressy
attire. The text accompanying the Instagram image was also used to reflect on or
engage with the funeral. Particular selfie takers hoped that ‘relatives were talking to
God right now’ or said that they were ‘not ready to go to this funeral’ and
responding comments reflected the sombre tone. The discursive field of multiple
hashtags, accompanying captions, and comments from other people indicates an
expansive practice of communication that is characterised by its efforts to express
emotion, solidarity, and connections with others.
Another common photographic theme was the expression of kinship and commu-
nity through the sharing of photographs featuring groups of close family and friends.
The prevalence of group shots underlines the importance of a funeral as a rite of
passage marked by transitions (van Gennep, 1960[1908]). The photos not only
mark the transition from life to death and not only reaffirm the living’s relationship
to the dead, but encompass the affirmation of the survivors’ social relationships
with each other. Through an examination of group photographs and associated
comments and hashtags we see these as clear efforts to communicate and share
feelings of intimacy, togetherness, family, friendship, and attachment. The group
images regularly featured smiling faces, and demonstrate an affective shift from
funeral rituals that mourn the dead, to rituals that celebrate the life of the deceased
within his/her social networks.
Only a handful of photographs, taken at funerals with open caskets, showed an
image of the deceased. However, this is unsurprising given the observed decline in
many Western cultures around the public viewing of the deceased (Walter, 2005).
Photographs taken of the service and the interring were common, but these rarely
captured individual mourning. One set of categories highlighted the funeral as a
ritualised event, by capturing the material culture of the funeral, included images of
funeral service cards, clothes, or food. There were many images of funeral flowers.
There were only very few images of headstones, urns, plaques, or overtly religious
images. This could be because of the character of the funeral hashtag. Events and
activities tagged with #funeral were typically associated with the funeral event
itself, before the ashes had been received or the headstone erected. In addition to
focusing on the event and the materiality of the funeral, there were photographs of
natural and built landscapes (sky, trees, graveyard, church details, etc.) that appeared
to abstractly express the mood and affect of the event.
It is important to note that the ways that this platform is put to use is quite different
from other social media like Facebook, which provides a locus for networked publics
to congregate. Social media profiles (as we’ve noted earlier in this chapter) can also
be memorialised after death, helping to create a shared and sacred place for
mourning and commemoration. In contrast, Instagram has no shared spaces and
Instagram users are restricted to only posting materials to their own profile.
Therefore, from an emic Instagram-savvy user’s perspective the tensions felt around
social media use at funerals are unwarranted even if they are simultaneously
understood at some level. Images shared around funerals are less about separation from
the social life of the funeral, and more about reaching out to signify presence – to
communicate an important and emotionally charged event to a wider (and missed)
social network. Funeral hashtags allow users to draw on recognised tropes in order
to reposition their funeral experience among their wider network of friends while
at the same time drawing their wider network into some degree of participation at
the funeral. The act of sharing photographs associated with funerals through
Instagram is all about affective communication to absent others (van Dijck, 2008).
Photo-sharing through Instagram, then, can been seen as a new shift in com-
memorative and memorialisation practice associated with social media. It extends
the increasingly common practice of online memorialising by embedding mobile
and social media in places and rituals of mourning. Clearly, such practices do not
replace institutionalised death-related rituals and formally provided and marketed
material and digital services, but they do intermingle co-present and distributed
publics, and in the process amend the location and institutionalisation of ritual by
enabling people to reach out into more informal and personalised networks. In doing
so, these photo-sharing vernacular practices remind us of a time in the past when
mourning was more commonly experienced as a public and communal affair.
Conclusion
Practices associated with commemoration and memorialisation through social
media are increasingly widespread, but as the incidents above illustrate, they
entangle the vernacular with the institutional, and blur the social conventions of
mourning with those of social networking in ways that continually create situations
that challenge social norms and expectations. In the collision of the private and the
public, and the traditional with the emergent, such practices continue to shape and
be shaped by the digital contexts, affordances, and cultures in which they take
place. Within such digital materialities, the deceased can be encountered in unex-
pected ways, raising questions about our relations with the deceased, along with
questions about the social status and meaning of dead persons. While users of social
media die, their digital traces tend to linger on, and through these persistent bodies
of data, the dead also retain a certain social presence, and can potentially continue
to play social roles in the lives of those left behind. Brubaker and Vertesi (2010)
note that death does not necessarily result in the termination of an account or,
indeed, an end to social presence, and have proposed that in these contexts of
posthumous digital presence, the dead should be thought of as ‘extreme users’,
rather than as non-users or former users, of social media.
Many millions of deceased profiles exist in a state where they may continue to
be modified and maintained through the collaborative actions and interactions of
friends and relatives, giving a continued interactive capacity to the dead. The
technical capacity for collaborative authorship on social media, even after death,
means that users, identities, and data are contingent on the networks in which they
exist (see also Karppi, 2013a; Stokes, 2012). These affordances make visible the
inter-subjectivity of identity by challenging humanist understandings of the self as
individually produced; an idea we return to throughout the book in our discussions of
personhood. Of course, part of this is socially driven, as we saw in the examples of
Anna and Zyzz, in which multiple publics participated in establishing, maintaining,
and challenging their memory. Yet, we also noted that such dynamics are mediated
by platforms, policies and intermediaries, which configure spaces of possibility and
contestation that have implications for the presence, persistence, and legacy of the
dead. Such dynamics are explored further in the following chapter, where we turn
to online worlds and games and the relationships between players and developers
and between emergent practices and established social norms of memorialisation.
And, whilst social media have emerged as important spaces for memorialisation, the
growth in mobile and location-based media are extending such practices beyond
the screen and into everyday places, routines, and objects in a range of novel ways,
which we explore later in the book.
Notes
1 To get ‘aesthetic’ is to achieve a shredded muscular body, and ‘mirin’ or ‘mire’ is to
admire another’s physique and achievements.
2 ‘srs’ tag means to take seriously; ‘negged’ means rejected or denied access by moderators.
3 Facebook ‘profiles’ are supposed to represent individual people and Facebook’s ‘real name
policy’ permits only one profile per person. ‘Pages’ look similar to personal profiles, but
represent businesses, brands, and organisations rather than individuals. People can set up
multiple pages (www.facebook.com/help/217671661585622).
4 www.fusion.net/story/276237/the-number-of-dead-people-on-facebook-will-soon-
outnumber-the-living/
5
MIXING REPERTOIRES
Commemoration in digital games and
online worlds
In the game World of Warcraft (WoW), a non-player character (NPC) called Elloric can be
found at the Seat of Knowledge in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms reading a map.1 Elloric is
named after the character of a player, Michael, who died aged twenty-nine on New Year’s
Day 2013 from a sudden asthma attack. The NPC looks exactly the same as the character
Michael created and used when he played the game. A few days after Michael’s death,
Ghemit, his husband and fellow WoW player, organised an in-game memorial service in his
honour. For over an hour, dozens of players gathered under a tree in the Night elf city,
Darnassus, on the Proudmoore server, to pay their respects to Elloric2 and eulogise on Ven-
trilo.3 Ghemit shared an image of the service with the Around Azeroth column of the WoW
Insider blog with the comment, ‘This showing of love and support shows this is not just a
game, but a fantastic community that supports our members when needed’ (Wachowski,
2013). A few days later Ghemit, an active social media commentator who often tweets,
podcasts, blogs, and so forth about WoW, got word from an unnamed person that Blizzard
(the game developer) and Dave Kosak (Lead Narrative Designer) had been contacted about
putting some kind of memorial for Elloric in the game.Ghemit (2013) writes:
Needless to say I was absolutely floored when I was exploring the PTR [Public Test
Realm] and came across my husband standing there reading a map. Elloric my loving,
goofy, never knows where he’s going in game husband! When I first saw the character
standing there I said to myself ‘NO FU*KING… WHAT…THAT CAN’T
BE… OMFG THAT IS’ I lost all breath in my lungs and started shaking and
crying. I was hoping *maybe* a grey vendor trash item4 , but I’m just a twitter
knownish hunter,5 surely people at Blizzard have better people to think about then me.
To commemorate Michael’s birthday in July of that year, Ghemit sent out a tweet asking
people for screenshots of Elloric with a cake. TradeChat, a well-known WoW video blogger,
retweeted the message and received dozens of images from players across a host of servers
76 Commemoration in digital games and online worlds
FIGURE 5.1 Members of the guild, Pride of Stonewall, gather in the gardens of Darnassus
for a memorial service dedicated to Elloric.
Source: © Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. World of Warcraft, Warcraft and
Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
in the U.S. and/or other countries.
showing various tributes at the Elloric NPC, including a lot of cake.6 Ghemit also gathered
with friends around Elloric and had a quiet and contemplative discussion with them on
Ventrilo. They also used a variety of game resources such as fireworks, cakes, spell effects, and
so forth to give the occasion a sense of celebration. A year after Michael’s death, Ghemit sent
another screenshot to Around Azeroth showing another memorial service (Wachowski, 2014).
It was important for Ghemit to share these images as he felt they demonstrated the sense of
community and respect that can exist amongst people who play games like WoW.
The social relations played out in the above scenario include those of the
bereaved player and his dead spouse, their immediate game community who gather
to participate in the memorial service, the community engaged through social
media, the game developers who constructed the memorial, the broader gaming
community who choose to engage with it in some fashion (whether or not they
are aware it is a memorial), and last but not least, the relations between Michael
(the person who died) and Elloric (his game character). In this network, the per-
sonhood of the deceased is interactively constituted in ways that extend their social
life after death. Additionally, this personhood is buoyed by various objects that are
created, used, and given meaning and value within this particular environment.
The game developers draw on and artfully repurpose digital game assets such as
Elloric’s character model, and further personalise it by affectionately alluding to
Michael’s poor navigational skills, to create a memorial that represents and recalls
Elloric the character and Michael the deceased player. Players also creatively use
the game to commemorate Michael by holding in-game memorial services and
creating new ritual processes, such as sharing screenshots of themselves enjoying
Commemoration in digital games and online worlds 77
cake with the Elloric figure. The commemorative and memorial events in this one
example connect people, publics, communities, artefacts, and institutions in complex
and interesting ways, and these connections will be discussed in this chapter.
Engaging with digital games is an everyday activity for many people. The games
industry now rivals the Hollywood film industry in terms of economic size and
cultural reach.7 Indeed, according to some measures, it now exceeds Hollywood in
these terms (Entertainment Software Association [ESA], 2015). However, we have
not simply chosen to examine video games because of the popularity of this media
form. We have chosen to examine commemoration and memorialisation in video
games (rather than in other forms of digital media such as cinema, books, or tele-
vision) because games combine the social with the aesthetic in ways that are rarely
achieved in other media (Aarseth, 2001). The memorials and commemorative
practices that feature in games are exceedingly novel, as they draw on the unique
interactional affordances of the video game environment as well as referencing
specific elements of gaming cultures. Yet, they also draw on the tropes and motifs
of established funerary practices. As we have already seen in the previous chapter,
memorialisation and commemoration practices are materially and symbolically
hybridised when they intersect with digital media; we would argue that such
hybridisation is at its sharpest when viewed in digital games.
In this chapter, we identify and describe an assortment of memorials and com-
memorative practices found in a variety of digital games and we show how they
draw on, appropriate, and refashion a range of material and cultural resources. Game
engines and game mechanics provide game developers and game players with a
range of materials for creating memorials and engaging in commemorative activities
that are often a pastiche of motifs and tropes drawn from both game culture and
from more ‘traditional’ memorial forms and mourning rites. The aim of this chapter
is, in part, to document and analyse the material and symbolic forms these innovative
memorials and commemorative practices take. It also considers the many ways the
personhood of the deceased is, to some degree, prolonged, extended, and refash-
ioned in the cultural and material entanglements that relationally constitute the
game commemorations discussed. We also consider how these activities are aligned
with broader, contemporary shifts in vernacular commemoration.
Memorialising and living on through games

In this section of the chapter we explore some of the forms taken by the memorials
constructed in digital games. These memorials not only provide resources for
remembering the deceased, but through their often-interactive character, they also
facilitate a mode of continuing social life for the deceased in and through digital
game worlds.
Although memorials created in computer games are relatively new, they draw
on established tropes and practices. The dedication of a book or film or even a
sporting match to the memory of a deceased person or persons is a well-known
practice of authors, publishers, producers, and the like, and this form of dedication
has been adopted by game developers. The most straightforward of these take the
form of a dedication printed either in the game’s manual and/or release notes. For
example, numerous role-playing games were dedicated to the ‘fathers’ of the genre,
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson who were the creators of Dungeons and Dragons
(D&D) (see Gygax and Arneson, 1974), after they passed away in 2008 and 2009
respectively. The 2.4.0 Fury of the Sunwell patch of World of Warcraft was dedi-
cated to Gygax; the Publish 51 patch of Ultima Online was also dedicated to him;
and patch 3.1 of World of Warcraft, The Secrets of Ulduar, was dedicated to Arneson
(Olivetti, 2012).
The eulogy is another form of established commemorative practice that has been
creatively deployed in digital games. Michael John Mamaril was a fan of the
Borderlands game developed by Gearbox, and following his death a friend made a
request to Gearbox for a Borderlands themed video eulogy to play at his funeral. In
reply, the developers made a video featuring artwork and a character from the
game named Claptrap to honour the memory of the fan (Tan, 2012). The video
concluded with a voiceover from the developers saying:
Carlo, everybody at Gearbox was deeply touched by your request to have our
silly little robot join you in eulogising your friend Michael. It means more to
us than you will ever know.8
Game developers have also placed architectural memorials within games, which
often draw explicitly on established monument motifs, to continue this process of
dedication. Returning to the examples of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, memorials
were added to Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO), an online game version of the
D&D tabletop roleplaying game (Turbine, 2006), shortly after their deaths. A
shrine in the form of a stone plinth holding a book and decorated with an inlaid
gem dedicated to Gygax was added to the Delera’s Tomb area of the game in ‘The
Way of The Monk’ update to DDO.9 Similarly, in the Ruins of Threnal game
update, a memorial altar dedicated to Arneson was added to the game several
months after his death. Each of these memorials was personalised by being located
at the sites of storylines (or quests) that were originally narrated by Gygax and
Arneson. In addition to the use of aesthetically and semiotically familiar archi-
tectural forms, new items were created as rewards for the storylines narrated by
Gygax and Arneson. For example, ‘The Voice of the Master’ was a trinket that
took the form of a 20-sided dice (an iconic emblem of D&D), and ‘The Mantle of
the Worldshaper’ was an appropriately named cloak.10
Alluding to Gygax’s and Arneson’s role as the originators of D&D, both of these
trinkets gave players beneficial boosts, including increased experience gains. When
both items were worn, players got ‘DM’s vision’: ‘With the two original Dungeon
Masters guiding you, you can see through most illusions and trickery. You are
under the effects of the True Seeing spell’.11 The example of the commemorative
dice and cloak is a neat illustration of the mix of commemorative practices and
game mechanics. To possess an object that is imbued with memory and
significance is a common commemorative practice, such as treasuring a father’s

pipe, an item of clothing, a lock of a child’s hair, or in this case, cloak and dice. In
many gaming contexts, the possession of objects such as these does more than
invoke memories, the objects themselves can demonstrate status, prowess, and can
imbue a character with additional power. The dice and cloak in DDO are thus
objects that are both commemorative and powerful. This raises interesting ques-
tions about motivations, and how players might be encouraged to participate in
commemorative acts by rewarding them with game play benefits. This is a point
we will return to later in the chapter.
‘Traditional’ motifs are also used in the game world to commemorate historical
figures. For example, the game World of Tanks has a series of medals rewarding
achievements that are named after World War II ‘tank aces’.12 Each medal is awarded
for game playing achievements that are thematically tied to the wartime achieve-
ments of the ‘ace’. For example, Oskin’s Medal is ‘awarded to players in medium
tanks who destroy three enemy tanks or tank destroyers. The targets must be at
least one tier higher than the player’s tank’. The award goes on to describe Oskin’s
achievements:
Alexander Oskin, a Hero of the Soviet Union, was a tank commander who
destroyed three King Tigers with his T-34 during a reconnaissance operation
near Oglenduv on August 11, 1944.13
In the game world, the T-34 is a tier V medium tank and the King Tiger (Tiger II)
is a tier VIII heavy tank. To win the medal, players must play out, as it were,
Oskin’s WWII achievements by destroying three technically superior tanks. This is
a commemorative re-enactment of the notable achievements of a historical figure,
translated and performed in the vernacular actions of the gaming world.
Game developers have also frequently used non-player characters (NPC) such as
Elloric, described at the beginning of this chapter, as a form of memorialisation.
Following Claptrap’s eulogy to Michael Mamaril, described above, Gearbox put a
non-player character (NPC) with the name Michael Mamaril in Borderlands II. This
NPC is a rare and random spawn which only appears at infrequent intervals at one
of ten locations in the ‘Sanctuary’ area of the game.14 The NPC looks more like a
player than a typical NPC; when players interact with him he says ‘Heya Vault
Hunter! I found this when I was out in the borderlands – you want it?’ and gives the
player a random but powerful weapon to use in the game. Michael’s NPC is also
integral to the game achievement called ‘Tribute to a Vault Hunter’. The deceased
in this case lives on as a benign presence. The charitable interventions of Mamaril in
the game world, and his ongoing presence among the living, allude to the possi-
bilities of redemption, continuance, a dynamic afterlife, and the ability to intercede
from beyond the grave. In a fashion somewhat similar to the vernacular angels
described in Tony Walter’s study of the online commemoration of Jade Goody in
the UK (2011), Mamaril is not positioned as a soul lying quiescent, patiently
awaiting the resurrecting mercy of a God, but as an active agent within the world.
Through NPC memorials of this kind, the dead walk amongst the living in these
game worlds.
In another notable example, memorialisation unfolds across an NPC, an online
database, a quest, and a funeral reading. In World of Warcraft one can find an NPC
memorial for Dak Krause, an avid player of the game. Following his death, his
character Caylee was memorialised in the game as Caylee Dak, and can be found
wearing the same haphazard collection of armour and equipment his character was
wearing when he last logged into the game. In appearance, she is a consistent
representation of Caylee at the time of Dak’s death. Caylee is also preserved in the
WoW Armory,15 an online database that contains records of current players and
their achievements. Visitors to her page have noted the uncanny effect of the
parallels between her database presentation and her presentation in the game world
(see Gibbs et al., 2012).
The Caylee Dak memorial is not limited to the NPC, and the database record
on WoW Armory, but also contains a missive that evokes the longstanding Christian
ritual of a funeral reading. Alicia, a friend of Dak, adapted the popular memorial
reading ‘Do not Stand at My Grave and Weep’ with game world references as a
tribute to her friend. She then petitioned Blizzard, the game developer, to make an
in-game memorial for Dak. In the game world, a NPC called Alicia asks players to
deliver a note to her friend Caylee, which contains ‘Alicia’s Poem’:
Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
across Northrend’s bright and shining snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
on Westfall’s fields of golden grain.
I am in the morning hush,
of Stranglethorn’s jungle, green and lush.
I am in the drums loud and grand,
the thunderous hooves across Nagrand.
I am the stars warmly gleaming,
over Darnassus softly dreaming.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.
So, as we can see, the line ‘I am the diamond glints on snow’ in the original becomes
‘across Northrend’s bright and shining snow’ and so forth. Alicia’s Poem reproduces
the original poem’s form and metre, and transposes its iconic content to evoke regions
of the game world thematically close to the original content of the poem.
The Caylee Dak memorial builds layers of significance by drawing on tropes
from both established memorialisation practices and the practices and tropes of the
game world to create a hybrid memorial that speaks to both the life experience of
the player as well as to their involvement in the game world. It can be seen as a
form of commemoration that celebrates and remembers what the deceased enjoyed
and how they passed their time. In many ways it is similar to the commemorative
plaque found at a golf club, a memorial park bench, or a corner stool at a bar, in
marking quotidian sites occupied and of significance to the deceased and hence
fitting for commemorating their life (Hockey et al., 2005).
As a final example of developers using their games for memorialisation, we point
to the construction of quests and storylines dedicated to the deceased. In World of
Warcraft, developers have created the Crusader Bridenbrad series of quests. This is a
memorial for Bradford Bridenbecker, the brother of a Blizzard Vice-President,
who died after a long illness with cancer. In this series of quests, players are tasked
with finding a cure for Crusader Bridenbrad who has been stricken with the
‘plague of undeath’, a contagious disease that turns people into undead minions of
The Lich King. The quests draw players into a narrative that alludes to the illness
or dying trajectory of a cancer patient (Kellehear, 2009); a trajectory involving
painful treatments, partial remissions, and subsequent relapses, before a final death
(Gibbs et al., 2012). The quests end with the crusader ‘rising up into the light’,
and thereby passing into the game’s spiritual domain – a final transformation in
Bridenbrad’s journey.
The series of quests is plainly a metaphor for a battle with terminal cancer and
captures some of the battle’s cycle of treatment and hope, followed by relapse
and resignation. It also evokes ideas of ‘dying well’ and the possibility of
redemption and afterlife
(Gibbs et al., 2012).
This story that is played out by players commemorates the life of Bradford by
focusing on his dying. This story configures death in a positive manner, repre-
senting it as a transformation rather than an ending, thereby opening up future
possibilities. This contrasts with modern commemorative acts that tend to erase the
final stages of illness in order to focus on the life as it was lived in its vibrant full-
ness. However, it also evokes other common narratives associated with ‘dying well’
and the ‘good death’ (Green, 2012). Finally, the quests allude to the possibilities of
redemption, continuance, and an afterlife, not dissimilar to the evocation of angels
and afterlife found by Tony Walter in the refiguring of popular religion in discussions
of the death of Jade Goody (Walter, 2011).
At this stage, it is useful to reflect on and consider how these developer-
constructed memorials contribute to our understanding of personhood and sociality
in the context of digital media and death. The relations suggested in these instances
of memorialisation feed into our conceptualisation of continuing social connection
between the living and the dead, and the creative extension of personhood
through commemorative practices carried out through digital media. The game
world provides a context for acts of remembrance, which can play out in a number
of ways. Dedications and monuments invite game players to relate to the deceased
by playing the game. Quests and NPCs extend this social connection even further by
not only providing resources for remembering and relating to the deceased, but also
maintaining the deceased’s personhood by providing ongoing forms of interaction.
As noted earlier, the form, shape, and symbolism of these developer-constructed
memorials also draw on tropes and motifs from both traditional and popular
funerary practices as well as the tropes and motifs common to the game worlds
they inhabit. In so doing, they can speak to game communities in ways that can
evoke both the rituals and gravitas of established memorial traditions while, at the
same time, speak to the vernacular and lived experiences of those game worlds.
However, while the aim may be to achieve these lofty effects, they do not always
succeed, a point we will return to later in the chapter.
Game rituals and player commemorations

In the previous sections we have looked at memorials created by game developers.
In this section we turn to player-generated commemorations. In addition to
memorials developed by game developers, players of games have engaged in a host
of commemorative practices, that draw on and mix together both established
funerary practices and game-specific tropes and motifs.
While not everyday occurrences, commemorative services organised by players
of World of Warcraft held within the game are well-known and unremarkable. One
of the earliest examples dates back to October 2005. Details are scant, but reports
suggest that the service was held in honour of ‘Snowly’, a young Chinese girl who
apparently died after playing World of Warcraft continuously for several days. Per-
haps understating the case, reports noted that her friends, who she also played with,
regarded her as a ‘very diligent member and a key official of their community’
(‘Death of Net Game Addicts Alerts Others’, 2005). A screenshot from the event
shows what appears to be a funeral service with approximately twenty-four player
characters dressed in sombre grey cloaks kneeling with their heads bowed facing a
twenty-fifth character who is standing, and appears to be saying something,
although the text in their speech bubble is illegible. Another early WoW funeral
that followed established funeral rituals was organised for an unnamed horde player
in 2005 on the Bronzebeard server by his guild mates. The service was held in the
Alliance’s Stormwind Cathedral, ‘the only cathedral in the game large enough to
really hold the huge numbers of people [attending]’ (Barrett, 2005). Locations that
resemble places commonly understood as sacred, such as the Stormwind Cathedral
or graveyards, are often used by players to hold memorial services (Gibbs et al.,
2012). As we will see later in the chapter, this particular funeral service was note-
worthy for its peacefulness and for the cooperation it engendered between the
warring Horde and Alliance factions.
Rather different forms of participative commemoration followed the death of
Sean Smith, aka Vile Rat, a prominent player of EVE Online, who was killed
during the 2012 attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya
(Gibbs et al., 2016).16 Players of EVE Online drew on a range of game resources
and cultural motifs from the game world to perform an array of commemorations.
On the 15th of September, a few days after his death, his alliance organised the
‘Vile Rat Memorial Not Purple Shoot It Diplomatic Disaster Op’ event as an
ironic commemoration and celebration of Vile Rat’s noted diplomatic skills.
Consistent with EVE’s ethos, the player-organised event involved thousands of
players forming fleets of spaceships and wantonly destroying other fleets of ships
until any remaining ships joined in a final massive, last ship standing ‘Thunder-
dome’ battle, which saw the destruction of over 2,400 player-owned ships in what
‘was surely the largest thunderdome (not to mention sheer waste of personal ISK
[assets]) in all of EVE history’.17
Prior to the Thunderdome, a large number of tributes were created within the
EVE Online game world for Vile Rat by his fellow players. These included the
renaming of player-controlled assets in his honour, including cargo containers and
hundreds of player-owned stations. Commemorative performances that appro-
priated symbolically apt game resources accompanied these less transient memorials.
A large number of players worked together to spell out the message ‘RIP Vile Rat’
using ‘warp bubbles’, which appeared as large shimmering spheres in the game.
Inside these bubbles were small sparks of light, which were ‘individual players
FIGURE 5.2 A tribute to Sean ‘Vile Rat’ Smith.

Source: Courtesy of Imperium News.
paying their respects by lighting a “candle” using the in-game cynosural field
item’.18 Cynosural fields are beacons used to guide ‘warp-jumping’ allies to a
particular location.19 Lighting so many of these candles in one location also created
a beacon that could be seen across the EVE Online universe and suggested, as per
the common EVE Online maxim, that Vile Rat should ‘fly safe’ on his last great
journey (Gibbs et al., 2016). The Thunderdome event was repeated in 2013 and
2014 and will likely become an annual event. In what seems to have become
established practice within EVE Online, similar commemorations have been held
for other players of the game. There are fields of cargo containers, a ‘fleet roam’ (a
fleet that roams around looking for fights) and stations renamed for Tony, aka
R76983, who died in 2013. Similarly, a cyno-lighting vigil and station renaming
took place for Shane Roderick, aka Shane Roderick, who passed away in 2014
(Gibbs et al., 2016).
In World War II Online: Battle Ground Europe, players have organised com-
memorative services for other players who have passed away and recordings of
some of these services have been shared through YouTube. For example, an online
funeral was planned and held for AOTHELM and a video of the service was
posted to YouTube.20 The video ‘Battleground Europe Online Funeral – RIP
AOTHELM’, draws on a number of established Christian funerary tropes. It
commences with the lyrics to the hymn ‘Mansions of The Lord’21 originally written
for the 2002 film We Were Soldiers,22 which is often performed to honour fallen
soldiers in the USA. It then proceeds to show dozens of players gathered in a
square in front of the game’s rendition of Notre Dame. Many players kneel behind
artillery pieces, the remainder are arranged in a big square formation and towards
the end of the video the artillery can be seen firing a gun salute. Sombre martial
music plays throughout the clip. A similar video posted to YouTube on the 11th of
August 2007 was dedicated ‘In loving memory of Thomas “Sdshill” Holt’ and
opens with the text: ‘We mourn the loss of a friend we all felt we knew so well.
We will never forget you.’23 This video also shows what appear to be dozens of
Sdshill’s squad members walking to a chapel and kneeling in orderly rows,
accompanied by Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’. About halfway through the
video the text appears: ‘We don’t forget to celebrate your life either, in our unique
way.’ The sound track then switches to a jaunty tune and the video shows
the squad moving through the countryside fighting other players.
Using pre-rendered video from a computer game to make a short film is called
machinima (machine + cinema) (Lowood and Nitsche, 2011). While the videos
made of the memorial services described above are examples of simple machinima,
other more sophisticated ones have been made as dedications to deceased friends.
These videos are not documentations of a memorial service, but rather artfully
crafted short films using game footage and other art work drawn from the game’s
computer files. The most notable example is the April 2008 tribute to Dandalyn
from the World of Warcraft Alleria server made by machinima artists, Summergale
and Nyhm. The short video, which is titled ‘In Memory’, features an adapted
version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’24 featuring new lyrics adapted to the
World of Warcraft milieu and to Dandalyn’s character in the game.25 Numerous

other video tributes and video recordings of in-game memorial services for players
can be found on YouTube and other video hosting sites.26
The online fantasy game Everquest II offers a poignant example of the communal
character of many game commemorations. In late 2012, Myrose posted a message
in the Everquest II forums about her six year old son who played the character
Ribbitribbitt on the Guk game server. Her son had cancer and was ‘given 6–12
weeks to live’ (Menon, 2012). Knowing that her son liked to run around his
player-owned Tenebrous Tangle Island as a froglok (a race of humanoid frogs), she
wanted to re-decorate the island and reached out to the Everquest II community for
assistance. Many players of Everquest II rallied and a team of hundreds formed a
guild called the ‘Lillypad Jungle’ and worked together to build houses, play-
grounds, and a tier-three guild hall (a notable status item in the game). The island
included treehouses, a roller coaster, a zoo, ponds, waterfalls, gardens, a candy
strewn pirate ship, a rainbow, a commemorative shrine as well as a host of other
buildings and objects (Guthrie, 2013). The redecoration entailed an enormous
amount of work and expenditure of game currency and was finished within a few
days. Players were ‘grinding’ all night for guild reputation and money, while others
loaded up their characters with materials and game currency and then paid ‘real’
currency to transfer to the Guk server to donate to the building effort (Bryan,
2012). The decorated island was unveiled during a special in-game event attended
by hundreds of players and overseen by several Game Masters. Ribbitribbitt’s
reactions to the surprise redecoration were filmed by his family and shared with the
community via YouTube.27 On the first anniversary of Ribbitribbitt being shown
his garden, players on the Guk server held a celebratory Ribbitribbitt day (Guthrie,
2013). As well as remembering this notable occasion, the event was ‘a chance to
tell stories, add to the memorial, and remember what it is to be a true community’
and to reaffirm friendships ‘had with adventurers we lost too soon’ (Dexella, 2013)
in a similar fashion to the way makeshift public memorials are often understood as
expressions of community and solidarity (Wouters, 2002).
Similarly, Minecraft provides players with resources that may be appropriated for
the construction of monuments. In late 2013, a player known only as Gas Bandit
lost his wife to ovarian cancer at the age of 41. In early 2014, with the help of
some friends who donated materials, he started building a monument in her
memory in Minecraft (Peppers, 2014). The monument is a large building; topped by
a gigantic statue ‘depicting her minecraft avatar riding a minecart’.28 The entry way
is lined with torches and Gas Bandit has built an elevated circular rail track around
the outside of the monument so it can be viewed from all angles. Inside the
building is an altar framed by twin waterfalls and surrounded by burning torches
and flowers. Inscribed on the altar are the words, ‘In Memoriam Pauline 1972–
2013 “Chikii”’. The monument was begun in January and completed on the 9th of
March 2014. On his YouTube posting, Gas Bandit states, ‘if my story moved you,
please consider contributing to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund’. Interestingly,
Gas Bandit chose to build the monument on a ‘private vanilla minecraft server in
survival mode, no mods, hacks, or cheats’ rather than building it in the far easier
creative mode; the considerable work involved in this decision can be read as a
commemorative act of labour and a way of expressing grief and respect through
sacrifice and dedicated work. This sits well alongside other wider-world intimate
physical labours of love, care and remembrance, such as making cemetery monu-
ments by hand, the physical act of washing the body of the deceased, the digging
of the grave, or throwing dirt onto the coffin.
The virtual world Second Life is replete with memorials of various kinds that have
been constructed by players. Some of these memorials are replicas of physical
monuments, such as The Washington Monument, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Wall, The Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park, the London
Tower Hill Memorial to men and women of the Merchant Navy and Fishing
Fleets who died in the World Wars, and The Cenotaph designed by Sir Edwin
Lutyens in Whitehall, London. Interestingly, Lutyens’ Cenotaph has influenced the
design of many war memorials and its form has been reproduced throughout
Britain and many other Commonwealth countries just as it has now been reproduced
in Second Life. Other memorials in Second Life have been erected to commemorate
service men and women who lost their lives in the Afghanistan war, 9/11, and The
Holocaust. Memorials to celebrities and famous figures such as Steve Jobs have also
been created. Graveyards and monuments to people who no longer engage in
Second Life due to death or other causes abound (see Gibson, 2017). There is even a
Second Life pet cemetery.29 While many of these memorials replicate their physical
counterparts, others have used the affordances of the Second Life platform to create
interesting commemorative experiences. For example, at a memorial to the fire-
fighters who died when the World Trade Centre collapsed, it is possible to don
fire-fighting equipment and climb up a 110 storey staircase (Apollo Manga, 2011).
Bill Bainbridge has used Second Life to commemorate his mother and her love of
the Oz books by L. Frank Baum through the reproduction of the New England
house where his mother raised her children and the creation of an Oz museum
where ‘she could display many Oz-related artefacts and give free copies to anyone
who wanted them’ (Bainbridge, 2013: 200).
To what extent ‘world builders’ like Second Life and Minecraft can be considered
games is an open question. While these virtual worlds share many features with
digital games, they differ in a number of respects. The most relevant difference, for
the purposes of this chapter, is the degree to which players have the power to
make changes to the world. While games like World of Warcraft have dynamic,
vibrant and changing social arrangements, players are heavily constrained in their
abilities to change the world.30 In these games, players can move through the
world altering it temporarily by killing monsters, harvesting resources and so forth,
but then a short time later the monsters and the resources will re-set, or in gaming
vernacular, they will ‘re-spawn’, ready for the next player. Players need to go to
extraordinary lengths to leave a mark on the actual world of these games and even
then, the effect does not persist but quickly disappears. Contrastively, games such as
EVE Online and Ever Quest allow players to create persistent, but impermanent,
structures within the game world. World-builders like Minecraft and Second Life take
this a step further, allowing for permanent changes to the game world to be made
by players. The former type of game platform enables commemorating the dead
but not memorialising them, while the latter allows both forms of activity.
Ultimately, we have seen here how innovative players have been in their use of
game platforms in their remembrances of the departed. Their creations allude to
both contemporary funerary practices while also drawing on the affordances,
tropes, and motifs of specific game worlds and their associate player cultures.
Ritualised play in quotidian spaces

While game memorials are public (if sometimes hidden) affairs, games can also be
sites for personal forms of remembrance, dealing with grief, and maintaining con-
nections with the deceased. Hockey et al. (2005) have described how the private
places of the home, the sitting room, the favourite chair, and other quotidian
spaces can become locales for remembrance. In this section, we extend our dis-
cussion by exploring how digital games can play a similar connecting role with
other people and with the deceased ‘outside’ of the game world but ‘inside’ private
and intimate contexts. In other words, in this section we will see how games are
evoked in the quotidian spaces of everyday life and how people use them to
remember the deceased.
The act of playing a game, in and of itself, can be a form of commemoration for
some bereaved. On or around the 27th of March 2014 beem0e created a post title
‘I miss you, little dude’ in the Advice Animals forum of Reddit.31 The post linked
to an image of a sad looking bear with the text: ‘My son, Monroe passed away in January.
I name RPG protagonists after him, and pretend the stories are about his adventures.’32 The
discussion thread quickly gathered replies with over 1,500 comments posted in the
first 24 hours. The most highly upvoted comments echoed the sentiment of
the Advice Animal image.33 Hot-Gothics replied with, ‘I do this exact same thing
with my brother. Especially when it comes to Legend of Zelda games. Because he would
always fight the hard monsters for me.’ In an echo of air force ‘missing man’ formation
flyovers, buying an extra drink for the departed, or setting an extra place at the
table, one poster discussed playing Super Smash Bros. with two close friends and
four controllers on the birthday of a deceased friend; the fourth controller being for
their best friend. Another poster replied, ‘Wow, you too? […] We plug in the fourth
controller and let the CPU play Bowser with us for hours, the character he used the most in
melee.’ Others write about retaining the deceased on their friend lists on multiplayer
game platforms such as X-Box Live and Steam. One made the poignant comment,
‘“Last online 427 days ago.” I know how you feel :( ’. Many commentators also dis-
cussed the way they kept saved games played by a departed friend or sibling as
reminders. Others also reported completing games partially finished by the
deceased as a way of honouring their memory. However, while many people’s
posts suggested that playing games was an act of remembrance, these kinds of
activities were, for others, creepy and/or uncanny:
Do you guys not think this is a little over the top? I mean, I love gaming, but
if I died and my parents/family decided to make a backup of my favorite game
and then played it ‘in my honor’ I would not be ok with that. It just seems
weird as fuck to me.
Playing games can be a way of remembering and communing with the deceased
through engaging in a pastime shared with the deceased in life, allowing people to
re-assert and continue their relationship with the dead. However, like many of the
emerging practices associated with commemoration and digital media, these new
forms of expression, even though they resemble and draw upon other accepted
forms of commemoration, are, for some people, inappropriately morbid and/or
maudlin. They are profane rather than sacred.
In the comments section of a YouTube video asking if playing video games could be
a ‘spiritual experience’ (PBS Game/Show, 2014), one teenager posted the following:
Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first, rug-
gedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all
kinds of games together – until he died, when i was just 6. i couldnt touch
that console for 10 years. but once i did, i noticed something. we used to play
a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty awesome for the time it
came. and once i started meddling around… i found a GHOST. literaly. you
know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a
ghost driver? yep, you guessed it – his ghost still rolls around the track today.
|and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the
ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and… i stopped right in
front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete it. Bliss
(00WARTHERAPY00, quoted in Lloyd, 2014).
Comments followed both on YouTube and other news sites where the post was
re-posted and discussed. Many reported feeling moved by the story and some
reported other experiences of loss, mourning, and grief associated with playing
games, and how the mundane and familiar activities of engaging with the shared
experiences of playing games with the deceased, was important for both memory
and feeling connected. Games can be places where the spirit or ‘ghosts’ of the
deceased are preserved and can be found and interacted with long after the
departed has departed. Lastrogu3 indicated a similar use of the fantasy game Skyrim
to remember and cope with the loss of his younger brother.
My brother passed away in 2013. I still visit him in Skyrim to see the last thing
he saw there. I never move his character or do anything, just sit there and look
at what he last saw before passing away. I miss him a lot but wanted to share
(Lastrogu3, 2015a).
Preserving his brother’s game character and ‘visiting’ it would seem to have
been an important part of Lastrogu3’s personal strategy for dealing with loss, and
maintaining an intimate connection with his brother. After posting his story on
Imgur (Lastrogu3, 2015b), the recounted experience quickly rose to the top of the
gaming sub-forum. Players responded, wanting to know Taylor’s location in the
game so they could leave flowers and other tributes to him in their own version of
the game. What followed over the next few days was a rush of condolence messages
and hundreds of tributes made to Taylor in the Skyrim world, including a game
modification (mod) that could be installed by other players in their version of the
game, which placed a roadside shrine at Taylor’s last location in the game.34
We have seen how dealing with unfinished games can provoke a range of
different possibilities for mourning practice. On the one hand, preserving a game in
the state it was last played presents opportunities for connection and remembrance.
On the other hand, some feel a desire to complete the game, or continue it, on
behalf of the dead, as a means of honouring them. Lastrogu3, for example, con-
templated this idea, creating another copy of the Skyrim that he, along with
his family, could complete together in Taylor’s honour. However, preserving a
game in its unfinished state is more commonly reported than trying to finish the
deceased’s game.
Personal possessions such as clothes, jewellery, and other objects with an inti-
mate connection to a person can become powerful commemorative keepsakes that
both evoke the person and help continue connection through memories. For
example, a game console that belonged or was loaned to a sibling can be saved and
preserved as a memento of shared times and activities. Throwawaymyideas reports
on getting an Xbox he loaned his sister back after she died in a car accident, and
how it evoked memories of her, and their relationship:
The controller still had some makeup on it from I guess where she played after
having a rough day. The cord to the controller was wrapped the way I liked it
(she picked at me for warping them up in an x fashion – original big loaf
controller). […] I never touch it and refuse to throw it out … feel like if I do
then I lose the last bit of her which connected us together.35
As the cases presented in this section illustrate, playing games can animate the
presence of the departed, make it a part of contemporaneous life, help foster con-
tinuing social connection, and create new forms of social engagement between the
living and the deceased in much the same way. People’s presence can be preserved
in the performances stored within a digital game. This presence can remain lively,
such as the haunting presence of his father that 00WARTHERAPY00 found in an
old Xbox racing game. Similarly, Taylor’s brother can find connection and
remember his brother through the preserved game state of his brother’s Skyrim
game. These forms of connecting and remembering the dead bear resemblance to
other commonly reported practices, such as preserving the deceased’s answering
machine message, keeping letters and SMS text messages, engaging in quiet con-
templation in places meaningful to the deceased, preserving, or alternatively finishing,
the deceased’s half-finished projects.
Contestations: matter out of place and/or fitting tribute

The creation of memorials by both game developers and players is not without its
controversies and discontents. While many of the examples above have been about
positive relationships associated with gaming memorials, we also raised the pro-
blems that some players feel uncomfortable with certain practices they find ‘creepy’
or ‘weird’. Clearly, as new forms of commemoration emerge, the norms around
appropriate behaviour and appropriate commemorative practices are still develop-
ing. In this section, we will briefly examine some of the contestations that have
emerged around commemorative practices in games.
Many of the memorials placed in games by game developers take the form of
‘Easter eggs’ (Consalvo, 2007): text, images, or sounds hidden away within the
game. These often take the form of an allusion or might be found in secret or hard
to access parts of the game. Many players make a point of hunting out Easter eggs
and take pride in sharing their discoveries with others.36 Getting the joke, reference,
or allusion in these Easter eggs is an important element in their enjoyment of the
game for many players. However, the allusions and references made in Easter eggs
are not necessarily transparent and their significance may not be apparent to all
players. In the case of memorials, not ‘getting it’ can be problematic. For example,
it is not obvious that the Michael Mamaril NPC discussed earlier in this chapter is a
memorial. This means that for some Borderlands players, far greater emphasis has
been placed on the loot and game rewards he gives, rather than on the memory of
a dead player, as can be attested by the many ‘how to farm Michael Mamaril’ video
guides that can be found on YouTube.37 Game players are attracted to rewards,
and game designers sometimes encourage engagement with a memorial by making
it rewarding as we have seen in a number of examples above. This becomes pro-
blematic when it leads to players exploiting the memorial for instrumental gains in
ways that devalue, undermine, or contest its commemorative purposes.
The form of interactions players can have with memorial NPCs can be crucial to
the tastefulness of the memorial. In September 2012, the Willow Foundation, a
charity that organises special events and days out for seriously ill young people,
arranged for James Payne, a keen game player, to visit the development studios of
Creative Assembly, the creators of the Total War series of games (Keating, 2013).
James toured the studio, met key staff, asked questions and offered suggestions for
the game, and was the first outsider to play Rome Total War II. His face was scanned,
measured, and photographed during the visit, and was used to model the face of a
Roman Legionnaire NPC in the game. After James died from liver cancer, the
company’s community manager, Craig Laycock, stated the following in an inter-
view with Eurogamer, ‘although he won’t get the chance to see Rome 2 released he
will live on in some small way in our game – and every time I see him I’ll be
reminded of what a great guy he was’ (Purchese, 2013). The Creative Assembly
team was no doubt well intentioned in creating a centurion in the likeness of James
Payne, and many commentators have been supportive of the gesture. However,
everybody did not share this point of view. While there was an overwhelming
positive response across various media sites and forums reporting the story, some
commentators questioned the tastefulness and appropriateness of this as a form of
commemoration, noting its irony, ‘so his face will be on generic soldier that will be dying
over and over and over again’.38 However, others speak of how knowing the NPC is
modelled on James will change their game play in other ways and will motivate
them to preserve his life in the game world as a tribute to the person that once was.
The knowledge that James is represented somehow, in some way, for some people,
enlivens and imbues the NPC with personhood, and creates a desire to preserve his
life, even if it is only the social life of an avatar in the game. Allowing an NPC
tribute to be slain, or not, in a digital game is an important design decision that can
have influence on whether or not an in-game memorial is regarded as tasteful or
inappropriate.39
Player-led commemorative ceremonies can also be contentious practices. The
choice of the Cathedral in the Alliance city of Stormwind for the Horde funeral
service discussed earlier is an interesting one. The choice of location is significant
for its religious overtones but also for the fact that in this WoW environment
Horde and Alliance players are typically at war, and often attempt to slay each
other on sight. And yet, the Horde funeral was well attended and peaceful, for the
most part. The peacefulness of the service is remarkable given the (in)famous events
depicted in the video, ‘Serenity Now bombs a World of Warcraft funeral’40 (Gibbs
et al., 2013; Hollingsworth, 2006), and the less well-known but more literal 2004
‘Planetside, Epic Carpet Bombing of a Funeral’.41 The ‘Serenity Now bombs a
World of Warcraft funeral’ video depicts a memorial service being held by a group
of Horde players for the player of Fayejin, who had recently passed away. As her
avatar stood by the shores of Frostfire Lake and as mourners waited patiently in an
orderly queue ready to file past and pay their respects, a group of opposing Alliance
players led by members of the guilds Serenity Now and Gnomeland Security
charged through a snow-clad forest, down to shores of the small lake and slaughtered
all the mourners.
The Serenity Now attack was captured on video and has become a well-known
cultural artefact that has circulated for some time within, and beyond, the WoW
community. The funeral and the video have been reported extensively in the
gaming and mainstream media and scholars have used it as a case for the discussion
of the ethics, politics, ontology, and aesthetics of player actions in games (Dyer-
Witheford and de Peuter, 2009; Gibbs et al., 2013; Hutchings, 2012; Servais,
2015). Indeed, the events depicted in the video have become an important part of
WoW’s player-generated folklore, and it is very rare to see the announcement of a
game memorial service without someone drawing attention to the video, and the
possibilities it depicts. In 2014, PC World magazine nominated the video, and the
controversy it created, as one of the top ten infamous moments in the game’s first
decade (Dingman, 2014). Academic writers such as Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter
have suggested that the exploits depicted in the video are an important part of
WoW history, contributing to the ‘body of lore and tradition that informs innu-
merable fan sites and boards and deepens the ambience of the game’ (2009: 131).42
Attacks of these kinds remain contentious. For players attempting to hold a peaceful
ceremony they are a violation of a solemn, profound, and even religious occasion. On
the other hand, these attacks are often justified by the attackers themselves, as well as
their moral supporters, as being statements about what are, and are not, appropriate
practices in the context of game worlds. Games such as WoW are combat games
premised on conflict and aggression between players. If any norms have been breached
in these attacks then it is by those who choose to hold a funeral in the game world,
not by those who attack it. Game memorial services uneasily combine the pro-
fundity of death and commemoration with the frivolity of violent play that is the
norm in these worlds. For some this is an acceptable and natural mixing. People form
real relationships over time in games and the game worlds are an appropriate place to
express sorrow and loss for a deceased player. For others it is uncanny, or un-
homely. It is the unwanted intrusion of serious matters into a ludic space of play.
Disruption can occur in other ways as well if attacking the funeral party is not an
option due to the games code (e.g. if player-versus-player combat is not possible).
Disruptive activities we have witnessed include dancing naked on the altar, salaciously
dancing with mourning players, making provocative comments in public chat
channels, or making rude emotes (gestures) such as licking or spitting on attendees.
Disrupting memorial services in these ways is, in a sense, a political move that seeks to
re-establish the normative order of the game world by disturbing the solemnity of
these occasions. On the other hand, as we saw with the case of Sdshill’s memorial
service in World War II Online, fighting other players in these worlds can be an
important ritual played out to honour the deceased. Similarly, the commemorations
for Sean Smith aka Vile Rat in EVE Online involved enormous ritualised battles and
large roaming fleets sowing wanton destruction across large swathes of the game uni-
verse (see Gibbs et al., 2016). Perhaps these forms of observance bear a passing resem-
blance to the funeral games of past eras, such as gladiatorial contests held at funerals in
Roman times. Playing the game, as we have seen, can be a tribute in and of itself.
Importantly, the cases discussed in this chapter speak to broader concerns about
online life and permissible activities in online contexts. As well as speaking to the
place of memorials and funeral practices in digital games they replay the concerns
and debates concerning death, commemoration and the internet more generally.
Many of the same debates that circulated around cases such as the Serenity Now
video have been replayed in the context of social network sites and their suitability
as hosts for memorials and other funeral practices as described and analysed in
previous chapters. Whether game memorials are ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas,
1966) or ‘fitting tributes’ depends on how individuals and communities understand
the ontology of game worlds, the aesthetics of commemoration, and their own
sense of morality (Gibbs et al., 2013).
Animating and remembering the dead

Commemorative practices such as roadside memorials and woodland burials have
challenged culturally constructed binaries so often associated with death practices,
such as ‘tradition and modernity’, ‘religiosity and secularity’, ‘the old and the new’,
to create vernacular rituals and memorials that connect meaningfully to the com-
plex contemporary lived experiences of individuals and communities (Margry and
Sánchez-Carretero, 2011; Wouters, 2002). In much the same way, the com-
memorative practices described in this chapter are also hybridisations that translate
many of the established and common tropes for death, dying, commemoration,
and memorialisation and render them in ways that connect with the daily activities
and practices associated with playing computer games. The construction of game
memorials and other practices described in this chapter show how digital media is
being adapted and used to create new forms of informal memorials and vernacular
commemorations, drawing from elements of popular culture, idioms of everyday
social media, and the aesthetics and iconography of material memorials, and mixing
them with the aesthetics, iconography, and idiom of gaming culture and practices.
Some cultural motifs are ancient. Plinths, cenotaphs, crosses, pyramids, and
cathedrals are all clearly cultural imports, and derive from wider social formations
rather than the in-game world as such. Other memorial and commemorative
practices are reflective of the game’s culture, and are not imported from wider
society, or at least not from contemporary, mainstream social contexts. It would
seem that in determining the form of the memorial or commemoration, the
integrity and consistency of the game world encounters derivative tropes imported
from the ‘real world’, for developers and players alike – hence Borderlands use of a
robot to deliver a eulogy, the use of memorial tombs and plinths in Dungeons and
Dragons, ‘tank ace’ medals in World of Tanks, a legionnaire in Rome Total War II,
memorial quests in World of Warcraft, wanton mass destruction in EVE, or engaging
in commemorative battles in World War II Online.
Similar to the use of social media in commemoration described in previous
chapters, the memorials and commemorations described in this chapter are part of
broader shifts in the ritual and practices associated with funerals and other forms of
public mourning. While contemporary funerals have become increasingly perso-
nalised, mourners are not creating entirely new death rituals, but rather, reinter-
preting already familiar funeral traditions by incorporating new elements, motifs,
and tropes in the funeral rites. ‘For the nearly 80 percent of Americans who iden-
tify as Christian, this means that the funeral will follow a standard model: opening
words, prayer, reading, eulogy, sermon, music, and closing prayer’ (Garces-Foley
and Holcomb, 2006: 219). Within this structure, mourners select music, choose
readings, present personal eulogies, and select photos and videos for slideshows and
montages. Other practices might include laying significant items such as flowers,
toys, or drug paraphernalia on or beside the coffin, candle lighting ceremonies, and
shared or collective eulogies in which everyone is invited to speak and to celebrate
the life lived, rather than sermons focused on the passage of the spirit to heaven
(Garces-Foley and Holcomb, 2006: 219–220). Through these personalised acts
people can create, for a time, a sense of community, or communitas (Turner,
1967), and find solace in the shared support of others gathered to collectively
remember the deceased (Garces-Foley and Holcomb, 2006: 225). Similarly, in the
various forms of in-game service we find practices that draw on familiar structures,
motifs, and tropes. Eulogies are spoken, people gather in silence, or take turns to pay
their respects. The deceased is implored to ‘rest in peace’ or to ‘fly safe’. Candles,
experienced by mourners as symbols of continuity or of spiritual journeys, are meta-
phorically and literally lit for the deceased. Game monuments have been built that
reproduce physical monuments, often quite literally. Others begin with the form of
particular material monuments and extend and elaborate them in ways not physically
possible to create both homages and experiences evocative of those they remember.
In is also worth noting here the importance of place in improvised memorials
and associated commemorative practices. These memorials often occupy and appro-
priate public space, springing up in places of significance to the death or tragic event
(Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti, 1998). For example, a roadside memorial will mark
the place of a fatal road accident; an improvised memorial may appear outside a
person’s place of residence; or, most commonly, memorabilia and tributes will be
left at the site of a tragic event or disaster. The choice of a game for making
commemorative acts is, in part, a similar choice. It is choosing to remember
someone in a place that was of significance to the life of the departed. It might be a
place that already references funerary practices such as a shrine, a graveyard, a
temple, or a cathedral. It may be a very different place, such as the location where
the player was last in the game, or a place in the game the deceased frequented or
one that was meaningful in the deceased’s playing career.
We also wish to draw attention to the ways in which improvised memorials
often express community solidarity as well as being public expressions of grief and
condolence. Wouters has suggested that ‘these public expressions signal a rising
need to find more public recognition of personal mourning and that, via these rituals,
participants are seeking to assert membership of a larger symbolic or “imagined”
community’ (2002: 2). Many of the cases we have presented in this chapter involve
players coming together not only to express grief and pay their condolences, but
also to assert their own sense of community as gamers. This is particularly high-
lighted in Ghemit’s comments at the start of this chapter concerning the love and
support he felt he received from his gaming community of friends and associates:
‘this is not just a game, but a fantastic community’ (in Wachowski, 2013). Similarly,
in the story of Ribbitribbitt we find a group of people coming together and
working together to create a present for, and ultimately a tribute to, a dying child.
Other forms of informal collective remembering include examples such as meeting
to play a game in honour of the deceased on an important date such as an anni-
versary or birthday. Through these activities people are able to express a sense of
encompassing community that can help to support the bereaved.
However, it is important to remember that not all funeral events are necessarily
supportive of community. Or rather, they are not supportive of game community
norms, norms that regard the serious and profound business of mourning and grief
as out of place in the superficial and light-hearted recreational places of gaming
worlds. From this perspective, a commemoration in the game world is not good
for either the commemoration or for the game. The most (in)famous and notable
of these as discussed previously is the YouTube video ‘Serenity Now bombs a

World of Warcraft funeral’ (Gibbs et al., 2013; Hollingsworth, 2006), which depicts
a WoW memorial service being attacked by another group of players. This example
has provided an interesting counter point to Ghemit’s portrayal of the WoW
community that we started the chapter with and reminds us that gaming communities
are often fractious and diverse in their opinions and actions.
In this chapter, we have presented a broad selection of examples of memorials
and commemorative practices that have occurred in a variety of digital games. In all
of these examples, both developers and players draw upon an eclectic mix of cultural
references and motifs to construct and perform these memorials and commemora-
tions. Through these creative acts of assemblage it would seem that players and
game developers are engaged in ‘the revival (and invention) of half-forgotten customs
and traditions’ (Brennan, 2008: 328), in a similar fashion to the vernacular com-
memorative practices for public mourning that emerged in response to the Hills-
borough stadium disaster and the death of Diana Princess of Wales. Brennan’s
phrase captures succinctly the ways in which these practices are both new and
inventive, but also rooted in older forms of commemoration and memorialisation.
Through this mixing and mingling of the new with the old, novel rituals and
performances are created which are both appropriate to new forms of community
and new mediums, such as game communities and digital game, yet are also
familiar, solemn and able to provide comfort in mourning, as well as convey a
sense of gravitas and meaningful acknowledgement of the deceased.
FIGURE 5.3 Selfie of the authors with Elloric in World of Warcraft (taken using the S.E.L.
F.I.E. camera MKII game toy).
Source: © Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. World of Warcraft, Warcraft and
Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Notes
1 www.wowhead.com/npc=70171
2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhMS6QeeSSE
3 A voice over IP (VoIP) service often used by game players.
4 Vendor trash refers to items found in role-playing games with no practical use other
than being sold to NPC merchants (vendors). In World of Warcraft items with grey
coloured names are of the lowest quality.
5 Ghemit is a social media commentator on Twitter amongst other outlets. He plays the
hunter class in the game.
6 www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=592817127427963&l=4eadf5c140
7 For example, a 2015 study in Australia indicated that 68% of Australians played digital
games for an average of 88 minutes per day (Brand and Todhunter, 2015). Another
study done the same year suggested that 42% of Americans played three or more hours
per week (ESA, 2015), while 33.5 million Britons – 69% of the population – were game
players (Stuart, 2014). At the end of 2014, World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer
game and gaming world that features heavily in this chapter, had 10 million active sub-
scribers (Blizzard, 2014). Although that figure had fallen to 5.5 million a year later
(Kollar, 2015), it still represents a substantial number of regular players.
8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuroFpcFq-c
9 www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/148387-First-Look-Release-Notes-Module-7-
The-Way-of-the-Monk
10 www.ddowiki.com/page/Mantle_of_the_Worldshaper
11 www.ddowiki.com/page/Mantle_of_the_Worldshaper
12 www.worldoftanks.com/en/content/guide/general/achievements/
13 www.worldoftanks.com/en/content/guide/general/achievements/
14 www.borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Michael_Mamaril
15 http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/boulderfist/Caylee/simple
16 The deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and
Tyrone Woods in Benghazi, Libya were used extensively in attacks on Hillary
Clinton in the 2016 US presidential elections. Remembering the dead can be acts of
respectful commemoration that service the needs of the bereaved, or they can be
acts of political manoeuvring that pay little heed to the dignity of those who have
passed away. How the dead are relationally entwined with the living, and how they
are mobilised by the living in the service of the living’s needs and ambitions, has
grave repercussions for how the dead are remembered and how the dead’s ongoing
personhood is respected.
17 www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJIUinAOhVk
18 www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzBGHNzGi8M
19 https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Cynosural_field
20 www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA-UK774xG0
21 Music by Nick Glennie-Smith/Words by Randall Wallace, 2002.
22 www.imdb.com/title/tt0277434/
23 www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuUEXxnUvJw
24 Words and lyrics by Leonard Cohen, 1984.
25 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWJ3qzk5kHo. The video has been viewed over 800,000
times.
26 The deaths of celebrities have also been acknowledged in a similar fashion. Notable
among these are the various examples of video tributes of memorial services to Michael
Jackson held in World of Warcraft after his death in 2009, which typically feature dancing
male night elves, no doubt due to the fact that the choreography of the male night elf
dance closely resembles Jackson’s ‘Billy Jean’ dance routine.
27 www.youtube.com/user/Ribbitribbitt/videos
28 www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUfGOrsw7ik
29 www.secondlife.com/destinations/memorial
30 Players change the game world on a personal level by completing quests, progressing
their character and so forth, but this does not directly affect the shared world. In these
games, perhaps the only way to create persistent memorials and memories is to export
them to other sites and platforms by recording commemorative practices such as in-
game memorials and uploading them to video sharing services such as YouTube as
described earlier in the chapter.
31 www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/21hbq3/i_miss_you_little_dude/
32 http://imgur.com/lTjodS2
33 Reddit uses a system where reddit readers can upvote or downvote posts. Upvoted posts
move to the top of the page, while downvoted posts quickly disappear from view. For a
discussion of the mechanisms of upvoting and downvoting posts on reddit and the
manner in which it contributes to the shaping of community norms see Kennedy et al.,
2016.
34 Skyrim modders come together to honour Taylor and Bear: http://imgur.com/a/
YvOUE#0
35 Permanent link: www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2x3xi9/found_this_post_
hit_me_hard_when_platform_doesnt/cowt6j4 (Accessed 30/08/2016)
36 See, for example: www.wowhead.com/guide=1832/a-guide-to-in-game-memorials
37 ‘Farming’ is a vernacular term used to describe the practices of repeatedly performing a
task or activity in order to gain items or rewards that advance one’s character in a game.
38 Ahzek_Ahriman, http://cheezburger.com/7152619776
39 For example, in WoW, with one notable exception, commemorative NPCs have been
set up so they cannot be attacked or slain by players of either faction.
40 www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJVolaC8pw
41 Previously available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x_WLbjNDcg Reposted here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S6v5uieLyI
42 However, they wrongly describe it as ‘the attack by Serenity Now on a rival group,
CROM’. The majority of the mourners were from Fayejin’s guild, Maledictions. The
mistake is no doubt due to their reliance on a re-edited, mash-up of the original video
posted to Google Videos by VC Films (2006) on the 13th of April 2006 and reposted to
YouTube by Septicbath (2006) a week and half later on the 24th of April under the
heading/title: ‘Crom vs Serenity Now’. It shortened the original video and used new
sound track music taken from the album ‘The Cocaine Wars (1974–1989)’ by the band
CROM.
6
THE FUNERAL AS A SITE OF
INNOVATION
Over four days in April, 2015, the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association
(ICCFA) held its annual convention and expo, called ‘Breaking Boundaries: Bringing our
Profession Together’, in San Antonio, Texas. We entered the conference centre’s main hall
after picking up the ICCFA bag and program, and wandered down the first few aisles of
displays on our way to the lecture theatres where speakers would enthuse to packed crowds of
members about the ‘Nuts and bolts of sustainable cemetery management’; ‘The new Face-
book: How the social media game has changed … And how you can succeed’; ‘Before and
beyond the funeral: creating a continuum of care’; ‘Cremation hotline calls, learning directly
from consumer questions’; ‘Power branding in the funeral industry’, and much more. People
were chatting with others perhaps not seen since the last year’s event, laughing and hugging in
front of rows of open and meticulously lined coffins, huge shiny black hearses, tables with
decorative displays of engraved urns, jewels and ceramics made of ash, urns in the shape of
American footballs, and computer monitors demonstrating digital memorial possibilities.
The trade expo was a grand display with nearly 300 stands that, together, gave us a sense
of the immense amount of physical ‘stuff’ associated with the industry; the diverse para-
phernalia required to manage the business of death, disposal, memorialisation, and caring for
families of the deceased. The funeral industry is currently a US$16–20 billion a year busi-
ness in the United States,1 and while the majority of this revenue is generated from ‘offline’
‘traditional’ funeral services, a number of online or technically enriched commercially-available
death services and objects are growing in number and significance. Considering the size of the
funeral industry and the fact that this revenue is predicted to increase dramatically and reach
‘peak death’ as members of the Baby Boomer generation die off (Larkins, 2007), it’s not
surprising that digital media entrepreneurs, who are relatively new to this space, see a pot of
gold at the foot of the rainbow.
As is the case with many industry trade shows, breakfast and lunch meals were available
on cloth-covered tables and caterers were present at different parts of the huge hall. While
sitting on a couch to eat and read product brochures and rest feet that ached with the miles of
The funeral as a site of innovation 99
expo terrain covered, a young man in a crisp blue suit came over to chat. We talked for a
while about his product: Porcelains Unlimited. This company puts porcelain images of the
dead onto headstones along with the option of an embedded chip-sensor that connects to your
smartphone or tablet and displays a memorial site constructed for the client. He fished in his
suit jacket pocket and showed us the chip – ‘just the size of a quarter’ – before rushing to
attend to another potential customer. Competition among stallholders for the attention of
delegates was obvious. One webcasting company offered a lovely vivid blue cocktail to
encourage delegates to stop long enough to learn about their digital products – in our case, a
successful strategy. Schwag abounded. Other stalls offered free pens, stress balls, or plastic
sunglasses. Finishing our cocktail, we rushed to the lecture hall to hear ‘The funeral experi-
ence of the future … today!’
This chapter considers how digital technologies are being developed and used in
and around the funeral industry to offer a new range of innovative goods and ser-
vices. It focuses on the convergences that are currently emerging between more
‘traditional’ material memorial forms and exploratory digital forms. These include
memorials that link headstones to websites via barcodes and mobile devices, funerals
that deploy streaming video or enable remote attendance, and technological inno-
vations like 3D printing that produce special commemorative objects. After an initial
survey of the range of possibilities that are currently available, we then elaborate with
particular case studies discovered during our visits to funeral industry expos in the
UK, US, and Australia. These expos are participatory spaces for displaying and pro-
moting innovation in the death industry, but unlike the gaming worlds explored in
the last chapter, there is a sense that the business world of funerary services is
speaking to (or about) a different and generally older population.
If death is ‘irreducibly physical’ while also being irreducibly social (Walter et al.,
2011–2012), then so too is the space of the funeral expo. Participation in the con-
temporary death industry is not just about service and product provision and ‘build-
ing a successful business’, it is also about ‘understanding family grief’ and addressing
concerns about death and disposal that are raised through personal experiences. Our
study considers how the biology of death extends beyond the body’s borders to the
cultural materials and services that are used to imagine and prepare for that moment,
to the management of body disposal through rituals like funerals, and finally to the
materials and services that project memorialisation into the future. In the following
discussion about the industry trade shows, we have chosen a temporal structure that
has been developed within the funeral industry sector and is referred to there as ‘pre-
need’, ‘at-need’, and ‘post-need’ – where ‘need’ is of course a placeholder for
‘death’ – a word generally avoided by the industry. We then introduce examples of
particular digital products and services using the same temporal structure, while
acknowledging that there are points of overlap.
The funeral industry and the expo

Digital and digitally enhanced products are now commonplace alongside rows of
silk-lined coffins, body hoists, and shiny black hearses at funeral directors’
100 The funeral as a site of innovation
conventions and expositions. These events are where the new is flagged, fostered,
and debated. We conducted field visits to four of these large gatherings in Australia,
the UK, and the US in 2014, 2015 and 2016, listening to presentations, socialising
with funeral directors and educators, and discussing new products with entrepre-
neurs over several days of proceedings. The trade shows were significant entry
points for us as researchers and we see them as critical sites allowing us to observe
how industry practices, norms, and imaginaries both converge and diverge. They
provide a front room to showcase services and products as they are imagined by
their vendors, and also give a sense of what then happens (or could happen) as this
imaginary is realised through the performance of the funeral process. The trade
shows also provide an important site for social interaction. They develop a sense of
community within the industry and let industry participants exchange information
with one another. The trade shows are global and local, material and ideational
displays as well as social hubs (Harvey, 1996). They are also places where repre-
sentations of ‘tradition’ and of ‘innovation’ rub up against each other, as we will see
in the following discussion.
During our trade show visits, it became apparent that funeral providers self-
presented as part of a national and global industry, not just a social or community
service. Business interests and the interests of the bereaved are self-consciously
conflated. Within the different service and product sectors of the industry, com-
mercial power is unevenly distributed, with funeral directors (as they are called in
Australia and the UK) and funeral homes and cemetery owners (in the United
States) playing a critical strategic role in the industry as a whole. Funeral directors
(or homes in the US) are overwhelmingly the first point of contact for members of
the public seeking to find and purchase items required and desired for the burial
and commemoration of loved ones, and play a critical gatekeeper role for the full
range of secondary, wholesale, and ancillary businesses in the industry. Coffin
vendors, for example, must pass through a funeral director to reach the end user,
and on all the trade show display floors a large range of coffins are hoping to catch
the eye of these critical middle-men. Alongside the traditional solid oak or mahogany
(at one end of the price scale),2 or veneered particle-board (at the other end),3 a
variety of innovative materials compete for favour – from wicker and wool coffins
that cater to people concerned with biodegradability4 and elaborately (and some-
times garishly) painted ‘designer’ caskets,5 to eco-friendly, wallet-friendly cardboard
coffins.6 However, funeral directors only have the capacity to show a very limited
number of options, even in the largest show room, and will choose to display some
coffin types over others. This decision is based on anticipated customer desire, but
is also influenced by the ‘tone’ each director wants to set for their business. Choices
made by funeral directors are central to the future success of many businesses, and
vendors of wicker coffins, woollen coffins and cardboard coffins, for example,
complained bitterly at the trade shows at being ‘locked out’ by funeral directors.
Digital tools for funeral management, commemoration of the deceased, and
administration of deceased estates are also displayed at the expo, but like the vendors
of novel coffins, they are not entering the market seamlessly. In order to succeed
and inject new ideas informed by their understanding of changing consumer prac-
tices, values, and ‘death-styles’ (Davies and Rumble, 2012: 90–92), these vendors
understand that they need to affect the choices made by gatekeeping Directors: to
lure a diverse and digitally connected clientele through an industry that has been
notably resistant to change. And so, for example, a representative of a start-up that
shuts down social media sites after a death explains that their product is not well
understood by directors. Appealing to funeral directors encountered at trade shows,
supplemented by direct-to-consumer advertising through social media and websites, is
said to be critical. In this way, the Director’s role extends beyond the authorisation
of modes of cultural production around death, by framing and legitimising modes
of consumption as part of the funeral checklist. A clear and articulate explanation
and recommendation of a product or service from a director to a customer can be
the difference between a small company getting a client or being ignored.
Family owned and operated funeral homes have not varied their practices very
much from one generation to the next (McIlwain, 2005) – a conservatism and
aversion to risk noted both by the Homes themselves and the innovators trying to
work with them. One entrepreneur told us, ‘I have worked in a variety of indus-
tries and have to say that funeral directors are the most stubborn, stuck in the mud
bunch I have ever met’. Another pointed out that the longevity of employment
tenure (an average of twenty years at the company Mount Sinai, for example) also
contributes to the ‘problem’. But the directors sometimes expressed a feeling that
the aversions come from the customer end, ‘You have to go at a much slower pace
than any other industry, just because of the age of the clients you are dealing with’,
said one informant, while another focused on the idea of family tradition that
customers hold – the ‘that’s how granddad did it’ mentality. So, the age of the
clientele, the orientation of memorialisation to the past rather than to the future,
the barriers to entry faced by innovators, and the deference paid to traditional time-
tested methods by multi-generational organisations, all appear to create barriers to
change. Brad Rex’s ICCFA keynote ‘Looking to the future’ pointed out the irony
of such conservatism through his claim that although 70% of baby boomers are
dissatisfied with traditional arrangements and want a different funeral experience,
they are not receiving it.
And yet hope for faster change was still in the air on the showroom floor at the
ICCFA. As a representative from One Room Funerals told us as he demonstrated
their funeral live streaming service, ‘We suspect that when it gets handed over to the
next generation, you might start to see a bit more warmth towards technology’. And
yet, warmth to technology is still understood to be only a part of the problem. Start-
ups are not only sensitive to many firms’ reluctance to adopt the new, but they
know that winning customers and making money from death can be more difficult
than in other industries. The customers for whom the products are designed are
either dealing with grief and loss or preparing for their own deaths, a difficult time to
make important purchasing decisions (see Gentry et al., 1995).
It is clear that today the industry still struggles to maintain a balance between
‘genuine concern’ and commercial opportunism (Emke, 2007: 27). At the San
Antonio ICCFA, presentations on ‘Understanding family grief’ sat alongside ‘101

ways to increase your bottom line’. These sessions reflect a range of concerns within
the industry, but the moral tensions linking care and commercial opportunity are
anything but new in the death-care space. A funeral industry textbook suggests that
the ‘industry has been in a decades-long state of “wringing of hands and gnashing
of teeth”’ as a result of the public’s collective ‘angst’ regarding the funeral trade
(Klicker, 1999: 221). Viviana Zelizer’s examination of the early life insurance
industry offers a useful historical comparison. She explains that although life insur-
ance was originally perceived as an immoral challenge to society, ‘establishing
monetary equivalents for relations or processes which are defined as being beyond
material concerns’ (1978: 605), it eventually emerged ‘as a new form of ritual with
which to face death’ (1978: 594; see also McFall, 2009). This example reveals how
commodification is embedded in a wider social context, as well as how ‘moral
boundaries’ around the proper preparation and management of death change in
relation to economies of service provision and consumption. These changes in turn
help to reconfigure cultural practices and social norms. Importantly, this process of
commodification requires attendant moral work in order for new cultural habits
and rituals around death and commerce to be established (Fourcade and Healy,
2007; see also Zelizer, 1979).
Critical assessments from outside the funeral industry that have offered targeted
and evidenced calls for reform include two books published in the same year
(1963): Ruth Harmer’s The High Cost of Dying and Jessica Mitford’s The American
Way of Death. Despite the eventual introduction of the Federal Trade Commission’s
Funeral Rule in the United States in 1984, which required funeral companies to
provide customers with accurate and more transparent information about funeral
costs, the role of commerce in the processes of death and memorialisation still
remains a contested issue. The funeral industry for instance, has long been accused
of encouraging vulnerable clients – who can be considered by definition ‘impulse
buyers’ (Mitford, 1963) – to pay for a wide range of non-essential services and
features to increase its profit (Emke, 2007). Interestingly, as Metcalf and Huntington
explain, far more money is spent on weddings in the US than on funerals, but few
draw attention to the materialism associated with providers such as the dressmakers
and caterers who make a profit from those rites of passage (1991: 198). They suggest,
‘Presumably this is because the critics regard weddings as socially useful and funerals
as useless. But who is to judge the value of a ritual’ (1991: 198). And yet, judge
they will, and public furore around the high cost of funerals carries on. It is perhaps
less about a notion of value and more about putting a high price on what the
industry markets as a personalised and ‘caring’ service.
Unsurprisingly, the funeral industry has long been aware of the difficulties in
balancing its concomitant caring and commercial interests and has conducted a
significant amount of moral work in order to establish a direct link between death,
consumption, and bereavement. George Sanders (2012) notes that the funeral
industry has developed a strong moral discourse around care across the twentieth
century, with industry participants framing themselves as moral entrepreneurs who
preserve a key social good. As the funeral industry has become increasingly com-
mercialised and monopolised, this discourse has been maintained, albeit with
commercial brands also representing these claims to moral standing, beyond just
individuals, such as Funeral Directors.
Sanders’ research on the funeral industry positions recent trends in the industry
in relation to scholarly debates around branding (2012) and consumption more
generally (2009). He offers a picture of the modern funeral industry in America that
is responding to (and encouraging) the growing turn towards the expression of
individualism in Western death rituals, and the role new technologies play in this
process. Caskets and urns can be customised to better represent the personality of
the deceased; funeral rituals can be augmented and personalised with videos and
slides; off-the-shelf coffins can be sold in a huge range of styles and materials; ashes
can be blasted off into space or incorporated into jewellery for family and friends to
wear (Sanders, 2009). The range of innovation points to the way in which items
may be consumed for their uniqueness and for their ability to cater to individual
symbolic associations rather than just their material value (Baudrillard and Poster,
2001: 25). As if writing for the funeral industry, Baudrillard has suggested (2001: 25):
We can see that what is consumed are not objects but the relation itself –
signified and absent, included and excluded at the same time – it is the idea of
the relation that is consumed in the series of objects which manifests it.
So, consumers planning for their own death or dealing with the disposal and
commemoration of their loved ones are drawn into purchasing, with the Funeral
Director’s guidance, objects and services that will produce far more than the
objects and services themselves. For example, Sanders has observed how consumers
increasingly engage in the co-production of funerals, assisting the Funeral Director
in the meaning-rich re-presentation of ‘the lives that have been lived’ (2012: 266).
We could see in our interactions with funeral industry representatives at the expos
how such meaning and relationality is variously produced, advertised, and displayed
for consumption, with or without the customer present. The funeral industry
thereby attempts to establish ‘customer relations management’ through the whole of
what it calls the ‘pre-need, at-need, post-need cycle’ (i.e. pre-death, at-death, and
post-death), and to deploy technologies at a number of points through these three
main temporal phases. We consider these phases and their technologies in turn.
Pre-need technologies and services

Interpolating and managing the various publics that will at some point consume the
services of the funeral industry, at an early point and in an ongoing way, is seen to
be critical to the business models of all industry providers. As mentioned above, the
idea of shopping around for a funeral is not an activity most people are accustomed
to or are comfortable with in the context of grieving. For generations, the way the
industry responded to this dis-ease was to position itself physically and socially in
the life of the local community, in such a way that locals would not have to think
twice about whom to call. This was true both in small country towns as well as in
huge metropolises composed of many different ethnic and religious groups. For
generations, small towns across rural United States have had a funeral home catering
for Black Americans, and another for White Americans. For many decades
Catholics in inner Melbourne did not need to make a decision as to who would
provide for them – Tobin Brothers was embedded in the history of that community,
as was Golders Green Cemetery for North London Jews, and as were other funeral
providers for other communities. Francis et al. (2005) conducted extensive field-
work on the memorial practices of different communities in London cemeteries
and their ethnography showed how the boundaries produced through these prac-
tices inscribed a sense of memory-rich homeland amongst the living mourners.
Family businesses have been servicing diverse local communities for generations
and even if family businesses were acquired by mega-companies such as InvoCare,
the family business name was invariably retained, along with its local associations,
good will, and client base.
Many funeral providers are in a more difficult position today. New green-field
communities have no traditional provider. The mobility of populations, alongside
the ubiquity of digital forms of communication undermine the reflexive non-
choice-making of old, which means contemporary industry players need to find a
different way to ‘be in the heads’ of local publics before their services are required,
in order to be the name that pops up at the point the industry terms ‘at-need’. The
gateway to this public consciousness is the internet’s ability to create a sense of
community through social media. So, despite the industry’s historical cautiousness
and aversion to risk associated with change, there is now wide recognition of a
counter risk associated with no change.
There is a sense at these events that the historically powerful economic and
cultural intermediary function of the Funeral Director is under threat from the
inevitability of ‘digital disruption’. This is expressed in presentations such as: ‘Adapt
or die: Technology trends disrupting consumer behaviour’ from H. Joseph Joachim
IV, President and Founder of funeralOne, at the 2016 ICCFA. The adoption of
new technologies can then also be seen as an ‘adapt or die’ response to the ‘dis-
ruptive’ potentials of the internet, in which the circulation of information, the
emergence of new products and services, and the formation of new social rela-
tionships around death and commemoration are able to circumvent the traditional
gate-keeping function of the funeral industry.
Critical to this sense that the internet is disrupting and reconfiguring the inter-
mediary relationship Funeral Directors have with customers is the discursive work
of technology evangelists. Key figures in organisations that stand to benefit from
the adoption of new digital technologies and services, such as DISRUPT Media
and funeralOne, actively work to construct the problem for which they then offer
a solution. For example, funeralOne, a digital service company offering website
design, funeral webcasting, memorial websites and funeral tribute video software, is
prominent at industry events and within trade publications and social media
discussions promoting the threat of disruption and their company’s solutions.

DISRUPT Media and its CEO, Ryan Thogmartin, are even more visible, posi-
tioning themselves at the forefront of innovative solutions to industry disruption
through a range of industry-specific social media and publishing platforms that
include channels on YouTube and Vimeo (funeral nation; disruptU), a blog,
Facebook page and Twitter account, and publication of the online industry
magazine Connecting Directors, which are all used to highlight disruption and cross-
promote their social media consulting, management, and marketing services.
In response to this situation and advice, cemeteries and funeral homes have
started to pay greater attention to social media. For example, Mount Sinai has
developed a Facebook page that is used strategically to participate in the social lives
of the Jewish publics of California ‘pre-need’. Their media manager reports that on
Facebook they do not directly advertise services and products, and despite a very
active social media presence they ‘talk about anything but death’. For example,
every Tuesday is ‘Tree of Life Tuesday’, where works of art featuring the Jewish
tree of life are posted on their page. The media manager remarks, ‘It has nothing to
do with being a cemetery … it is just interesting stuff that people will pass on, and
when they share it with their friends, Mount Sinai pops up in their friends’ boxes.
That’s what I’m trying to do.’ Similarly, in Australia, Tobin Brothers’ media
manager maintains a very active twitter feed, tweeting and retweeting comments
on sport in the main, interleaved with tweets on funeral insurance, new cemeteries,
personnel changes at Tobin Brothers, celebrity eulogies, ‘wacky’ funerals, and other
industry related matters. Larger funeral companies such as Mount Sinai and Tobin
Brothers commonly employ in-house media managers, and many of the smaller to
mid-range companies outsource media management to companies such as DIS-
RUPT Media, who have operatives specialising in servicing the funeral industry.
Typical ‘pre-need’ media strategies involve detailed analysis of engagement, and
success is measured in hits, bounces, repeat visits, Likes, Friends, forward referrals,
and other analytics familiar to businesses with an online presence.
Engagement analytics are deployed daily across content to optimise content
selection, and analytics are deployed across visits to identify zip codes, gender, and
age in order to profile the public drawn to the media. Facebook advertising is also
seen as very important to position the business in the minds of community members
‘pre-need’. Zachary Garbow, a speaker at the ICCFA revealed to a large audience
‘a detailed blueprint for effective Facebook marketing’ to increase reach and ‘grow
customers’. The objective of the ‘pre-need’ strategy is to eliminate decision-
making, using Facebook and other online media to harness a community and
position the business in the consciousness of a community whose intergenerational
commitments have severely eroded.
Of course, the strategies outlined above often fall short and many people find
themselves at a loss when a death happens and do not know which funeral director
or home to call. In order to cope with this significant portion of the market, we
were told, unsurprisingly, that Google search is critical, and is optimised to ensure
that those searching for cemeteries, funerals, cremation, property, or funeral
insurance come across the appropriate websites at the top of the search-return list.
For example, funeralOne advertises, ‘Our SEO experts have made the f1Connect
website platform to please both your client families and the search engines. Your
firm will rank high when families search for funeral homes in your area, every
time. Guaranteed’.7
This process of online intermediation therefore requires Directors to make two
decisions: (1) how to orient one’s funeral home to new services and (2) how to then
articulate these services to customers. Every Director we spoke to recognised the
need to establish and maintain some engagement with digital media in order to have
a presence in the market for new customers, but also to maintain a relationship with
past customers, and thus facilitate repeat business through extended networks of
family and friends. Maintaining an ongoing relationship with customers and facil-
itating repeat business is a difficult and sensitive matter when it comes to funerals:
Informant: One of the biggest things for a funeral home, at a marketing level,
is how do they remain in touch?
Researcher: Right because once the funeral is gone, you don’t actually, yeah,
there’s no—
Informant: Do you really want your funeral director to ring you?
A more comfortable option is afforded through digital media, and online memorial
sites play an important commercial role, enabling the business to engage with the
customer at particular opportune moments, and to reinforce the presence of the
company and its brand in the mind of the consumer. One online memorial pro-
vider gave us the example of using ‘post notifications’ to achieve this purpose.
When a friend or family member adds a message of condolence to a memorial site,
a message is sent to the subscribers to the site notifying them of the post, and of
course the notification message is branded with the company logo. This allowed
‘the funeral home to stay in touch in a meaningful way’.
It was not surprising, given the tension between the oft-expressed need to adopt
new tools and the prevalent conservative structures of management that were built
in a pre-digital era, to discover innovators at the trade shows wishing to circumvent
the traditional gatekeepers, partially, or altogether. For example, at the Australian
Expo, a company called Funeral Studios offered software developed to semi-automate
the decision-making process that is usually shepherded by the funeral director.
Among other products Funeral Studios offers an online service deployed on a
funeral director’s website that guides the bereaved through all the decision-making
and purchasing steps that need to be made to personally arrange a funeral, without
the presence of a funeral director. In a nearby booth a related product attracted
somewhat bemused interest in its ambition to circumvent the funeral director’s
advisory role in a more complete way. The product concerned is a ‘recommender
system’ website, modelled on hotel-room or airline-flight recommender websites.
Using this site a visitor can ‘click to select’ a regional location, a time window, a
burial or cremation, a coffin from a very large range, a hearse, a celebrant of a
certain type, a chapel of a certain size and so on, and the system packages it all up
and recommends a funeral director or home to deliver the package at the best
price. If the customer engages the recommended funeral home or cemetery
through the site, the site claims 8% of the total price. Not surprisingly, funeral
directors and homes have not thus far cooperated with the system, and without
their cooperation in providing prices, the system cannot function.
The disruptive potential of such start-up services points to a future in which the
funeral director may be removed from their privileged position in the industry. As
traditions weaken, opportunities open for new players and products in the industry.
For example, an Australian consultant to the funeral industry suggested that as
funerals become more celebratory, secular and individualised, it may be that the
first port of call in the arrangement would be professional ‘event managers’, already
experienced in arranging celebratory, secular, and individualised wedding recep-
tions, birthday parties and the like, who would relegate funeral directors to the
provision of outsourced technical tasks such as preparation and transportation of the
body. Interestingly, if this were to happen, such a change in role would echo a past
era when the funeral director’s primary public health role was embalming bodies,
as opposed to their current public facing role as grief experts (Howarth, 1996).
Indeed, at the trade show in the UK a very large contingent of Church of England
Ministers made their presence felt, attempting to recapture the traditional role of
the Church ‘in the whole of the experience of death’, including ‘funeral arranging’,
rather than simply acting as ‘a guest speaker at a funeral someone else has orga-
nised’, to paraphrase one of the Ministers. At the time of writing, any real threat to
the central caring and arranging role of the funeral director is pure speculation, but
it underlines the importance of any ‘cultural intermediary’ retaining authority,
expertise, and an ability to build a network (Maguire and Matthews, 2012).
The funeral trade show has been seen in this chapter as a space where these
hybrid products and relationships are imagined, generated, discussed, modified, and
marketed. It is an interactive display space that spreads across both physical/material
and social/semiotic territories. It is a place where ideas about the various advantages
and risks around ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ are contested in both public
presentations and private discussions. The trade show is where they are displayed,
but the funeral, the cemetery, the crematorium, and the home are locations where
these convergences of products and relations and the tensions they produce are
tested out and performed. We turn now to describe in detail some of the products
and services deployed at-need and post-need.
At-need technologies and services

Death reaches into all lives and is thus at one level quite ordinary. People die after
a ‘long life’ when they are old, they die ‘too soon’ when they are younger, and
their friends and relations are mobilised (or not) around these moments of final
transition that are variously classified as good or bad deaths. Good deaths suggest
‘some degree of mastery over the arbitrariness of the biological occurrence’ while
bad deaths ‘demonstrate the absence of control’ (Bloch and Parry, 1982: 15). Some
bad deaths can also be seen as ‘offending’ deaths (Davies, 2005: 162–163) – ones
that break primary social values and incite anger and a mass response (see Chapter
Four for a discussion about how such offending deaths fare in social media). The
important point here is that there is no such thing as a ‘neutral death’ (Bradbury,
1996). Death in its various forms, despite being part of everyday life, may often be
felt by individuals and communities to be extraordinary because of the emotional
weight it carries, because of the responses it evokes, and because of the position it
marks in the life course.
From the perspective of those who work within the business space of death
management and commemoration, there need to be ways to recognise and react to
clients’ senses of extraordinariness that may be experienced throughout the process.
When a death suddenly occurs, or is perceived to be imminent, and even earlier in
anticipation of dying, a range of activities are mobilised to manage the processes of
interment and commemoration. These activities contain both culturally obligatory
processes as well as optional ones that address the particular needs and characteristics
of families or friends attending to their known or imagined understanding of their
loved one’s desires. While before the event people often make choices and express
preferences (shaped by cultural diversity and personal experience) that are not
constrained by industry, there are some decisions that need to be made with the
help of the industry. As shown above, what the bereaved determine they need or
want for disposal, interment, and commemoration is largely led by what is made
available and can be sold to them through the funeral industry. To a lesser extent,
their choices for products may be affected through direct advertisement, media
features, and online search engines reaching out to the market. The diversity of
contemporary funeral rites in the multi-cultural, mobile ‘West’ (Howarth, 2007)
requires a listening and accommodating funeral industry. The resultant diversity
and competition among entrepreneurs in the funeral and IT industries thus stoke
the production of the new, which as we have seen, is variously embraced and
resisted by forces of tradition, innovation, regulation, and commercial interest.
Screened funeral arrangements

An important site where these forces play out ‘at-need’ is in the consultation
between funeral directors and the bereaved. A great deal of paperwork has been
and still is associated with funeral arrangements, alongside face-to-face encounters
(see Howarth, 1996). The self-designated ‘traditionally-minded’ Funeral Directors
and Funeral Home Owners we have spoken with prefer the work associated with
arranging the funeral with clients (including viewing the available products,
reviewing the process, assessing costs, signing forms, recording what clients want,
etc.), to be recorded on paper in the context of face-to-face interactions with the
relatives, friends, or other persons dealing with the process for the deceased. In part
this is perhaps because they may be of an older and technologically averse generation
themselves, but it is also because some of these owners take the view that screens
and keyboards are a barrier to forming the interpersonal relationships that are part
and parcel of their emotional labour as supporters in times of need. In our experi-
ence this is more so in the UK than in Australia, and according to one of our
interviewees, the American industry has been through a turning point on this issue.
He reported that screens appeared for use in the funeral arrangement stages as early
as 1990 – made less obtrusive by having the screen built into the desk. However, at
that early stage in personal computing many were adamant that computers, screens,
and keyboards were not to be used in the consultation. A different kind of off-
screen intimacy, they suggested, needs to be formed to make appropriate decisions
about funeral arrangements. A manager for the Forest Lawn Memorial Park business
in LA, for example, expressed concern that the computer would pose a barrier to
the intimacy of interpersonal service. The way he explained it came from a refer-
ence to care in times of illness: ‘Go to a doctor’s office and do you want a screen in
between you or do you want the doctor looking at you?’ He quickly pointed out
that despite this, the use of screens in the arrangement process is now routine due
to social changes normalising digital technologies, as well as to changes in hard-
ware, particularly the use of tablets that can be better integrated with face-to-face
discussion and flat screens rather than the more obtrusive cathode ray tube screens.
There is a broad range of experience and variance of opinion that surrounds the
use of screens in funeral arrangements. Several vendors displaying funeral manage-
ment software at the trade shows claimed that ‘arrangement management’ software
was only ever used ‘back of house’, never ‘front of house’ alongside the bereaved as
decisions were made. Others, however, claimed the exact opposite. Screens are
here to stay, are the way of the future, and are indispensable tools for them. For
example, Brad Rex (who presented the keynote ‘The funeral experience of the
future … today!’) owns many cemeteries and funeral homes in the US. His sales-
people use large wall-mounted screens to take clients through chapel options,
coffin and urn options, personalisation of coffins and urns, hearse and car options,
service requirements, and all the other decisions that need to be made. His staff also
travel with a tablet screen and conduct house calls as an alternative to clients travelling
to their on-site ‘arrangement room’, as do travelling salespeople at Forest Lawn and
many others.
These innovators claim that their customers far prefer a screen or tablet presenta-
tion to a talk-based sales approach supported by printed media, and viewings in the
‘coffin selection room’. For these new generation companies, businesspeople and
clients, screen displays and selection software enable far more options to be offered –
hundreds of coffins, for example – and enable the entire process to be more trans-
parent. Importantly, prices are displayed on the screen for each product and service,
and a grand total progressively accumulates during the decision-making process and is
displayed at the bottom right of the screen, avoiding the problem of ‘bill shock’, a
common cause of customer dissatisfaction in the industry. Using this proprietary
system, the manager at Forest Lawn also claims to be able to ‘up-sell’ more products
and services, thus increasing profitability as well as customer satisfaction rates, as a
consequence of the technology offering greater choice and greater transparency.
The screened funeral

According to another leader in the US funeral home industry, many people now
opt for a biographical and celebratory multimedia show at funeral and other com-
memorative ceremonies. In Australia, these multimedia shows generally comprise
photo stills and a music soundtrack on a PowerPoint loop, usually put together by
a family member and displayed on a temporary pull-down screen. Others, parti-
cularly in the United States, are sometimes more elaborate professional productions
displayed in high-definition using professional cinema projection systems. Some
apparently even come complete with scent vaporisers – evoking pine or eucalyptus,
for example, for someone who liked hiking and who might have liked a sensory-rich
ceremony with an outdoor natural theme. Even in Mount Sinai Memorial Parks
and Mortuaries (catering for Jewish communities in LA), labelled by those in the
industry as among the ‘most traditional’ of such companies, screens are deployed in
each of their memorial chapels for viewing videos. Interestingly, however, there is
a contest of interests at Mount Sinai between new and established practice: Jewish
law stipulates that burial should occur within 24 hours of death (and Mount Sinai
claims to achieve an average of 36 hours). This tight time constraint for burial
limits opportunities to prepare desired media for the ceremony for unexpected
deaths. The Mount Sinai website, however, encourages planning ‘in advance of
need’ if possible, which offers the opportunity to prepare for media-rich ceremony
in anticipation of a person’s death.
At the final dinner for the ICCFA Expo in San Antonio, Texas, an example of a
video commemoration was featured. Our notes record:
The San Antonio trade show week concluded with an extravagant final dinner,
thematically decorated tables, black tie dress requests for gents and dresses and
cowboy boots for the ladies. Before the meal was served and the evening Mex-
ican Mariachi band and folk dancers performed, we were hushed to silence to
watch a professionally-produced large screen video memorial dedicated to all the
US funeral directors who had passed away during the previous year. This was a
single show that seamlessly flowed from one person’s story to the next in a
touchingly narrated and musically accompanied tribute with pictures reminding
the members present of the deceased’s industry achievements, and their commit-
ments to their families and to their friends in the wider funeral home community.
Without knowing any of these people, I shed a tear or two into my cloth napkin.
The commemorative multimedia show is often highly affective – it is designed to

evoke emotional responses from people who see it – everyone from relative
strangers, to acquaintances, colleagues, and, of course, close family and friends of
the deceased. Multimedia presentations that evoke a rich life lived strike to the
heart in commemorative proceedings. In the eyes of some, the emotive deployment
of multimedia shifts the character of the funeral in undesirable ways. The sheer
emotional power of an artfully designed video can overshadow the communicative
efforts of living speakers, often unaccustomed to oratory, and encumbered by grief.

In this view, the experience of family and friends communing with one another is
reduced to a media spectacle, hollowing out the meaning associated with coming
together for this shared intersubjective ritual. Sometimes, however, a relatively
low-key presentation operates as an illustrative backdrop for a speech or personal
eulogy – photos and video recordings with little or no sound, for example.
Recording the ceremony for asynchronous replay is another contemporary
practice that is increasingly offered as a service by larger funeral homes (Forest
Lawns in LA is one example). For some people, attending a funeral poses a set of
problematic decisions. To affirm a connection with the deceased, to express affinity
with the bereaved, and to fulfil social obligations requires attendance, but attending
the funeral might also entail an expensive airline flight, a night or two in a hotel or
on a relative’s couch, time taken off work, and time away from other duties and
pleasures. It may well be that friends and family have travelled on numerous
occasions to visit the person now deceased whilst they were ill in hospital, or in
palliative care, and must now decide whether another trip is warranted given that
the person is dead. In the United States airlines previously offered discounted
tickets to those travelling to a funeral, a practice that has recently ceased.
In a response to this problem many of these larger establishments in the United
States, Australia, and the UK have cameras permanently installed in their premises,
as do some smaller establishments (the Catholic Church in Parkville, Melbourne,
for example). Less common is real-time streaming, offered as either an optional
extra or as a default at no extra charge. According to an experienced UK-based
funeral celebrant, about one third of London crematoriums are equipped with
cameras, mostly using the Wesley Media system (a specialised music and media
service set up in the 1990s for the bereavement community, and currently entirely
generated and managed online).
In some cases in Australia, the US, and the UK, where family or friends are
distant and unable to travel, live streaming options are taken up. There is often a
strong social expectation that people closely related to or emotionally tied to the
deceased should travel to be physically present no matter the distance. Here,
according to informants in the industry, we can often observe a trade-off between
emotional distance, geographic distance, and time-zone distance, each interacting
with one another to produce a decision on how best to ‘attend’ to the death –
whether to attend in person, attend through live streaming, or attend via replay.
Those who are emotionally close and in the same time zone are expected to travel.
Those distant enough not to have this expectation and who live in a different time
zone need to be highly motivated to watch in real-time. Sufficient bandwidth is a
technical problem that is also identified by the industry as a barrier to live streaming.
Experienced people within the industry have observed that the primary audience
for these funeral recordings are those not close enough emotionally and/or socially
and/or culturally and/or geographically to attend the funeral in person. The second
key audience is the family itself that reviews (or hopes to review) the ceremony in
months or years to come, perhaps on a birthday or other anniversary. The third
key audience is comprised of the descendants of the deceased, who might want to
look back at family history (if available technology permits at this future time).
Interestingly, the products advertise different options to not only facilitate mourners’
‘at-need’ connections with family and friends but also provide for a com-
memorating future. Tribute.com is one company, for example, that advertises a
service that ‘never expires’. Of course, any customer should be quite wary of promises
of a ‘never expiring’ service in the digital world where platforms and technologies so
quickly move on, but it is the idea of a tribute’s permanence – the idea of its
movement into an unknown future – that makes it seductive and marketable. The
fourth audience is the management of the funeral home or cemetery, who will
watch proceedings to keep their workforce under surveillance for quality control
purposes.
A seemingly trivial but important question raised in preparation for funeral
recording is how many cameras to use. It is considered standard practice to use just
one camera, situated at the back of the venue and focused on the speaker, with
either a photo of the deceased or the actual coffin in view behind that person.
Some in the industry are adamant that this is the only way to do it. At Mount
Sinai, for example, there is no photography done in the memorial park, no lists
identifying graves, no GPS mapped grave locations, and no photography of people
attending ceremonies – ‘Everything we do is very private’, we were told, and
indeed, following Jewish tradition, until recent times it was common at Mount
Sinai for the family to be shielded from others in the Chapel, within a curtained
ante-room. Even in such cases, however, the funeral is acknowledged by the
industry as a social as well as religious and personal occasion, and funeral guests will
generally mingle after the formal service. It is then common for many of the
attendees to retire to another location for further communal mourning.
An issue raised here is that the use of a single camera erases from the digital
record a critical social aspect of the commemorative ritual experience. Funerals are
experienced as important opportunities for extended family, friends, acquaintances
and others to see each other, catch up after often long periods apart, swap stories,
and so on. In a contemporary hyper-mobile world, that communal function
becomes even more pronounced, as discussed in Chapter Four through the use of
mobile phone cameras and social media to establish distributed relations of presence.
At funerals you will likely see people taking an intense interest in who is there and
who is not, in who is looking healthy and prosperous and who is not, in who is
looking truly bereaved and who is not. Watch the crowd at a funeral waiting for
proceedings to begin, and after proceedings end. You will see them meeting and
greeting and often in animated discussion. Watch the crowd during formal com-
memorative proceedings and you may likely see individuals watching each other as
much as they are attending to the speeches. To have a single camera positioned at
the back erases all of this from the record, and denies those not present the ability
to witness the social aspects of the event. As with image sharing of funerals on
social media, we can probably expect that such recording and streaming practices
will be extended through the adoption and use of live streaming applications, such
as Periscope or Facebook Live, to broadcast funeral or memorial services to a social

network as part of a vernacular practice that operates alongside or even circumvents
commercial funeral streaming services.
The robot and the funeral

A radical way to remedy this single-camera shortcoming has been introduced by Orbis
Robotics, who have manufactured telepresence robots to deploy during funerals. The
robot not only allows people at a distance to witness the funeral, but also enables a
form of interactive real-time involvement. The robot we saw in operation at the
ICCFA trade show, named CARL, has an electric motor which enables it to be
mobile, has a flat screen that is equipped with microphone and speaker and sits on top of
an extensible ‘neck’ (which can be raised or lowered to talk to a person who is standing
or sitting), and through Skype software, enables a user to see and be seen, and to speak,
and to hear. The robot is operated by someone sitting at a computer in another part of
the world, whose face is seen at the event-end on the robot’s screen ‘face’, and who can
see and hear the funeral or their interlocutor on their own computer screen at home. A
mouse is used to control the robot and move it around the funeral. The ability of the
robot to move freely at a funeral, to ‘be there’, to take in the eulogy and other pre-
sentations, to mingle, to have one-on-one talks with individuals at close range, and to
view the body (if it is displayed) for a final farewell, offers opportunities for interactivity
not afforded by streaming or recorded media. At the time of writing, few funeral homes
offered the Orbis Robot service, perhaps wary of the potential for disruption or dis-
traction that might ensue from the presence of the robot. From their novelty position
at present however, the companies who are producing these and the directors who buy
or lease them see them as a way to facilitate participation and a form of co-presence in an
important ritual, for an ever-more globally dispersed generation.
Steve Gray, CARL’s developer, provides testimonials attesting to how effective
and affective this form of participation is, and decries the fact that funeral homes do
not make CARL universally available, depriving distant mourners of the ability to
participate in a very significant life event. Andrew Phillips, a funeral director at
Farnstrom Mortuary shared a story of its effectiveness:
The most meaningful use of CARL that I have experienced was the time it
allowed me to offer a grieving sister the opportunity to remotely attend a private
viewing for her brother. She had been considering a last-minute 1,500 mile flight
in order to spend a few minutes with him, but cost and logistics were prohibitive,
and she was facing not being able to say goodbye. Through CARL, we were able
to give her the opportunity to attend the viewing remotely and spend some time
with him. Her tears, words of love spoken to her brother and gratitude toward
our funeral home were evidence enough for me that we were able to give her the
tools she needed in order to walk through her loss. For this lady, and hopefully
many others in days to come, CARL will continue to assist us in helping families
come together, and find comfort and peace, wherever they may be.
The roaming robot at funerals is an unusual but nevertheless interesting example of

how computing technologies have moved beyond their historical desktop location.
In the next section we explore other digital technologies in what the industry calls
‘post-need’ contexts or spaces.
Post-need technologies and services

At-need technologies are deployed in the immediate temporal frame of the death,
and reach their apogee at the funeral, but as has been said many times before, death
is not a discrete event with a neat beginning and end, and so far as the funeral
industry is concerned, the business of death does not end in its immediate aftermath.
While most technologies and services are oriented to those ‘at-need’, the industry
recognises the existence of the ‘long tail’ that extends from this peak period, and it
rises to meet the challenge. If the funeral is at the core of at-need services, then the
memorial is at the core of post-need services, and at the trade shows many innovative
memorialisation technologies were on display.
Mobile and locative media

Mobile media are being deployed in a range of memorial spaces, both through
everyday use and deliberately designed artefacts. They are increasingly attached to
bodies or embedded in a variety of objects and places as discussed in Chapter Four.
A range of terms have been used in the literature to describe these ever-changing
paradigms of ‘anywhere and everywhere’ computer interaction, including ubiquitous
computing (Greenfield, 2006), locative media (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2010),
and the Internet of Things (Carretero and García, 2014). Whilst these terms carry
somewhat different emphases, they all share a common interest in trying to
understand how physical and digital entanglements affect our everyday lives, and,
we would add, our deaths.
Locative media explores how digital technologies intersect with place, while
ubiquitous computing looks at how everyday objects and environments are embed-
ded with technologies for sensing, monitoring, tracking, and actuating. GPS-enabled
smartphones provide a clear illustration of locative media and ubiquitous computing.
They demonstrate the entangled relations that are constructed between the digital
and the physical, anticipating the ways objects will be increasingly interconnected
through internet protocols to create networks of smart objects sharing data (Ashton,
2009). Due to the digital augmentation of everyday artefacts, computer interactions
are increasingly embedded within both physical and communicative environments.
This raises interesting new questions about how to design for and accommodate a
world of digitally enlivened objects (Coleman, 2012), a world where once passive
things can conceivably become more animated or responsive to human action
through the interactivity enabled by computing technologies (Weiser, 1991).
In the context of the funeral industry, sites for the deployment of mobile, net-
worked and ubiquitous computing include the deceased’s body, the cemetery, the
funeral home, the deceased’s home, and memorialising objects carried by loved
ones. Applications of technological innovation and augmentation can be found in
artefacts such as headstones, other objects at sites of internment, urns, and memorabilia
made from human remains. The following sections introduce some examples of
these objects that are produced to enhance and enrich post-funeral commemoration.
Identification technologies
The ‘Living Headstone’ is an internet-connected, screen-embedded, and digitally
tagged headstone that is able to connect from a particular spot in a cemetery to
digital content located on a web-server (Vercillo, 2011; Gotved, 2015). It utilises
QR code (or smart barcode) technology, which is a machine-readable pattern that
has been commonly used for supply-chain product tracking and logistics, for
marketing products, accessing information, paying parking fees, and so on. As
people meander through graveyards, their smartphones can scan QR codes
attached or engraved on headstones and open a website on the phone screen that
presents a personalised online memorial page.
A less obtrusive alternative to the QR code is the Radio Frequency Identifica-
tion (RFID) chip. Like a QR code, a RFID chip may be attached to an item, and
when energised by an RFID reader, emits a burst of binary digits which the reader
uses as a key to access the item’s record in a database. The chips are very small
(about the size of a grain of rice), are very cheap, and are widely used in industry to
identify and track the identification and the movement of goods. In the funeral
industry, the chips may be used to identify the body of the deceased, and have the
advantage over other methods, such as wrist and ankle bands, in that they can
be read at a distance, thus obviating the need to open a coffin, or open a storage
drawer in a morgue. Having served the purpose of identifying the body in the
morgue or funeral home, the chip may also be used to identify the buried body,
and its binary key used to access a cemetery record, or to access a memorial
website.
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
require neither a QR code nor an RFID chip and are increasingly being used to
create interactive digital maps for cemetery management. A number of companies,
including Plotbox, Axiom and Cemetery Information Management Systems, now
offer cemetery management software systems. These use mapping technologies,
including drones, to create maps and databases that can be used for multiple pur-
poses, such as site management and capacity planning, integration with other
database records, and visitor guides and information. As we have already noted in
Chapter Three, within the cemetery, the locations of the dead have always been
physically marked in space through the names, dates of birth and death, and family
affiliations typically carved into headstones. In a sense, the cemetery has thus always
been a ‘database of the dead’ in which the remains of the deceased are organised
and managed in a collective fashion. It is not surprising then, that digital management
systems such as GIS have been applied to different cemetery sites in order to record
that wealth of information and to help with site conservation and maintenance
(Mollick, 2005). Many cemeteries additionally offer, via these locative tools,
information to help visitors navigate their sites and locate individuals. For example,
the Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) in Vermont has used GIS to create an
interactive map available on a website or mobile app for visitors to search and
locate specific grave markers.8 The ANC Explorer app offers features such as event
notifications, a range of self-guided tours, mapped locations and descriptive text for
‘notable graves’, ‘memorial trees’, ‘medals of honor’, and monuments. Other public
facing applications have been developed through the use of virtual reality tech-
nology, with a company called Cemetery360 offering a service to cemeteries that
produces 360 degree imaging of sites for people to be able to take virtual tours to
select a plot for interment.9 As noted earlier, other cemeteries, such as Mount Sinai
in Los Angeles, resist offering such a mapping service in the name of preserving the
privacy of those interred under its rolling lawns.
The identification systems inherent in these technologies are not limited to
cemeteries. Similar applications have been used by a project set up to commemorate
individuals who died in road accidents:
The Roadside Memorial project is an online photo-journal data-base of

roadside memorial displays from the U.S.A. around the world, so that the lives
represented by these memorials may be honored, and the stories told.10
The site attempts to establish a network of grievers – its ‘vision’ invites visitors to
care for themselves and each other through F.A.R.S.I.G.N. (Friends Along the
Road Sanctuary For Those In Grief Network). The Roadside Memorial project
was set up to be collaboratively constructed, with an open invitation for new users to
contribute and participate by submitting information, images, and stories about
their loved ones who have died in traffic accidents. Thus, it does more than map
the coordinates of roadside deaths, but it also annotates that location with digital
content that other grieving families can view or post.
Designers often describe these geographically linked web pages as interactive
‘living’ memorials that form a legacy for future generations, and which complement
the physical gravesite or roadside memorial. The pages are thought to provide, in
effect, the best of all worlds; past, present, and future. Alas, while they provide this
potential to buoy life in this way, the sites need to be visited to keep them ‘alive’ in
people’s consciousness into the future, and they also need to be managed – the
impetus to carry on with the maintenance of an online project site may decrease
with time as family and friends’ lives move on. A look at the Roadside Memorial
Project site provides an illustration of this. It is ‘living’ insofar as the URL can be
located online and one can post to it, but it does not appear to have grown much
over the years and most areas of the US that it had clearly hoped to reach are
missing entirely – 18 of the 23 roadside memorial details posted are from Colorado.
We would suggest, however, that the fact of social and technological stagnation is
not as relevant to our discussion here as is the implied promise of the dead’s
FIGURE 6.1 Cemetery360 virtual reality – cemetery tours technology.

Source: Photo: Bjorn Nansen.
longevity through the support of ‘enlivening’ and geographically locating technol-

ogy. It is the idea (not the proven history) of the memorial’s capacity to be inter-
active and to provide even temporary illusions of animation that gives it ‘life’ – a
quality that challenges our assumptions about the associative qualities of cemeteries
as sombre, quiet, resting places.
The etymology of the English word cemetery comes from the Greek word koi-
meterion meaning ‘sleeping place’ or ‘dormitory’. Judeo-Christian rituals and meta-
phors associated with the burial and commemoration of the dead are often infused
with references to sleep. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, death and sleep and are entwined
in the famous line ‘To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream’ (1998: 670).
The Old Testament explains that it is only the body that sleeps in the ground, not
the ‘spirit’. Such Cartesian conceptualisations of the body as distinct from the
‘mind’ and/or ‘soul’ sustain the association between sleep and death into the present
day. The ethnographic record of the material anthropology of death, particularly
visible in the iconography of the cemetery, heavily emphasises sleep (Hallam and
Hockey, 2001). Interestingly, the emerging examples of digital mediation and
augmentation of the cemetery and the material culture of death appear to animate
the dead for the living who visit the grave through texts, images, and also as we
will see in the final chapter, through sound.
These post-need technologies produce the sense of a restless dead materialised in
lively forms of media and exhumed within a network of social and technical con-
nections previously delimited by cemetery geography and physical inscription in
stone. The ability to enliven the dead and bring them into sharp focus through
hybridising headstones, websites, and streaming media is also demonstrated in
growing technological capabilities around cremation. 3D printed urns and jewels
made with human ash and hair exemplify this well.
3D printed urns
Bespoke, personalised cremation urns are now being constructed with the use of
3D imaging, computer-assisted design, and additive manufacturing technologies
based on photographs and facial recognition software. For example, a US company
based in Vermont called Cremation Solutions11 brings the individuation of com-
memoration to a new level by using these technologies to manufacture com-
memorative urns shaped to realistically resemble the head of the deceased (Marsh,
2012). Cremation Solutions offer a small ‘keepsake’ version for US$600, or a life-
sized head urn for US$2600, and their website assures us that with this urn ‘You
will never again have to worry that you might forget what your loved one looked
like’. Choice is not limited to images of the deceased, as the urns can be made in
the image of your favourite celebrities – ‘even President Obama!’
The personalised urn or keepsake becomes a 3D photo-realistic physical reminder
of the dead – designed for commemorative display in the home. As a photo-
realistic representation of the deceased’s head, the figure is symbolically buoyed and
enlivened in the minds of those who recognise the figure, and this literal verisimilitude
is further reinforced, filled as it is with the true physical ash-remains of the dead.
One could say that it is simply an example of the industry ‘upselling’ a product, in
that it is just a more expensive version of the urns that have been used to contain
human remains for millennia. If needs be, the classic urn may be augmented with
photographs of the deceased (or of Superman or Obama), and other such keepsakes,
as we saw in the San Francisco Columbarium. However, it could also be argued
that the 3D realism of the face combined with the symbolic power of an association
with the bodily remains contained therein, provide family and loved ones with a
stronger and more literal sense of ‘timeless presence’.
Cremation jewellery
Cremation Solutions also produce a range of cremation jewellery to be worn by
the bereaved. The first and most simple ‘style’ in the range is jewellery that includes
a small chamber where cremation ashes can be stored. The Dutch company SeeYou
offers a very wide range of memorial jewellery in this style. The second style
includes custom-made ‘cremation glass beads’ or objects that resemble semi-precious
stones, or sculptures of glass or manufactured ‘stone’. For these, the customer is
required to post the required amount of ash to the ‘artist’ who adds the ash to the
glass or to the base material to manufacture the commemorative objects. Ever-
Sculpt is one of many companies offering these products, at prices that range from
a few hundred pounds, to over £100,000.
The third and most sophisticated style includes jewels (diamonds or crystals) that
are made from the ash (or alternatively from hair). The process entails refining the
ashes to alter the relative proportions of constituent elements, thus affecting
the clarity and colour of the finished product, then applying heat and pressure. The
UK company Phoenix Memorial Diamonds can produce diamonds in Light
Canary Yellow, Free Range Blue/White, White, or Pink, and these are typically
cut with fifty-eight facets. The crystals take 4 to 6 weeks to craft, while the diamonds
can take four months or longer, depending on colour and size.
Another company called Mevisto, retailing through Wholesale Funeral Products
Australia, produce gems from both human ash and hair. They claim to be the first
company in the world to be able to demonstrate through university-based laboratory
testing that the gemstones are actually made from the hair or ashes provided to them,
thereby catering to customers’ concerns about the authenticity of the products they
receive. A different ash jewellery product comes from a company called CremainGem,
who are headquartered in California, with its factory in Thailand, and produce a ceramic
or stone-like material from human (or pet) ashes, that is then set in silver or gold:
It symbolises love and honor via a genuine object made from 100% cremains
of your beloved one. Each piece is unique in both meaning and appearance.
It is psychologically outstanding as a novel alternative in expressing indivi-
dual’s memorial needs. By accompanying physical, memorial and spritual (sic)
feelings, the CremainGem provides connectedness, comfort, peace and recol-
lection for the holder. Our innovation in restoring the cremain is adorable,
portable, and durable.12
In suggesting that their ‘innovation’ restores (rather than ‘transforms’ or ‘converts’)

the cremated ashes, and provides ‘connectedness’ for the ‘holder’, CremainGem is
appealing to the desires of those bereaved who wish to stay physically connected to
the ‘restored’ bones of the dead – a contemporary version of the many material
manipulations based on ‘associative thinking’ in the ‘primitive’ worlds that James
Frazer described in terms of ‘contagious magic’ (1915). The new technologies that
allow for ash to be produced in forms that closely resemble ceramics, crystals, or
diamonds means that the wearer benefits from the private symbolic associations
based upon the physical nearness to a loved one’s remains while an encountering
public (who perhaps might not be as enamoured with the idea) does not. Cremation
Solutions explain the growing popularity of their product by suggesting: ‘People
often scatter in several locations, sometimes thousands of miles apart, and cremation
jewelry lets people keep their loved ones with them wherever they go.’
DNA legacies
Closely related to cremation jewellery are products that base their memorialisation
not on ashes, but on DNA extracted from the deceased. Companies offering these
DNA-based technologies (dnalegacy and DNAMemorial, for example), have a
two-pronged marketing strategy. The first parallels the ‘value proposition’ offered
by the jewellery manufacturers described above; the manufacturing processes
resemble that used in the first and second style of jewellery described above, as do
the finished products. Companies producing DNA-based products, however, can
make the claim that unlike ashes, DNA more closely represents the ‘essence’ of our
being – ‘the entire genetic “blueprint” of an individual’ as dnalegacy puts it.13 In
nations such as the UK, Australia and the US, which are very mindful of the
potency of DNA (if only through films such as Gattaca, and popular media debates
about the risks and benefits of genetically engineered crops), DNA may well be
regarded by the bereaved as being more ‘connected’ to the deceased than ashes.
Therefore, the surrogate bond to DNA-based memorial jewellery may be stronger
than ash-based jewellery.
The second prong of the appeal made by this technology is unique, and gives it
a clear advantage over ash memorials. This appeal is not to the preservation of a
keepsake as the expression of a sentiment, or the expression of a purely emotional
bond, but as the preservation of a pragmatically useful biotechnical legacy. This
product is referred to in this industry sector as ‘DNA banking’, whereby a sample
of purified DNA is stored in a sophisticated container designed to preserve the
DNA in good condition, which may then be displayed, in a living room, for
example, as a memorial. It is argued that the keepsake will be valued by many
generations to come … ‘75% of all diseases can be traced back to our genetic
makeup … Banking your family’s DNA is an important step in tracing the root
cause of hereditary diseases and paves the way for targeted treatments in the
future’.14 It is argued that highly accurate ‘ancestry testing’ becomes possible with
DNA banking, and that full advantage can be taken of the personalised and
genome-based medicines that are said to be the biomedical technologies of the
future. These claims move well away from sentiment-based, symbolic and mne-
monic memorials and keepsakes, to something that may well still be emotively
charged, but is also said to be of material benefit to the bereaved and their
descendants.
Interestingly, while in the US over 1000 funeral homes offer these new DNA
products,15 conversation at the stands at the UK tradeshow suggested more
resistance. In particular, funeral directors expressed doubts about a successful out-

come to the conversation that needed to occur with the bereaved for permission to
collect the tissue sample (typically a cheek swab) needed to refine the DNA.
Asking permission to open the jaw to scrape the inside cheek (which depending on
the time of death may require a degree of force), and to charge between £300 and
£500 for the service, in order to produce a jewellery memento, and/or to provide
the bereaved or their descendants an uncertain benefit at an uncertain point in the
future, was for many, a step too far.
It is one thing to use technology to create a memento and a genetic record for
the immediate bereaved family and descendants, it is quite another to use DNA
technology to conduct a digital autopsy (in a way that leaves the biological corpse
intact and allows the extracted information to travel globally and be applied to
many contexts and uses). The idea of what digital autopsy can offer over physically
invasive body investigations is of interest to many professionals: researchers, doctors,
investigators, and technicians. We look briefly at the digital autopsy in the next
section in terms of its function, facilitation and potential, but also because it opens a
new door through which to consider how the personhood of the deceased may be
buoyed, sans biological body, through possible future transactions with a range of
interested parties.
Preserving the body through digital autopsy

In the UK around 200,000 autopsies are carried out each year, and iGene, a
company founded in Malaysia but offering its services in the UK, market the digital
autopsy as an alternative. Rather than a cause of death being established through
the dissection and examination of the body itself, a digital isomorph-body is created,
and that body is dissected and examined. The biological body thus remains
untouched and intact. The digital isomorph-body is created in a two-step process.
In the first step, the biological body is scanned using ‘X-ray computed tomo-
graphy’, often called a CT scan. This technique involves taking multiple images
through the body at different angles using X-rays. The second stage involves using
computational technologies to assemble these tomographic images (or slices) to
create a single 3D representation of the body. The advantage that iGene has over a
standard CT scan is that the subject of the scan is dead and cannot be harmed by
X-rays. In the course of a CT scan, the body receives between 100 and 1000 times
the radiation emitted from a single X-ray scan, and this radiation is known to be
harmful. Where the body is dead, the CT scanner can be ‘cranked-up to the max’
and used without regard to radiation exposure, thus dramatically increasing the
resolution of the resulting images. Indeed, the images on display at the UK show
were spectacular in their detail and resolution.
While the biological body is a material reality constituted in flesh and bone, the
digital isomorph-body is an abstract reality constituted in binary digits. The key
‘value proposition’ of the digital autopsy is that the biological body is not subject to
dissection, and this is important for those who regard the body of the deceased and
the personhood of the deceased to be inextricably entwined. However, other

advantages of reconstituting the body in this way, then dissecting the surrogate, are
numerous. The digital isomorph-body may be ‘dissected’ many thousands of times,
by many people, over many, many years, not just for the purposes of the autopsy,
but also for research and educative purposes. Some medical conditions (though by
no means all) are more readily evident using the digital surrogate than is the case in
a ‘traditional’ autopsy. The digital isomorph-body can be accessed remotely, or can
be transported across the globe at near zero cost. In many ways, this new form of
posthumous embodiment carries with it the same appeal that applies to the digital
embodiment of personhood in life. In life we are present in the world, act in the
world, and are represented in the world in digital forms – through databases, net-
works, social media, email, avatars. To be so represented in death offers continuity
more than a discontinuity.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have observed a number of interesting trends. We have con-
sidered the development of new digital technologies and services for the material
world of death, through a lens provided by the funeral industry and its trade shows.
We have seen how thousands of people and thousands of old and new products
converge at these trade shows. In particular ‘tradition’ and the interests of tradition
have been seen to both resist and collaborate with ‘innovation’ and its interests.
Similarly, ‘commerce’ and ‘service’ were each apparent in abundance, and, on the
showroom floor and in the lecture theatres, they often made for uncomfortable
bedfellows. The window provided by the trade shows has allowed us to find out
how people within the industry have seen themselves, how they have assessed the
products and services they offer or choose not to offer, and how they have assessed
and related to a brave new world of technology. Directors continue (at the time of
writing) to keep in touch with each other’s ideas and experiences and the latest
innovations through such trade show and convention events, but also through
online communications such as the online industry newsletter, Connecting Directors.
There is a vibrancy at the shows and in the online newsletters that many people in
the death industry clearly feel, whilst at the same time there is a sense of inevitable
disruption that these platforms promote and exploit:
ConnectingDirectors.com is the leading online daily publication for funeral

professionals with a reader base of over 45,000 of the most elite and forward-
thinking professionals in the profession. With ConnectingDirectors.com we
have created a global community through an online platform allowing funeral
professionals to Stay Current, Stay Informed and Stay Elite.
If several of our informants at the ICCFA are right, we are at a cusp of change. We
are at a revealing moment in which the old and new, the traditional and innovative
(Current, Informed, Elite) rub shoulders. We can chart the tensions and shifting
desires that these interactions reveal, and these can lead us to consider where we
are going (in Chapter Seven) with future (but already imagined) innovations.
Notes
1 See IBIS estimate here: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-trends/market-research-
reports/other-services-except-public-administration/personal-laundry/funeral-homes.html.
See Forbes’ estimate here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/perianneboring/2014/04/25/
the-death-of-the-death-care-industry-and-eternal-life-online/
2 www.centralengland.coop/funeral-services/funeral-products-and-services/coffins-and-ca
skets/traditional-coffins
3 www.coffinworld.com.au/coffins/mdf-coffins.html
4 www.thenaturalfuneralcompany.com/coffins-and-caskets
5 www.lifeart.com
6 www.cardboardcoffinsaustralia.com.au/
7 www.funeralone.com/switch/features.php
8 www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ancexplorer
9 www.cemetery360.com/
10 www.friendsalongtheroad.org
11 www.cremationsolutions.com
12 www.cremaingem.com
13 www.dnalegacy.com
14 www.dnalegacy.com/
15 www.dnalegacy.com/
7
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE OF LIFE
AFTER DEATH
In early 2014, a start-up called Eterni.me emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Entrepreneurship Development program with the tagline – ‘simply become
immortal’ – and quickly became a media curiosity. Eterni.me is in the process of developing a
set of algorithms that will learn to emulate your personality after your death through computational
analysis of your digital footprint. Using data-mining techniques their software will be able to
work through all of your online documents, emails, and social media postings and draw on
this digital corpus to emulate the characteristics of your interests, writing, and conversational
style. The algorithms can then function as an artificial intelligence for a 3D avatar, which can
‘interact with and offer information and advice to your family and friends after you pass
away’ (Gayomali, 2014). Eterni.me offers people the chance to ‘become virtually immortal’
through an avatar that ‘will live forever and allow other people in the future to access your
memories’, thereby providing ‘an invaluable treasure for humanity’.1 Within weeks of publicising
these plans, tens of thousands of users signed up on a waiting list to access a Beta version of
the service and Marius Ursache, Eterni.me’s Chief Executive, expressed confidence that they
will achieve commercial and technical success, because, as he has put it, ‘Nobody wants to be
forgotten’ (‘Live forever: Would you like to become a digital avatar after you die?’,
2014). But the question remains: how does one turn a creative vision of ‘virtual immortality’
into a marketable and sustainable future reality?
Eterni.me’s goal of establishing an ongoing digital afterlife rests on a long and
popular tradition of techno-utopian and futurist speculation. In these narratives, the
project of immortality is embedded in a fantasy of maintaining and indeed enhancing
life through technological mediation. For many years we have seen these speculative
desires actuated in films such as Lawnmower Man, Abre Los Ojos, Transcendence, and
RoboCop. In literature, William Gibson’s Neuromancer stood as the forerunner of a
genre called ‘cyberpunk’ that explored digital ways of being in digital spaces, parti-
cularly focusing on how digital worlds could offer people freedom from the con-
straints of physical bodies, spaces, and temporalities. The rallying catch-cry was
Looking to the future of life after death 125
‘leave the meat behind’, and this was logically extended in libertarian and techno-
utopian strains of posthumanism, which expressed a desire for an electronic exis-
tence through transcending the fragile hardware of the brain and uploading the
neural ‘software of the mind’ into the more durable and flexible hardware systems
offered by computer networks (Moravec, 1998).
While it may seem fantastically implausible for humans to ‘disembody’ and ‘leave
the meat behind’, for the techno-utopian such barriers to implementation are
merely viewed as a transient phase that will be overcome with more data, better
theory, and better instruments. As Moravec (1998), Kurzweil (2012), Bostrom
(2008), and other futurists tell us, scientific progress is inexorable and meeting our
desires to move the project of human evolution through transhumanism to post-
humanism is just a matter of time and effort. From this perspective, humans are ‘a
work in progress’ and the conceptualisation of a human as a being that is (of
necessity) phenomenologically embodied is rejected entirely.
These beliefs have influenced the creation of a number of services that share a
common goal with Eterni.me, namely allowing social presence to persist beyond
death through some form of digital afterlife. Not only can interested customers use
such services to move beyond what they perceive to be the limiting confines of
biological death, but they also provide new ways for the living to engage with the
dead. Therefore, these services both challenge existing notions of personhood and
reimagine and reshape social relations between the living and the dead. In this final
chapter, we examine how a range of companies are looking to the future and
mobilising digital technologies to facilitate posthumous personhood and to help
customers reimagine the ontological possibilities for animating the deceased.
We begin this discussion with prosaic technologies deployed to exotic ends,
before moving to more ‘cutting-edge’ examples. Included are companies that offer
to use augmented reality to represent the deceased at their gravesite, promise to
keep Twitter accounts active after the death of the account holder, send a series of
emails to selected parties after an individual’s death, as well as those companies
attempting to build interactive online avatars, so family and friends can continue to
interact at some level with dead loved ones into the future. These commercial
developments raise significant temporal and ontological issues for personhood
within and beyond digital environments (Graham et al., 2013; Stokes, 2012), and
so in this final chapter we explore how these speculative future services operate,
examine their ambitions, and explore their social and cultural implications.
Everyday ‘life after death’ technologies

At the outset, it is important to note that the maintenance of posthumous social
presences and personhood can be a relatively banal task achieved by everyday
media. People have long planned for a social afterlife by writing autobiographies,
leaving personal letters and diaries, curating and burying time-capsules, or compil-
ing audio and video recordings to be used when dead (Exley, 1999; Jones, 2004).
Everyday media have also allowed us to capture the images or sounds of the living,
126 Looking to the future of life after death
which take on a new and sometimes profound significance after death. A mundane
example is when the voice of the deceased persists in stored voicemail messages or
in pre-recorded answering machine messages. These have been preserved by loved
ones and used to answer the telephone:
My sister kept her dead husband’s voice message for ten years after his acci-
dental death: ‘Hello, you’ve reached the answerphone for Fred, Janine and
Maddie McFadyen. We can’t answer the phone right now. Can you please
leave your message after the tone …’
Many friends and family urged her to remove it or save it as a recording and get
a new machine, but she resisted that loss of his aural presence in the home …2
The presence of the dead in all kinds of media (including social media accounts, text
messages, and emails) is more often preserved than deleted. Video clips and digital
images of the dead are no more likely to be deleted from our smartphones than are
images in the traditional photo-album, and they clutter up our SIM cards, hard-
drives, and cloud-space as much as shoe-boxes full of mementos crowd our closets.
Film and television offer an even more dramatic possibility of posthumous exis-
tence. We are of course well accustomed to seeing commercial film and television
footage and audio recordings of people long dead. However, this medium has also
been used to grant posthumous life to dead stars. The 1991 video recording of the
song ‘Unforgettable’, recorded by Natalie Cole and her dead father, was regarded
by many as uncanny in the way it mixed and matched the performances by both
the living and the dead. Its two Grammy awards demonstrated the popularity of
this new genre, and it was quickly followed by posthumous recordings featuring
Bob Marley, Dean Martin, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon, Conway Twitty, Frank
Sinatra and 2Pac amongst others (Stanyek and Piekut, 2010). The 1981 recording
by Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline also deserves a special mention as the first duet to be
recorded after both singers were dead (Stanyek and Piekut, 2010). In film, Woody
Allen’s Zelig and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump both feature live actors being inserted
into archival footage and interacting with long-dead notables (John Lennon in the case
of Forrest Gump). Alexandra Sherlock (2013: 166) also offers the compelling example of
Bob Monkhouse, a popular British comedian, who offered a prostate cancer warning
from ‘beyond the grave’, assisted by archival footage, a body double, and a voice
impersonator. The 2016 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a prologue to the 1980s Star
Wars trilogy, ends with computer enhanced footage of a young Carrie Fisher, who
played Princess Leia in the earlier films. Shortly after the new film’s release, Carrie
Fisher died (in late December 2016), and the speaking image of her in the film
becomes imbued with a deeper nostalgic association, as it not only animates a
character we knew and loved in the past, but also animates the now-deceased actress.
In addition to such vernacular and commercial attempts at personal preservation,
in previous chapters we have seen that the potential for a posthumous presence has
also been explored in various cultural contexts through rituals, oral traditions,
eulogies, traditional epitaphs, inscriptions in stone, and obituaries printed and
circulated in newspapers. These traditions allow the dead to continue to commune

with the living, and the living to express their interpersonal relations with the dead.
Regardless of the level of formality or of interaction, everyday vernacular and
institutional media, as we’ve demonstrated, help individuals maintain some level of
what Robert Lifton would have called a ‘symbolic afterlife’ (1979), in simple and
relatively unambitious ways. In contrast though, in the 1970s we saw the first
ambitious steps towards digital technologies dedicated to ontologically sustainable
posthumous personhood, with the launch of the ‘Talking Tombstone’.
Talking tombstones, playlists for the dead and living graveyards

The ‘Talking Tombstone’, a precursor to the ‘Living Headstone’ described in
Chapter Six, was an early commercial effort to animate the dead and to normalise a
literal and ongoing communicative connection between the deceased and the
living. As discussed by Gary Gumpert (1988), the first Talking Tombstone featured
a solar-powered headstone containing an analogue speaker system and later a video
display to play pre-recorded visual and audio messages from the deceased. The
product included optional extras such as sensor activation to trigger the display
when visitors approached the gravesite. An imagined scenario of use has a visitor
approach the grave, thus activating the system to play a pre-recorded video of the
deceased speaking to the visitor. The first version of the product was developed in
the mid-1970s and was featured in a 1977 issue of People magazine (see Gumpert,
1988). However, priced at US$39,500, the first Talking Tombstone remained an
expensive and largely unpopular novelty, and failed as a commercial venture.
When it comes to animating a life after death, solutions couched in terms of
technology innovation, adoption, and popularisation are challenged by the fact that
technology is even more fragile and shorter lived than the biological body. For
example, the earliest talking tombstones relied on early-model solar-charged batteries
with limited lifespans, and the media used analogue technologies which in the
intervening years have essentially become museum pieces that are difficult to
maintain (see Acland, 2007). Once digital sound, image, video files, and software
became encoded in digital forms, media content was more easily stored, modified,
automated, and distributed (Manovich, 2001). However, as we have already seen,
even these digital objects are subject to processes of social and technological
entropy and redundancy. In a practical sense the longevity of the afterlife through
media depends as much upon remaining technically interoperable and durable as it
does in remaining socially significant (Acland, 2007; Mosco, 2004). However, this
fact hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from continuing to operate outside the box in
their attempts to work with emerging forms of digital media to invent ever more
ambitious versions of the Talking Tombstone.
Perhaps the most fanciful of these inventions is the CataCombo Sound System.3
This product, priced at US$30,000 in 2012, consists of a high-fidelity sound system
built into the coffin and headstone, comprising top-end woofers, 8-inch sub-
woofers, externally cooled tweeters, and a custom-built amplifier. The speakers and
amplifier are all linked via a 4G wireless connection to a processor and music
server embedded in the headstone or tombstone, together with a 7-inch LCD
monitor. A playlist for the dead is managed by the CataPlay App and can be com-
piled by an individual (planning for his/her own death), or collectively by friends
and family through social media, and can be updated well into the future. Like the
Talking Tombstone, the CataCombo Sound System is, at the time of writing, off the
market. This might come as no surprise, as, of course, we all know that the dead
cannot hear.
Yet, we also know that the dead cannot feel or see an oak coffin or distinguish it
from a cardboard coffin, but nonetheless it might be important for a family member
to purchase an oak coffin for a departed family member who was a traditionalist or
alternatively, buy a cardboard coffin for a deceased relation who cared about the
environment. In choosing oak or cardboard we need have no fear of being
mocked. In a similar spirit, although we may think that the dead cannot hear the
music any more than they can feel the coffin, we might well visit her grave, play
her music to her, and through sharing that music commune with her. The use of
such imaginatively intersubjective, communicative technologies produces a sense of
restlessness and a certain liveliness that is associated with the deceased. A deceased
family member with an active playlist is not a deceased family member in quiet
repose.
This restlessness has also been produced through the use of augmented reality, a
system in which digital images, text, or sound is overlaid on our natural perception
of the environment in real-time, through head-mounted goggles, glasses or contact
lenses, or through hand-held devices such as mobile phones. For example, high-end
systems are used by surgeons to overlay PET (Positron Emission Tomography)
scanned images of the body’s internal organs onto the body that is being opened;
information about historical and cultural landmarks may be provided as one moves
about Rome or traverses a museum display; or pocket monsters may be overlaid on
the inner-city streetscape, to be caught using the Pokémon Go App (a gaming
phenomenon that attracted great popularity in 2016). Media attending to Pokémon
Go noted how this vivid example of ‘techno-animism’ (Allison, 2006) could lead
players to ‘sacrifice their bodies’ to find god-like pocket monsters in all sorts of
unexpected places,4 including cemeteries where one would suddenly find oneself
‘walking among the dead while trying to capture the not-actually-living’.5
A number of start-ups are developing services that, although in their infancy,
offer to use augmented reality to mediate gravesites with representations of the
deceased. Eternal Memoria, created by Nizar Rasheed – who lost his mother to
cancer and found comfort in the voicemails she had left on his phone, and then
was devastated by their loss when the phone was stolen – invites customers to
create a ‘virtual archive’ that:
can include photographs, videos, obituaries, eulogies, family ancestry, guest registry,
links to the Facebook, Twitter and other social networks pages of your loved one,
as well as comments by friends and family, to truly become a celebration of life.6
The information stored on the Eternal Memoria webpage is then overlaid on the
grave through a smartphone or tablet. In its early versions the webpage was accessed
through a QR code etched into the gravestone (see Chapter Six), memorial bench,
or the like, but in later versions, object recognition technologies identify the grave
and obviate the need for a QR code.
Whilst still a new and emerging technology, particularly in the context of
commemoration, augmented reality also has a heritage that connects directly to
holographic projections, which have also been developed for commemorative
purposes. There is, for example, a patent proposing a Holographic Projection for
Grave Memorials (US patent 20050068595 A1). The system incorporates a holo-
graphic projector and energy source to display 3D visual images on or near to a
grave or urn which will ‘convey information about a deceased individual’, includ-
ing a holographic image of the deceased and a sound file of the deceased’s voice, in
order to bypass the limitations of inscriptions afforded by the spaces and materials
of interment.7 Despite the ambition and future imaginary of this patent, it has yet
to be seen as a commercially available product.
The scenario of use envisaged by the designers of technologies such as this, is
one where a visitor arrives at a grave, or a location where ashes are kept (such as a
columbarium) or scattered, and then positions their iPad or smartphone to frame an
image of the location which appears on the screen courtesy of the device’s camera.
A QR code, object recognition software, or GPS system identifies the grave or
location, and using this identification, streams a pre-recorded video of the deceased
to the device. The pre-recorded video has been shot in a studio against a ‘green
screen’ and is superimposed on the image of the grave or location. The end result
is a video of the deceased sitting or lying on the grave, or standing in the location,
in situ, speaking directly to the visitor.
Talking tombstones, in-coffin sound systems, and augmented reality graves are
not just new sophisticated means for commemorating the dead, they are developed
to animate the dead for the living. The ambition to create a livelier cemetery
remediates the materials, relations, and rituals associated with interring the dead and
the manner in which they rest. Graves that respond to visitation, bodies that listen
to updated music playlists, and graves overlaid with text and video point towards
enhanced colour and reciprocal movement and towards an ongoing temporality in
the physical graveyard. In the digitally enhanced cemeteries that may abound in a
speculative future, the dead are lively (see: futurecemetery.org): that is, the remains
of the dead and the memorials that stand for the deceased are no longer quiescent,
but respond to our presence and actively communicate with us just as they invite
us to commune with them (Nansen et al., 2014).
The etymology of ‘temporality’, which denotes both secularity and a place in
time, is also useful to consider in this context. We have seen that the animation of
the grave is mediated by technologies, sanctioned by entrepreneurs, and is not
necessarily touched by church or sacrament. The commemorative media artefacts
that capture the attention of the living are interpersonal rather than transcendent,
and, as the technologies develop, they tend to be more mundane than sacred. But
‘temporal’ also relates to the passage of time, and following on from our discussion
in Chapter Three, the new developments sketched out here augment the traditionally
durable materials of headstones with relatively impermanent and dynamic digital
materials. The grave is not just a space to reflect on a person long since departed,
but instead becomes a space to interact with and co-produce that individual’s post-
life personhood. Memorialisation becomes as much about continuing relations in
the here and now as it does about connecting through memories of the past.
Posthumous messaging
A number of online services also allow the living to continue communicative ties
with the dead. Death Switch, GhostMemo, DeadSocial, If I Die, MyGoodBye-
Message, and Dead Man’s Switch all help people to arrange for messages to be sent
to friends and family after death (see Meese, Nansen et al., 2015). Each of these
companies operates this very particular service in different ways, and they also
articulate a range of different reasons one might choose to use their services. In this
section we outline how each service operates and presents itself, and explore how
the interactions they facilitate between the dead and the living affect social bonds
and understandings of personhood. We then go on to discuss even more ambitious
speculative products.
Dead Man’s Switch, GhostMemo, and MyGoodByeMessage are three dedicated
posthumous messaging services. They each begin when a customer composes
messages (which may be in the form of emails, text messages, documents, video
files, images, and other digital objects) and associates each message with one or
more recipients. The files and their intended recipients are then stored in encrypted
form on the company server until the messaging is activated. In the case of the
services above, activation is triggered when a ‘proof-of-life’ test fails. For the proof-
of-life test the company will email and/or text message the client at regular inter-
vals asking them to click a link or respond to a password prompt. If the client does
not respond to an agreed number and sequence of prompts, the assumption is
made that the client is dead and the pre-recorded messages are sent to the intended
recipients. The service called If I Die, however, offers something slightly different,
in that a nominated agent or trustee is responsible for informing the service of the
death of a client, after which the company posts the pre-recorded message (or
video) on the deceased’s social media sites and to the deceased’s Twitter followers.
In an apparent attempt to normalise their service, some companies offer to send
one message to one recipient for free, and then a premium service that sends
multiple messages to more recipients is available at a price.
There are various ways these services can be applied. In some cases, they facilitate an
important act in digital asset management: for example, the messages might contain
the passwords to various online accounts, or the location of a will, ledgers, titles, or the
location of a bank-deposit box and other material assets. In some instances they permit
a final unmediated message of love to be sent to a spouse or to a grandchild. Some
services suggest that their product can be used by customers to do things such as reveal
a ‘long kept secret’, or win ‘an old score you wanted to settle’ (If I Die) after their
deaths. It is not unimaginable that some might use such post-mortem messaging to
pursue enmities, or to harass, bully, and abuse real or perceived enemies into the
future, protected from repercussions by death. Messages from beyond the grave can in
these ways function to communicate important and useful information at the time it is
needed, or they can function as powerful emotive missives.
While the above messaging technologies offer a very basic form of commu-
nicative life after death, others are taking the process a small step further. Like
the abovementioned companies, competitors such as Incubate: The Time-Delay
Messenger and ToLovedOnes allow people to ‘upload an unlimited number of
photos, video, audio and text messages which will be sent out on Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn … after their death’ (Kleenman, 2014). However, in these cases
the messages are not triggered by a ‘proof-of-life’ test, but are triggered by life
events of descendants (birthdays, births, marriages, deaths and the like), and are sent
by a nominated agent or agents, who are able to send the messages, but are pre-
vented, by encryption, from reading, editing, or deleting the messages. The messages
may be recorded in a variety of media, a number of different social media channels
may be used, and the messages can be scheduled for distribution at events up to
999 years into the future (Meese, Nansen et al., 2015). As one user of the service
explained, the proposed length of the service will allow him to not just talk to his
children but also his ‘grandkids, and all my generations for years to come. It’s
always going to be out there, in the cloud’ (Kleenman, 2014).
The interesting question here is whether a life can be projected into the future
in a way that is legible and relevant to future lives. In the operation of posthumous
messaging services offered by examples like If I Die, family and friendship are
presented as temporally elastic social formations. Prepared messages move in one
direction from the dead to the living, stretching the interactive performance of
family and friendship through time and potentially, through generations. Perhaps
through one to two generations, a message from beyond the grave will be able to
maintain some sort of social life. Messages may be able to draw on shared memories
and experiences much like a letter or a video left by the deceased for the living.
However, though pre-recorded messages may be left for generations yet to come,
they will probably be ‘unable to support the deeply contextual and ongoing prac-
tices of intimacy and reciprocity that define a contemporary family or friendship’
(Meese, Nansen et al., 2015: 417). As one might expect, the CEO of Deadsocial,
James Norris, disagrees and has suggested that the goodbye messages previously
offered as part of their end of life social media tool and legacy planner site does
reconfigure the generational longevity of relationships between the living and the
dead. He explains that the service allowed people to ‘live on virtually’ and ‘extend’
friendships beyond death. For Norris, Deadsocial did not simply offer people the
option of leaving a final message, but also allowed friendships to ‘continue’ through
the careful curation of a sequence of messages that could be sent to friends and
family after death (Kleenman, 2014). This sort of ambition brings the voice of the
deceased into the present day and projects that voice further into the future.
Lawton (2000) argues that the personhood of the dying partly turns on the
ability to act in the world, and is diminished through the diminishment of agency.
It follows, therefore, that if these services do allow the dying to set up ways they
might act in the world post-death in relation to living beings, then they do retain
at least a vestige of personhood. And yet, it is also clear that their agency is limited
by the design of the services. The dead cannot adjust their pre-recorded messages
in the light of major world events, or in the light of important personal events
effecting the living. This lack of intersubjectivity and flexibility is a sure reminder
that the dead have indeed departed no matter what tricks are played. Additionally,
it should be noted that although they use new media these services are not radically
different from long-standing written and material forms of posthumous commu-
nication through, for example, carefully curated time-capsules. Other posthumous
technology designs are far more ambitious however, in that they forego pre-recorded
messages in favour of newly composed messages.
Living on
In 2007, in a move that left some incredulous (Cameron, 2007), the United
States National Science Foundation ‘awarded a half-million-dollar grant to the
universities of Central Florida at Orlando and Illinois at Chicago to explore how
researchers might use artificial intelligence, archiving, and computer imaging to
create convincing, digital versions of real people, a possible first step toward virtual
immortality’. What seems to have left some incredulous is the posthumous
application of this research and development project. The project itself – to
create a digital persona capable of realistically representing a human being – is
scarcely controversial, and has attracted the attention of the biggest and best
resourced IT companies in the world. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and many
specialty companies have developed and are continuing to spend billions to
develop digital personal assistants that learn and adapt to social interaction with their
owners and with others, with the ambition of developing the software to a point
where the digital personal assistant can act on behalf of the owner with all the
initiative, autonomy, and authenticity that human personal assistants exercise on
behalf of their employers. The move from a digital isomorph acting on one’s
behalf in daily life, to a digital isomorph continuing to act on one’s behalf after
death, is surely not a huge move.
For example, LivesOn8 utilises software to mine and analyse the client’s Twitter
feed, ‘learning’ about the client’s interests, likes, tastes, and characteristic syntax,
predicting what one might tweet next, and generating new tweets that reflect the
client’s communicative style. At the time of writing, these applications often fall
short in that they auto-generate an ‘incoherent, random string of phrases’ (O’Dell,
2011) with little to offer in terms of viable posthumous communications. Early
chatbots were subject to the same criticism. However, in each case developers have
marked out a clear trajectory that challenges the monopoly living human beings
have on the performance of social relations and interactions.
These early and technically rudimentary examples of posthumous connection are

being gradually superseded by the research and development work that builds on
science fiction, techno-utopian, and futurist narratives, which imagine a digitally
mediated immortality (Lombard and Markaridian Selverian, 2008). For example, new
media commentator Adam Ostrow (2011) has suggested that software will be able to:
[U]nderstand human language and process vast amounts of data […] It’s going
to become possible to analyse an entire life’s worth of content – the tweets,
the photos, the videos, the blog posts that we are producing in such massive
numbers. And I think as that happens it’s going to become possible for our digital
personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we’re gone thanks to
the vastness of the amount of content we’re creating and to technology’s ability to
make sense of it all
An early commercial product reflecting this ambition was called Virtual Eternity,9
developed by Intellitar Inc. Founded in 2008, Intellitar Inc invited people to create
digital ‘clones’ that could be used in a number of commercial and personal contexts
across many social network sites (Meese, Nansen et al., 2015). The training and the
algorithms that shaped the digital clone to its owner were not entirely unsuccessful,
but the clones the system produced were not met with universal enthusiasm, and
even within the tech industry, fell into the ‘valley of the uncanny’:
The problem: it’s creepy. Both for me and the co-workers I showed it to, it
elicited a visceral negative reaction. To be fair, I did not actually show it to
any children, but that’s because I can’t imagine doing so. Even CEO Don
Davidson acknowledges that his company’s avatars reside in an ‘uncanny
valley.’ That’s the place on the spectrum of animation that lies outside the
clearly drawn and clearly alive–and that freaks people out by being neither.
Rafe Needleman.10
Other reactions were harsher:
In theory, between your training and what it learns from conversations, your
techno-ghost will become a near perfect stand-in for you. In practice mere
pictures can’t capture the true horror of seeing them in action. Their empty
eyes and gaping maws are mockeries of the humans they were meant to
emulate. Their voices are colder than the grave you’re feebly trying to escape.
And their conversational skills are terrible …11
At time of writing, the Virtual Eternity service has become defunct, perhaps due to
lack of interest (about 10,000 early adopters signed up for the service), but also as a
result of a legal dispute over who had intellectual property rights over the artificial
intelligence engine that powered its avatars. However, Intellitar Inc are by no
means the only players on this field.
Eterni.me, as discussed at the start of this chapter, began development in 2014

through the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program, continued in Santiago
through an accelerator programme financed by the Chilean Government, and
draws on a range of affordances outlined throughout this chapter. Like Intellitar
Inc, the company deploys artificial intelligence techniques in order to build a vir-
tual ‘you’, and in a similar fashion to LivesOn and Virtual Eternity, seeks to achieve
a faithful representation of subjectivities and personality through data mining, pat-
tern matching, and adaptive interpretive methods. Eterni.me will collect almost
everything that you create during your lifetime and will process this huge amount
of information using complex Artificial Intelligence algorithms. This involves
incorporating data from ‘Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photos, video, location infor-
mation, and even Google Glass and Fitbit devices’ (Parker, 2014). To assist in this
process Eterni.me is, at the time of writing, looking to release stage two of its Beta
software, featuring an avatar biographer:
The new Eternime avatar will be your personal biographer. It will want to learn
as many things about you as possible, picking up cues from your social media,
email or smartphone. It will try to find meaning and context in everything you
do, and it will try to have short chats with you every day in order to get more
information about you. If you want to upload your thoughts, your personality
and (maybe in the future) your consciousness, there’s no cable now. You will
have to do it a little bit every day, for the rest of your life. Ten minutes every
day will add up to thousands of hours telling your story. Fact by fact.12
Another recent addition to the list of ambitious start-ups in this space is Eter9… ‘a
new social network of Portuguese origin, but with a worldwide reach and
vision … [and a] unique ability to convert users into eternal beings’.13 Technical
details in the public domain are scant, but like its competitors, Eter9 would seem
to run adaptive algorithms, capturing and processing one’s posts and comments in
order to construct and educate a ‘digital counterpart’. This counterpart also posts to
the Eter9 social network in the presence and in the absence of the ‘organic user’
that it intends to resemble. It is this counterpart which lays claim to immortality.
Lifenaut, established by the Terasem Movement Foundation (TMF), is yet another
company that invites people to ‘create a computer-based avatar to interact and respond
with your attitudes, values, mannerisms and beliefs’.14 TMF’s key research and devel-
opment vehicle is BINA48 (‘Breakthrough-Intelligence-via-Neural-Architecture-48’.
The word also translates to ‘intelligence’ or ‘wisdom’ in Hebrew). Bruce Duncan,
TMF’s Executive Director, explains in an interview with a local Vermont paper that
BINA48 was commissioned to ‘test the feasibility of transferring consciousness from a
human to a biological or technological body’ in a two-step process:
1 An imprint of a person’s consciousness can be created in a digital form, called a ‘mind-

file’, by collecting detailed information about that person. That information can then be
expressed in a future, not-yet-created type of software, called ‘mindware’.
2 That same imprint of a person’s consciousness can be placed in a biological or technological

body to provide life experiences comparable to those of a typically birthed human.
BINA48 is an early test of these two hypotheses. (Stein, 2012)
The second step in this ambition, in which the entity engages in new experience
rather than exclusively responding to interpretations of stored experience, is vital to
the project. The limitations of systems such as Eterni.me and Lifenaut, importantly,
are not inherent in the digital ontology of the systems, but are evident in what the
systems cannot yet produce, the elements of personhood that move beyond an
archive of texts in a semantically and syntactically authentic manner. That is, the
capacity to reach back through a life captured in digital form to create future action
that is reflective of a particular instantiation of personhood relies on a presumption
that a person’s future is wholly, or at least substantially, predictable – that a person’s
words, manners, and personality are ever launched from and in keeping with their
past words and actions. In this logic, a key limitation to Eterni.me, Intellitar Inc,
LivesOn, Lifenaut, and other efforts to instantiate personhood after death, is that
consistency and predictability are privileged by pattern-matching analytics. Dis-
juncture, improvisation, surprise, and otherwise unpredictable futures that living
persons and their digital selves can always enter are at best clumsily simulated by
randomising functions. Ironically, it may be easier for data-mining analytics to
closely mimic a target than to depart from the target, yet departures are important
to a sense of authentic personhood. It is the idea of this capacity for persons to say
or do something utterly unpredictable, to react to new phenomena, to change
their mind – indeed to age with reference to social interactions in the future rather
than the past – that is difficult to achieve in digital efforts toward a social immortality,
and which may ultimately disappoint consumers.
This having been said, we suggest that the variations of digital afterlife currently
under development raise significant temporal and ontological issues for the status of
the person. This argument centres on a broad conceptualisation of personhood as
involving a relational ontology. If we recognise our interactions with these beings
that act in the world, and we recognise the significance of those beings because we
live in relation to them, collectively these engagements support a relational ontology.
This conceptualisation raises a set of ethical, legal, and economic questions to be
asked about the above posthumous services, as well as the duties and rights of those
who engage with them. How should we, the living, interact with these entities? It
is interesting to observe, for example, how the planning and implementation of
digital afterlives tend to be concerned with a variety of interactive spaces that
involve one deceased person interacting with one or more living others. The social
life of the dead, therefore, is only made social through relations with the living and
not with other deceased ‘persons’. There is no community of the dead produced in
these imaginary new and creative spaces of conversation.
But surely this need not always be so? The ambitions of these organisations to
create digital beings capable of human-like communicative behaviours, which will
then interact with living humans, is clearly very human-centric. But my digital
persona may well gravitate to the company of other digital personas, leaving me
and other organic humans out of the social loop entirely. If we succeed in creating
such beings, should we assume that they will always only talk with us, or should
we consider the possibility that they may talk with our descendants? The presence
of a digital afterlife challenges us to turn from a concern with how the dead are
digitally and textually constructed by the living as persons to consider more broadly
how and in what configurations they are relationally enlivened.
Speculative futures
Our outline of the current digital environment reveals an expanded range of
ambitions that reach towards the construction and maintenance of a sort of post-
humous reality, where the deceased are able to communicate and interact in the
world of the living (and even, as we just suggested, in the world of the dead). This
may be through the assistance of a loved one assuming a dead person’s profile,
through sending recorded messages well into the future, or through the stuttering
efforts of algorithms and software programs to create interlocutors that are functional
isomorphs of the living.
The fact that such research, development, and entrepreneurship is working with
digital forms that have an existence in their own right, and are capable of acting in
the world in and of themselves, is of considerable significance, regardless of how
clumsy and inept those actions may be at the moment. The question of what
characteristics constitute humanness in general and what characteristics constitute
each individual’s particular instantiation of humanity is a question that has been
actively explored for millennia. What makes these projects different is that the
exploration of what it is to be human and what it is to be a particular human is
now a matter of practice, and not simply a matter of argument. These new projects
proceed not only by discussing the nature of being, but by creating beings that can
act in the world. Whether or not the beings in question communicate as persons, as
isomorphs of individual humans, or more likely, have quite different characteristics –
far better memory, for example, or far less sensitivity to irony – their existence in
our social lives has implications for how we identify our characteristics as humans
and as persons.
Stokes (2012) approaches this question by arguing that the affordances of digital
technologies do allow the dead to retain a kind of personhood. He distinguishes
‘persons’ from ‘selves’, the former being a kind of narrative social construction that
initially adheres to a subjective agent, but can live on in systems of representation
and meaning after corporeal death. The persistence of a kind of posthumous per-
sonhood allows us to feel affected by the seeming ongoing agency of the dead, to
socialise with them, and expect they deserve moral rights. In this world of messages
from beyond the grave, surrogate agency, robotics, holograms and adaptive social
presence, the body does not directly intercede and the sociality of the person in
question is performed entirely through algorithmic manipulation of data, text,
narrative, and image. The ontological status of this sociality is questionable: after all,
if the ambitions of these innovations are achieved, what we are left with at the
core, is what Hayles (1999) called the ‘flickering signifier’.
Signifiers though, are powerful, and in particular, text is powerful. According to
the pragmatic school of communications (Coyne, 1998), text itself is an entity that
acts in the world. In this pragmatic view of textual narrative, an interactive narration
of personhood is a kind of action that ‘makes it so’. From this perspective, for the
person whose presence in a social world is digitally mediated, what appears in an
email, on a Skype screen or on Eter9 social media, is not a simulacrum, a repre-
sentation, or a metaphor for embodied personhood and interpersonal relations; it is
the very stuff of personal agency and being in the digital world. In the digital
afterlife, the text or the images on the screen are not simulacra for ongoing per-
sonal relations, but rather, the text or the video is an ongoing form of personal
relation (Arnold, 2002).
For a living reader and a living writer on a social network, for example, a rela-
tionship mediated through digital text alone is in an important sense an immediate,
intimate relationship with the text itself, and only secondly, an abstract and
detached relationship with another human imagined to be reading or writing the
text. And so it is when one interlocutor is dead. In this world, the direct and most
important relational ontology is with and through the digital signification. The
existence of a living person that actually does the typing is not as important as the
typed text itself.
Following this line of thought, a notion of personhood emerges, which moves
beyond the corporeal body and the boundaries of skin. In this case personhood
does not inhere in the properties of a being (humanness, aliveness, bodiliness, con-
sciousness, and so on), but inheres in the relationality of the being. This ‘relational
turn’, evident in science and technology studies, moral philosophy, ecophilosophy,
and other discourses, seeks to cut the Gordian Knot of the properties approach by
focusing on what a being does, rather than what a being is when it comes to attri-
buting a particular status to that being (see Coeckelbergh, 2012). Such a relational
ontology might allow room for forms of personhood to reach beyond the human
body while alive, and to persist in time beyond biological death.
Concluding thoughts
This has been a book about death and new media technologies. Both death and
technology cause us to question what it is to be a person, where in space our
personhood ends as technologies extend the reach of our agency, and where in
time our personhood ends as these technologies continue to act in the world even
after we are dead.
However, the relation between these two concerns is not simple or unidirec-
tional. Technologies do not cause particular responses to death, and death does not
cause particular configurations of technologies. Therefore, understanding this rela-
tionship necessarily has required us to also attend to persons, publics, cultures, laws,
social and cultural practices, norms, and all the other actors that come together
around death and digital media. This has informed our interdisciplinary approach
to the topic, which has allowed us to address how relationality, materiality and
temporality and the personhood of the deceased are understood in relation to
recent developments across digital media. Through the chapters the reader will see
that we have taken a material approach to our analysis of death and digital media.
There are bodies and memorials involved, and there are software and hardware and
memorabilia to consider. Questions of temporality have also been implicit in these
ideas of personhood, relationality and materiality, which has also informed our
understanding of death and technology. A death is a pivotal point in time, and
digital technologies are very much things of their time.
Temporality gives way to materiality as the main theme of Chapter Three, in
which the artefacts that memorialise the dead in cemeteries have been compared to
the artefacts that memorialise the dead on the web in terms of their performativity,
inscriptions, engagement of publics, and their articulation with or of place, as well
as their architecture and design. Through this comparison we have suggested that
the gravesite memorial uses its material presence to imply a mode of relations that
is more structured around social institutions, and is more objectified, formal, and
intransient than a web memorial. On the other hand, the web memorial implies a
mode of relations that gives voice to social networks and publics of various kinds, is
focused on individuals (both the deceased and the mourners) and their subjectivity,
and at a number of levels is energetic and fluid. The materiality of each is a media
that speaks to and of cultural values.
In Chapter Four we moved to a consideration of social media as technologies for
commemoration and memorialisation. This saw the deceased being repositioned
within the everyday flow of daily life. Through the cases of the death of Anna
Svidersky in 2006 and Aziz Shavershian in 2011, we discussed how platform archi-
tectures and policies both shape and complicate digital forms of remembrance, and
how practices of memorialising unfold and change over time through users appro-
priating the affordances of social media. We observed that social media may shift
memorials from a place for monologic tribute (on either a memorial website, or in a
cemetery) to one of continued and sometimes seemingly dialogic conversation, with
the dead persisting as integral actors in ongoing social relationships. In terms of our
themes we have suggested that such memorial shifts through social media point to the
performative extensions of personhood beyond death and the relational integration
of the dead in the ongoing daily life of the living. The transience of social media
platforms (such as Myspace) and of particular social media memorials has also illu-
strated the importance of temporality to an understanding of digital media and death.
Materiality, personhood, relationality, and temporality continue to weave through
the stories and analyses offered in Chapter Five, where a wide range of com-
memoration and memorialisation practices were explored in the context of video
gaming environments. Personhood was expressed through the materialities and
cultures of these game environments in a dynamic fashion and memorial practices
ranged from those deploying commemorative motifs that would be recognisable
centuries ago, to commemorative quests, trinkets, NPCs, and Easter eggs that could
only exist in game worlds. Tropes of long standing and tropes unique to the game
world were mixed, matched and hybridised, providing rich and dynamic possibilities
for the dead, and for those who mourn them.
The business of death is of course big business. Unsurprisingly such an industry
attracts its fair share of entrepreneurs keen to innovate in what is commonly
regarded as a conservative industrial sector. In Chapter Six we used our research on
industry trade shows to contextualise death and technology as a commercial
undertaking, and to remind ourselves and readers that while commemoration and
memorialisation can be intensely personal, social and emotional, it can also be
heavily commodified. The work that takes place to foreground the personhood of
the deceased; to place their life and death in time and to move with the times; to
bring people, institutions, and things into relation; and to materialise emotions that
are immaterial, is work that mostly comes with a price.
And yet this entrepreneurial work can project us (along with the funeral industry)
forward into new realms of possibility. Some of it, as we have seen earlier in this
chapter on ‘speculative futures’, might seem quite fanciful – the work of science
fiction-like dreamers who manage to tickle the imaginative desires of a listening
public that wants something new, that is not satisfied with a standard coffin or urn,
an inscription on stone, an obituary in a paper, a state of repose. Such work, that
allows us to at least imagine interacting with and communicating with the dead in
meaningful ways over time, or that allows our animated visage to dance on our
own grave, plays with our deep desires to never be forgotten, it gestures towards
forms of social immortality, and it extends the ability for the dead to stay with the
living and for the living to stay with the dead. Still other new speculative forms we
have seen seem far less radical. Indeed, they can be understood as remediations of
older forms of commemoration and memorialisation, seen as just another gradual
step along an eternal history of mediated deaths.
In considering what is in store for our own demise, remembrance and memor-
ialisation, and in thinking about what might be for future generations, whatever
media comes along next will surely be both novel and familiar. Over the last few
years we have all been startled by the presence of the dead in our Facebook pages
and other social networks, in our digital games, in our smartphone apps, and yet to
some degree we have already in this short time become acclimated to their presence
there, as an extension of historically stabilised forms of mediating the deceased. Our
contemporary, digitally afforded ways of feeling connected to other living members
through digital and social media have opened up the simultaneously stunning and
mundane possibilities of feeling ever more connected not only to the living, but
also to the dead. So many of our observations and considerations throughout this
book came out of this very basic discovery.
Notes
1 www.eterni.me/
2 Personal communication with anonymous, 2015
3 www.gizmag.com/catacoffin-catacombo-sound-system/25427/
4 Hannah Gould traces the parallels between Pokémon Go and religion in terms of its
animist origins, the fervour of its devotees, and its interactions with technology and
capitalism (see: www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/12/pokemon-go-addictive-
game-shares-much-with-religious-devotion)
5 www.uploadvr.com/pokemon-go-taking-people-bathroom-cemeteries/
6 www.eternalmemoria.com/how-it-works/
7 www.google.com/patents/US20050068595
8 www.liveson.org/
9 www.virtualeternity.com via www.archive.org
10 www.cnet.com/au/news/intellitar-avatars-a-poor-substitute-for-afterlife/
11 www.cracked.com/article_19869_the-5-creepiest-ways-to-immortalize-yourself.html
12 www.medium.com/@mariusursache/the-journey-to-digital-immortality-33fcbd79949#.
vka8abbgx
13 www.eter9.com/help/about
14 www.lifenaut.com/mindfile/how-it-works/
An afterword
Elizabeth Hallam
How death and the dead are caught up in practices involving digital media is a
central concern of this book. The volume traces the intricate entanglement of
death and digital media, highlighting the fluid and shifting nature of both, and
suggesting ways in which emergent digital practices can be understood in relation
to broader cultural and social changes associated with memorialisation and com-
memoration. Threaded through this wide-ranging account of developments in
contemporary death and digital media is a concern with four key issues. First,
materiality, as explored through the book, is significant in the dynamics of mem-
orialisation as practiced with diverse media, including the digital. Second, the
authors examine personhood, analysing the ways in which the personhood of the
deceased may be variously extended and reconstituted through digital media.
Relationality is a further central issue running through the chapters, which inter-
rogate the ways in which uses of digital media can crucially shape relationships with
the dead, as well as relations among the living who are dealing with death. Finally as
the authors suggest, temporality is an important factor in engagements with digital
media surrounding death. Involving practices that maintain memories of the deceased’s
past and those that forge futures for the dead, forms of digital memorialisation are
produced and modulated over time.
Entanglements
By way of an afterword, I here reflect from an anthropological perspective on the
intersection of death and digital media as social, cultural, and material processes.
Building on the discussion of extensive examples in this book, I begin by high-
lighting the ways in which graves, as predominant sites of memorialisation, have
become thoroughly entangled with digital media through both materially groun-
ded and online activity. My opening example, from the UK, underlines the
142 Death and digital media: an afterword
significance of digital media in the continued post-mortem social life of the

deceased, especially in mobilising materials and generating narratives through
which the personhood of the deceased is constituted over time, along with the
maintenance of ongoing, dynamic relationships between the living and the dead. A
note on the non-coincidence of contemporary social death and biological death pre-
cedes a brief discussion of changing and diversifying methods of both body disposal
and modes of memorialisation together with their connections with digital deve-
lopments in the field of death. I end by pointing to some of the ways in which
death and digital media are currently working through and inflecting perceptions
of personhood, materiality, relationality, and temporality – key themes woven
through this book. Here reference to entanglements captures patterns of interrelation
emerging around death and digital media, while reference to trajectories alludes to
the ongoing developments and transformations entailed in processes of dying and
memorialising.1
In April 2017 at a large and well-maintained Nottinghamshire cemetery, in the
north of England, it is evident from the grave displays surrounding headstones that
some intensive memorialising activity has been taking place. Within this Victorian
cemetery – which, like Melbourne Cemetery discussed in Chapter Three, is
recognised as a site of ‘huge personal significance for many hundreds of local people
whose loved ones are buried there’ – a section has been reserved since 2003 for
children’s graves.2 A sculpture of a young girl with a dove, entitled ‘A Child at Peace’,
was installed to provide a ‘focal point’ within the new Children’s Garden Cemetery,
the outcome of working group action by the local council, bereavement organi-
sations, and families of children who are buried in the wider cemetery.3 Subse-
quently, numbers of graves have increased, many with highly distinctive headstones
and all with their own carefully arranged compositions of plants and items including
toys, decorative windmills, and photographs (see Figure 8.1).
Changes in graves and graveside practices at this cemetery have been unfolding
over the past three decades, even as many aspects of this site of interment and
memory making have endured.4 At the turn of the new millennium it was apparent
that memorialising at the grave provided for relatives and friends an emotionally
meaningful way of continuing to live alongside the deceased. Taking everyday or
familiar mundane objects from the home to the grave to display them near the
headstone was a common material practice that while acknowledging a person’s
death also helped to form the deceased as a person with an ongoing social life. So
grave displays were tailored to each particular person, comprising not only flowers
(cut and potted), letters, cards, lanterns and wind chimes, but also small ornaments,
and objects relating to their hobbies, and interests.5 At this time, around 2000, early
digital memorials were beginning to emerge, with websites set up to memorialise the
deceased (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 215). Links between graves at the Nottin-
ghamshire cemetery and digital memorials were not evidently being made by the
bereaved around 2000, but by 2017 the very design and composition of recent
graves had become thoroughly entangled with memorial practices online, even
though this entanglement is not overtly visible to grave visitors.
FIGURE 8.1 Children’s graves in a Nottinghamshire cemetery, April 2017.

Source: Photo: Elizabeth Hallam.
One particular children’s grave at this cemetery, outstanding in the extent to

which it is embellished and tended, has been caught up in digital activity since the
child’s death. Four days after the two-year-old died in April 2016, the local
newspaper reported online that her parents – following the ‘devastating loss’ of
their daughter, who died when she ‘was in the bath and suffered an epileptic fit
which led to her taking in water’ – were receiving help from friends through
GoFundMe, an online crowd-funding platform. A dedicated page had been set up
by friends to ‘relieve some of the stress as they prepare[d] for the funeral’. As in the
case of online memorials occasioned by sudden and unexpected deaths which are
described in Chapter Four, reports of the heartbroken parents grieving for their
toddler, painfully described as ‘the happiest girl on earth’, circulated through news
websites. At the same time, donations and tributes were ‘pouring in as the com-
munity rallie[d] to show support for the family’.6 On GoFundMe, then, which
connects with Facebook and Twitter, a photograph of the child smiling into the
camera alongside the ‘story’ of her death, provided an emotionally intense focus for
messages and contributions towards her funeral expenses.7 At the girl’s grave these
monetary gifts, gathered via digital media, became dramatically visible and material
in the form of numerous funerary wreaths. These took the shape of the child’s
favourite character from a UK animated TV series, Peppa Pig (a young, smiling
female pig in a red dress) – a character that features across several digital media
formats including YouTube, websites and video games, as well as being distributed
in print and in the form of fabric and plastic toy figures.
Several weeks after the funeral, visitors to the cemetery could still view this pink,
white, and red grave display of floral tributes fashioned as Peppa Pigs, hearts, angels’
wings and stars. A year later, while local and national news websites continued to
disseminate details of the girl’s accidental death and of the inquest that followed,8
the ephemeral flower display at her grave was translated into a more durable ver-
sion comprising a bed of bright pink gravel on which small Peppa Pig toys were
placed alongside lamps, plastic windmills and butterflies, fairy lights, photographs,
and written messages – headed by a gravestone carved and coloured to form the
same pink smiling pig character. The inscription on the stone reiterates previous
personal comments posted on news websites about the girl’s happiness, and
describes her in the present tense, now playing with angels, still having fun. The
figuring of the child herself as an angel was also a strong theme on her GoFundMe
page, where messages posted in the days immediately following her death com-
municated this image of the deceased girl as beautiful, as spreading her wings and
flying high, as looking down from the sky upon her surviving loved ones. Digital
messages from the bereaved thus expressed a simultaneous letting go of the
deceased (she was imagined flying up into the sky) and a keen desire to preserve
her presence – much like the cases discussed in Chapter Four.
This nexus of grave and internet – evident in many examples throughout this
book – is culturally and geographically situated, as specific relationships between
death and digital media form and develop in various contextually dependent ways.
In this case of a child’s death, over eighty contributions to the financial resourcing
of the funeral were gathered though online activity, so that the grave became a
particular materialisation of that activity and the network of social connections that
were facilitated by the GoFundMe platform.9 Even though invisible at the grave,
online practices were thoroughly integrated within, indeed had crucially helped to
generate, this grave and its central visual/material features composed as a memorial
for this young person. In addition, the child’s digital page on the crowdfunding site
also became an online memorial for her – comprising a home photo of her during
life, a short textual narrative of her death, and many messages left by contributors
to her funeral, including close relatives, parents of children in the same nursery,
people who did not know the family but who wanted to give their condolences,
and anonymous contributors. The online page thus initially provided a means to
actively connect with the grieving family and to participate, albeit remotely, in the
ritualised process of the funeral, whilst also later becoming a memorial that could
be viewed, re-read, and reflected upon in retrospect.
The narratives of loss through death produced at this online site also represented
the deceased child as in some ways still alive, or at least active, and present or held
by the bereaved in their hearts and thoughts. As an angel, and as a bright star in the
sky, the child’s post-mortem life was represented through digital media as a trans-
formation that maintained her contact with her family and friends. Analysis of
internet memorials indicates that images of angels tend to predominate on websites
in the USA that memorialise pregnancy loss and neonatal deaths, and that these
images are strongly suggestive of a child’s post-mortem ‘life’ that is ongoing else-
where (Keane, 2009). With reference to online tributes featuring angels, which
were made for the British celebrity Jade Goody who received widespread publicity
around the time of her death in 2009 from cervical cancer, Walter notes that such
tributes are gendered, in that talk of angels is a predominantly ‘female discourse’,
and that this talk expresses ongoing bonds of care with the deceased and enduring
love which can be felt as reciprocal (Walter, 2011: 41). Through such reciprocity
with the deceased – in the above example not a famous celebrity but an intimate
family member for the bereaved – the dead person is felt to exert a form of agency;
while the child is imagined as still an infant playing with angels, she has also trans-
formed into an angel who continues to look upon and care for the living. With the
deceased’s post-mortem identity figured as such, the child is felt to express love and
continued concern for her surviving relatives, and in doing this she is envisaged
moving between the worldly lives of the bereaved and the sky or ‘heaven’ broadly
conceived (see Walter, 2011).
At this grave in the Nottinghamshire cemetery – as at many others in Britain and
elsewhere (see Chapter Three) – these continuing relationships of affection are
materialised and maintained through the construction and tending of a grave dis-
play (see Francis et al., 2005). In this case the grave comprises a clearly demarcated
space, defined by colorful gravel held in place by borders resembling those in
domestic gardens, upon which are placed toys and ornaments, and at the head of
which the gravestone stands in the shape of an animated character familiar to many
children in this community. Like possessions kept in a young girl’s nursery or
bedroom, these toys form a collection of treasured items, gifts to the deceased
toddler who is now imagined by the bereaved family and friends still to be playing
in her on-going afterlife. The appearance of the grave conveys an impression of
happiness and enjoyment, even in the face of a death reported online as traumatic
and ‘tragic’; the remembered demeanour of the child while alive – described in
messages on GoFundMe as smiling and joyful – is therefore reconstituted after
death via ongoing graveside practices that nevertheless express deep sadness.10
Like children’s graves nearby in the same cemetery, this memorial display is
undergoing modification over time, as when new gifts or balloons are brought to
mark a birthday and death anniversary, for example, and in this way the deceased
continues to be formed as a person with particular characteristics, qualities, and
potentials. Through these graveside practices a girl’s personhood is made to be
continuously present; her remembered predominant features are materially enacted
and displayed at the grave as are the ongoing relationships that her family and
friends sustain with her. In this process of mourning, embodied material practices
within a cemetery environment are linked with those in meaningful domestic
spaces (such as the garden or nursery) previously occupied by the deceased and are
interwoven with online activity that was particularly intense at the time of the
funeral. Such domestic spaces are in turn enmeshed in mobile media and inter-
related with online spaces, as we have seen through the case studies in this book,
especially during significant dates of death and remembrance. As Christensen and

Sandvik suggest with reference to children’s graves in Denmark, the grave and its
material objects form significant media – along with related digital media, especially
online memorial sites and the embedded use of mobile devices – that ‘serve as
facilitators for relation-building and relation-maintaining practices with the living as
well as the dead’ (2016: 257).
When this Nottinghamshire cemetery first opened in 1857, there was a growing,
wider tendency toward the relocation of the dead from churchyards in the centre
of towns to cemeteries in the suburbs, a shift encouraged by a complex range of
factors including growth in urban populations, concerns about bodily decomposition
defined as dirty, offensive and a threat to public health, and developments in
landscape design which provided aesthetically pleasing and emotionally meaningful
spaces for remembering the dead (see Tarlow, 2000; Rugg, 2013; Laqueur, 2015).
While such cemeteries are still currently in use, this past material placement of the
deceased which enacted a degree of spatial and physical distancing between the
living and the dead has now been substantially reconfigured. The graveside practices
at the Nottinghamshire cemetery in 2017 are indicative of a diverse field of late
twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ritualised practices, in Western contexts,
which are felt to bring the living and the dead into close and sustained proximity.
As Francis et al. (2005) have argued with reference to London cemeteries, visiting
the graves of relatives and friends not only perpetuates memories of the deceased,
but also animates graves – where the headstone can come to be strongly associated
with the departed and, indeed, might be treated as though it is the departed
(envisaged during life rather than now after death) during grave visits and tending.
This enactment and sensing of closeness between the living and the dead,
which is maintained and modified over time as part of the continuing social lives
of the deceased, is also enabled in a variety of ways by digital media. Indeed, as
this book’s discussion of social media suggests, one of the most significant per-
ceived affordances of social media sites, such as Facebook, is the impression of
‘direct communication with the dead’, a mode of communication implicated in
the sustenance of beliefs in forms of afterlife (Ebert, 2014: 30; see also Staley,
2014).
Endings
From a very different epistemological position, contemporary biomedical accounts
of death continue to present the physical cessation of life as an absolute end. This
moment of ending is described unflinchingly by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh: ‘I
know that everything I am, everything I think and feel, consciously or uncon-
sciously, is the electrochemical activity of billions of brain cells, joined together
with a near infinite number of synapses […] When my brain dies, “I” will die’.11
Yet, the very biomedical practices and discourses that highlight death as a singular
moment or event, also blur boundaries between life and death; the management of
dying (in hospitals), for example, and post-mortem uses of bodies such as organ
donation and transplanting, form extended processes in which social modes of

dying are as significant as physical deterioration, and in which extracted parts of the
dead can continue to thrive when integrated into the bodies of living patients
(Lawton, 2000; Lock, 2002; Lock and Nguyen, 2010). Biomedical technologies
also provide resources through which stillborns, for instance, acquire social pre-
sence, as when obstetrical ultrasound images taken during pregnancy are treasured
by bereaved parents and displayed on memorial websites dedicated to the deceased
(Keane, 2009; see also Hayman et al., 2017).
Ritualised practices that attend to those who die before birth, providing them
with a distinctive memorial space, a post-mortem identity and a continued
social life, are evident both at graves and in related online activity. One inter-
net-publicised instance of this interrelation of grave-tending and action using
digital media in the UK emerged in 2015 when two parents, whose daughter died
at thirty-nine weeks, decorated her grave with a small fence, gravel, and mementoes.
Faced with the local Council’s demands to remove these from the grave, on the
basis that they broke cemetery rules, a friend set up an e-petition, generating
7,000 signatures in support of the memorial remaining in place – with the effect
that the Council agreed to allow the decorations to stay, pending a review of
cemetery policies.12
Biological death and social death (which occurs with the cessation of social
interaction and the loss of social identity) are thus decoupled so that they do not
map exactly onto one another; social death may happen before the physical ending
of a life, and a person’s social life may persist well after pronouncement of their
death in physical terms (see Hallam et al., 1999). If death decomposes into these
differently constituted aspects, which variously align depending on multiple
contextual factors, the contemporary uses of digital media have further ramifica-
tions in terms of how death gives way to forms of continuity and dynamic ongoing
existence for the deceased. Online memorials on Facebook (see Chapter Four) for
those who have died through suicide, for instance, are perceived by the bereaved
to provide the deceased with a continued active presence and social identity (see
Bell et al., 2015). Furthermore, the new technologies described in Chapter Seven
offer the promise and hype of a potential posthumous existence, even if only
through the automated reconstructions of the deceased’s former life.
Yet, while contemporary ways of memorialising are providing culturally sig-
nificant means through which the dead can be perceived as socially alive and
interactive, death is, nevertheless, often felt as an ending or stoppage of sorts – even
though such endings can be ambiguous and elusive, given that they are socially
negotiated and processual. How uses of digital media enact and enable dis-
continuities in persons and relationships, bringing some to an end with death while
enabling the continuance of others, remains to be examined as a potentially fruitful
area of enquiry in this field.13 Kaufman and Morgan note, that endings, which are
situationally defined and unstable, ‘depend on the culturally acknowledged trans-
formation of a living person into something else – a corpse, non-person, spirit,
ancestor, etc’ (2005: 319). In contemporary practices surrounding death and
memorialisation, digital media are now significant in such transformations –

transformations that entail losses and cessations even within continuities.
The ways in which death is sensed, conceived of, and dealt with is intimately
tied up with practices surrounding the deceased body, especially its disposal, and
developments in digital media, correspondingly, are also intimately caught up in
these practices – as explored in the last two chapters of this book. At play here,
then, are culturally dependent approaches toward the treatment of corpses, as well as
differential access to and take-up of digital technologies, for example, those displayed
at funeral trade shows discussed in Chapter Six. Adoption of such technologies is,
furthermore, informed by differences in economic wealth, class, gender, and geo-
graphical location. In the remainder of this afterword I outline shifts in methods of
body disposal, as well as modes of memorialisation and their relation to digital
media surrounding death, extending this book’s discussion of technological inno-
vation (see Chapter Seven). I close with a consideration of how the nexus of death
and the digital is both informed by and implicated in the constitution of persons
and relationships, and how these processes involve significant material and temporal
dimensions.
Disposals
Exploring the ‘evolving terrain of body disposal’ in contemporary Britain, Rumble
et al. (2014) identify environmentalist discourses that work through and inflect
recent natural burial, cremation (involving recycling of body prosthetics and heat),
and further innovative methods (e.g. alkaline-hydrolysis and freeze-drying) for
treating or ‘processing’ the body after death in Western contexts (2014: 243, 249).
They argue that these recent practices and discourses tend to integrate the living
and the dead within the same environment, rather than reinforcing boundaries
between them, so that, in Britain for instance, the ‘dead are decreasingly being
disposed of somewhere out of sight in sequestered spaces and are increasingly
becoming subject to a managed process of dispersal into environments inhabited by
the living’ (Rumble et al., 2014: 244). Within this process the dead are defined as
gifts that are of benefit to the living and to the ecology of which they are part.
Rather than alluding to a permanent disposal of the dead – interpreted as a removal
and placement of the whole body within a relatively stable identifiable/marked
location – innovations in cremation, burial, and recently emerging techniques for
post-mortem body processing instead propel human remains through different and
varying trajectories.
Cremation became the predominant method of body disposal, in comparison
with burial, in the UK during the 1960s, and in 2014 the percentage of the dead
who were cremated was 74.44% (see Kellaher et al., 2006). By comparison in the
same year 46.72% of those dying in the USA were cremated, with wide variation
between states, and records for Australia show 69.23%.14 Anthropological analysis
of what people do with ashes in Britain suggest that rather than leaving cremated
remains with crematoriums for their staff to scatter in a garden of remembrance,
there has been a rise in numbers of family and friends of the deceased collecting
ashes for private disposal at personally selected sites (Kellaher et al., 2006). While
cremation offers an alternative to burial, where the body is located within a clearly
defined place of interment, some peoples’ approaches to ashes scattering never-
theless still indicate a preference for depositing at a particular place, such as the base
of a chosen tree. Others, however, opt for what they see as more a creative release of
ashes which are distributed, for instance, at several personally meaningful places, or
where ashes can be taken by the wind, or by the tides. Decisions of family and
friends regarding the destinations of ashes can, then, according to Kellaher et al.
(2006), create a ‘more fluid memorialising trajectory’ that recalls aspects of the
deceased’s life and relationships whilst also working to ‘extend the life narrative’ into
the future (Kellaher et al., 2006: 249, see also Vaczi, 2014).
Alongside the growth in grave practices that seek to tailor and personalise graves
so that they communicate with, and display aspects of, particular deceased persons – a
process described in the opening example of this afterword (as well as in Chapter
Three) – there is a parallel development in the disposal of ashes. So too in the
practice of natural burial, which involves burial at a designated site in such a way
that the body can readily decompose into a growing environment of grass, flowers,
and trees that is largely free of obvious physical grave markers. Clayden et al. (2015: 4)
outline the wider context of the growth in natural burial; in Britain, North
America, Australia and Japan, a form of post-mortem body processing which can
offer ‘creative resistance’ to other institutionalised and commercialised methods for
dealing with the dead, such as those undertaken by professionals in hospitals, funeral
homes, and established cemeteries. Natural burial, by contrast, is associated with
DIY funerals, in which the bereaved may take stronger, and for some perhaps
more imaginative and emotionally fulfilling, roles in dealing with the body and
memorialising the deceased – for example, dressing them, customising the coffin,
and conveying the coffin to the grave (Clayden et al., 2015, see also Davies and
Rumble, 2012).
At the same time, key developments in commemorative practices over the last
two decades in Western settings have seen the expansion and diversification in
public memorial making in response to deaths. Such memorials are characterised by
informality, improvisation, and location outside established spaces dedicated to the
dead, such as at roadsides (see Doss, 2008; Sidaway, 2016). Comprising ephemeral
material entities, such as flowers, handwritten notes and candles, they are often
transient rather than constructed as ‘permanent’, but they nevertheless give sub-
stance and form to enduring relationships with the deceased. Of these emerging,
vernacular memorials, those placed at sites of sudden, as well as of collective, deaths
are especially numerous and made publicly visible; the nature of a death – whether
an accident, due to a disaster, or a traumatic event – has effects in terms of
prompting these spontaneous memorials (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero, 2011;
Vaczi, 2014). The making and activation of such memorials, which tend to com-
prise mundane items and familiar objects, often also entail use of digital media. For
example, ghost bikes – bicycles painted white and placed at accident sites where
cyclists have died – are digitally mapped throughout Europe, North America, and
Australia on a website that displays the global proliferation of these memorials and
acts to further amplify their impact online.15 Improvisation and diversification in
memorial making is also strongly apparent in digital spaces such as virtual worlds
and digital games where spontaneous, ad hoc public memorials are increasingly
established (see Chapter Five).
It is in the context of these wider shifts and innovations in body disposal and
memorialising practices that digital media have been designed, appropriated, and used
in relation to death. Death-related digital media have emerged, grown, and taken
direction as part of, and in response to, these shifts. Examining how the internet is
changing the ways people die and mourn in Western contexts, Walter et al. (2011–
2012) point to several key effects: first, uses of digital media disrupt the (supposed)
sequestration, or separation from everyday life, of death and dying that is (appar-
ently) reinforced when the dying and dead are largely dealt with by professionals in
designated spaces such as hospitals, hospices, funeral directors’ premises, and
cemeteries; second, uses of interactive social media facilitate grief as a communal
activity; and third, because ‘online the dead continue as social actors’, the ‘continuing
bonds’ forged with the deceased through digital media can become especially potent
and meaningful, maintaining a strong sense of the presence of the dead (Walter
et al. 2011–2012).
Death’s thematics
Building on these insights, the interdisciplinary analysis of death and digital media
in this book frames and engages with a further set of significant issues, all of
which are implicated in various ways when death intersects with the digital: the
personhood of the deceased and their relationality, the materiality of practices
surrounding the dead, and the temporality of death and memorialisation. As the
above opening example of the child’s grave shows, all of these issues are inter-
related, in that personhood comes to be recognised and negotiated via particular
social relationships which are enacted through grounded material practices that take
place over time; these practices have the capacity to reconstitute the deceased’s past
and to forge, or end, their future.
With developments in digital media, death is sensed, managed and recalled in an
expanding range of ways, just as multiple and differing trajectories are made possible
for the post-mortem lives of the dead. If the actions of the bereaved – taking place
at funerals and gravesides, in association with cremated remains and as part of
memorialising gestures – are now often entangled with ever-expanding digital
practices and rapidly proliferating digital media, what are the effects of this entan-
glement for death and the deceased? As discussion in the present book indicates,
this is a pressing question given that human activity increasingly involves the digital
and, indeed, distinctions between online and offline domains can be highly
unstable if not absent for many of those who routinely navigate them. Analysis of
online 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life (see Gibson, 2017), and online video
games, for example World of Warcraft (see Chapter Five), highlights the complex
interconnections and disconnections that define relations between the virtual and
the ‘real’, whilst also drawing attention to the varied experiences and possibilities
afforded by different media (see Nardi, 2015).
Just as relations between the physical and the digital are configured and nego-
tiated in funerary and memorial practices (see Chapter Six), so are relations
between different media platforms, for example between texting, Skype, email,
Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Miller (2016: 21) refers to this relatedness of
platforms as ‘polymedia’; arguing that ‘[p]eople now purposefully exploit this range
of media’, actively making choices regarding which media to use, whether estab-
lished or recently emerging – and these reflexive choices are themselves very much
part of the social interactions involved, including those entailed in death and
memorialisation. Such social choices are also influenced by the technical affordances
of different digital platforms which enable varied forms of mobility, presence and
participation, and configure specific ‘platform vernaculars’ (Gibbs et al., 2015)
which also unfold in the contexts of death and memorialisation. Aspects of these
media interrelations in the field of practices surrounding the deceased are explored
in Chapter Six with reference to the diverse digital media used in the funeral
industry, from online search engines to Facebook, and from multimedia displays to
robots.
Returning to Rumble et al.’s assertion that contemporary innovative methods
for disposing of bodies after death, which are informed by environmentalist discourses
and practices, might be better characterised not as disposal but as dispersal amongst
the living, they further argue that the wider ramifications of this amount to a shift
from ‘from finality to process’ (2014: 251). Rather than effecting a final disposal of
the body, then, innovative techniques – such as natural burial – are concerned with
process, especially processes of transformation. In the case of natural burial, the
transformation that is foregrounded is the decomposition of the body and its
regrowth, as plants for instance, within the environment (see Clayden et al., 2015;
Davies and Rumble, 2012). A similar, and probably related, constitution and posi-
tioning of the dead within extended processes of ongoing relationship maintenance
and formation – rather than a treatment of death as a finality or end – is apparent,
as chapters of this book demonstrate, in uses of digital media within funerary and
memorial practices.
We can see these processes playing out in the ongoing constitution of the
deceased’s personhood. Anthropological studies have analysed personhood not as a
fixed ‘essence’ confined within a clearly bounded body but as emergent through
social interaction with other persons, living beings, and material entities within
wider environments. So, persons emerge, grow, and change within networks of
social and material relations (see Kaufman and Morgan, 2005; Degnen, 2013).
Drawing on Gell’s (1998) work, anthropological analysis of memory-making
around death in Western contexts examines how, through socially and materially
situated interactions, personhood comes to be produced not just at the site of the
body but also within material objects with which those bodies are associated
(Hallam and Hockey, 2001). When personhood is distributed among sets of per-
sonally and socially meaningful objects (see Chua and Elliott, 2013), such objects
can become powerful entities for the maintenance of memories after a death.
In the above example of the Nottinghamshire cemetery, a child’s love of Peppa
Pig, and her parents’ recognition of that attachment, became a focal point and
generator for the memorial display at the young girl’s grave. Since the child’s per-
sonhood is relationally constituted through the Peppa Pig figures at the grave they
continue – as a set encompassing soft toy, plastic, and gravestone versions – to
enable surviving relatives and friends to feel a sense of the deceased girl’s presence.
Gell’s observations, regarding the agency not just of persons but of the material
objects a person is connected with, are pertinent here: ‘the doll is an emanation or
manifestation of agency (actually, primarily the child’s own), a mirror, vehicle, or
channel or agency, and hence a source of such potent experiences of the “co-presence”
of an agent’ (1998: 20).16 After death, then, a person’s social life, and their agency
understood as an attribute of their personhood as formed within their social rela-
tionships, can persist through practices that preserve, manipulate and generate
interrelated material objects, visual images, and written texts that are connected or
associated with the deceased. Indeed through these objects the deceased can be
perceived as socially active persons.
How does this memorial practice with material objects, and the post-mortem
constitution of the deceased’s personhood, work in relation to the digital? As
the above example of the child’s grave indicates, the material and the digital are currently
already integrated, so that digital media, in this case an online crowdfunding site
and newspaper websites, were enmeshed in the very production of the grave – its
financial resourcing and its predominant visual features. This book suggests multiple
ways in which digital media facilitate post-mortem personhood within an ongoing
social life after death. Memorial websites (see Chapter Three) and social media
platforms in which the dead participated during life (see Chapter Four) have sig-
nificant effects in terms of how the deceased are remembered and, indeed, sustained
as active within the lives of relatives, friends, and wider communities (see Meese,
Nansen et al., 2015). A post-mortem life as it unfolds within and across digital
media transfigures the dead so that their death is not an ending – instead the
deceased is caught up in memorialising processes that propel their distributed
personhood onward in time. As Gell argues:
a person and a person’s mind are not confined to particular spatio-temporal

coordinates, but consist of a spread of biographical events and memories of events,
and a dispersed category of material objects, traces, and leavings, which can be
attributed to a person and which, in aggregate testify to agency […] during a
biographical career which may […] prolong itself long after biological death
(1998: 222).
Through digital media, which is used in relation to a panoply of further material

objects within the deceased’s environment, the distributed personhood of the dead
can continue to be formed, contested, and negotiated. So much so that, deceased

persons while being memorialised in terms of their past life, can also be afforded an
ongoing life in the present that continues to shift and change across an emerging
and dynamic afterlife course. Indeed, the discussion in Chapter Five on digital
games points to the creative potential of memorials placed within virtual worlds to
provide the deceased with an afterlife in which they can be refashioned; the dead
are animated therefore within their ongoing social relationships. The technologies
explored in Chapter Seven, for example talking tombstones, in-coffin sound
systems and augmented reality graves, also reach toward this animation of the dead
and the facilitation of communication between the deceased and the living.
Digital media in which traces of the dead (as once living) are present and media
which are used to memorialise the dead (after death) are caught up in multiple
relationships: between people (alive and dead) and between people and material
objects. Relationships are also formed between material objects and digital media
(e.g. headstones and websites), and between different media. Indeed, the forging of
interconnections between different media (a process of intermediality) is currently
perceived as an effective strategy in the display of the dead body as a resource for
understanding the living human body in the context of medical school anatomy
teaching (Hallam, 2016). The complexity of the relationality entailed in the field of
digital media surrounding death and the dead is conveyed in this book’s chapters
that examine how digital media is mobilised by the bereaved as well as by those
involved in the funeral industry and commercial enterprises. The chapters indicate
just how expansive, and intensive, the wider social networking around a death, and
collective deaths, can become when facilitated by digital media.
Attending to social and digital relationships (in the context of a museum database
in Vanuatu) Geismar and Mohns (2011) emphasise that these relationships are
always configured in contextually and materially grounded ways. In the setting
they address, virtual information is conflated with material objects, so that the
digital is not differentiated from the material. The meshing of the digital and the
material is a significant issue in anthropological studies of everyday and design
practices that mobilise digital technologies (see Horst and Miller, 2012; Pink
et al., 2016), but these interrelations are still to be more fully teased out in analysis
of the materialities entailed in death and memorialisation. Studies of the spatial
and material dimensions of dying, death, and mourning (e.g. Hockey et al.,
2010) attend to the locatedness of death – in hospitals, hospices, funeral directors’
premises and places of interment, for instance – but digital practices and tech-
nologies have remained outside the analytical frame. How material objects, as
well as materials come to have social lives, and by extension social deaths, is a
prominent focus of interest in anthropology (see Harvey et al., 2014; Drazin
and Küchler, 2015) yet again there is further potential for analysis that encom-
passes digital-material relations. Chapters in this book offer insights with regard to
these relations as articulated around death and the dead, whether at the site of
burials, within digital platform architectures, within digital games, or as part of
funeral practices.
In his analysis of ‘being alive’, Ingold foregrounds the ‘entire field of relations
within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually
and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (2011: 68). Life in this approach
encompasses processes of dying, yet nevertheless within the ‘ecology of materials’
that Ingold (2012) has explored there is still scope to incorporate the digital.
Indeed, from an informatics perspective, Nardi observes that a ‘complex ecology’ is
formed through human activity that is, she notes, increasingly ‘mediated through
multiple digital technologies including internet telephony and video, instant
messaging, blogging, social media, games, forums, chat channels, listservs, podcasts,
logs and databases’ (2015: 16). An interconnection of the living, growing ecology
and an ecology composed of digital technologies and media, is provided by Tsing’s
analysis of ‘multispecies historical ecology’ which she develops via her focus on the
Matsutake mushroom (2015: 143). Citing an online discussion of a ‘global grave-
yard for dead computers in Ghana’, Tsing draws attention to the multiple materials
enmeshed within computers and mobile phones: at the end of their use-lives large
volumes of these devices are transported to West Africa and, she notes, children
work to salvage their metallic parts (2015: 302). In a context where about 20% of
people in Africa are using the internet (compared with almost 80% in Europe),17
journalists have reported on this giant graveyard of e-waste where 50 million tons
are deposited annually to be burnt then picked over to retrieve metals of value,
including traces of gold in computer chips.18 Digital devices, with their own life
cycles are, then, entangled in a complex ecology, just as human bodies after death
are enmeshed in their wider social, material, and digital environment (see also
Parikka, 2011).
The degree to which the social, the material and the digital are now interrelated,
if not fused, in death practices that propel the dead across novel memorial trajectories,
is evident in one final example which also serves to highlight a further key theme
of this book – temporality. In April 2016, at the International Cemetery, Cremation
and Funeral Association (ICCFA) annual convention and expo in New Orleans,
many death-related products, from coffins (in a range of materials from cardboard
to ‘diamond’ studded) and $100,000 hearses to gravestones and embalming fluid,
were vying for attention in the huge exhibition hall (see Chapter Six). Among
display stands featuring a multitude of memorial items such as gem stones made
from cremated remains, and 3D printed urns for ashes (including a replica of the
one commissioned by Motorhead’s Lemmy, featuring the ace of spades playing-
card design), one product, designed and developed by the company Omneo, was
outstanding in its apparently seamless integration of cremains (ashes) and digital
components. The Omneo, designed by sculptor Bruno Mezcua, and advertised as a
memorial that is the ‘true essence of our loved one [the deceased]’, is ‘formed
entirely with the cremated remains’. Shaped into a minimal black cube and
covered by a ‘skin’ which is ‘warm to the touch’, the ashes can be tapped with a
smartphone to connect with the loved one’s profile page on a dedicated website.
This digital page, where stories, photos, and videos can be placed, forms a social
network. Recorded video of the deceased (uploaded while alive) can also be
included along with password protected ‘time capsuled messages’ for surviving
family and friends to open at a future date.19
The Omneo memorial provides direct connectivity of human remains (in the
form of the Omneo cube), smartphones and computer screens, as well as perma-
nent storage (in the cloud) of the deceased’s online profile. It is also promoted as a
‘timeless legacy for future generations’. There is temporal complexity in this
material-digital fusion: it facilitates the recall of the deceased person’s past, while
also enabling the deceased’s future, interactive, social life. Transforming the body
into a form that is resistant to decomposition, it provides a degree of material stability
that reinforces its claim to permanence.
While for many the ‘moment’ of death is taken as profoundly significant for the
dying as well as for their surviving relatives and friends, recent and emerging develop-
ments in digital media – as explored throughout this book – situate that moment within
ongoing social and material processes that memorialise the dead by maintaining their past
within the present and by fashioning for them an apparently never-ending future.
Notes
1 For analysis and use of the concept ‘entanglement’ see Thomas 1991, Hodder 2012,
Ingold 2011.
2 ‘Council carries out cemetery upgrade’, The Chad, published online 16 August 2010.
3 ‘Children’s memorial unveiled at cemetery’, The Chad, published online 15 December
2003. Sculpture by Gordon C. Brown, artist based in Ravenshead, Nottinghamshire.
4 This cemetery in Nottinghamshire is one of my long-term research sites in the UK,
which I have visited, regularly since 2000 and occasionally since the late 1980s, to
observe it, record with photographs, and to talk with cemetery visitors (see Hallam and
Hockey 2001).
5 On flowers as material memorials, see Hall 2016.
6 N. Charity, ‘Crowdfunding campaign to pay for Mansfield tot’s funeral’, The Chad,
published online 5 April 2016. N. Charity, ‘“My cheeky little girl had a smile to melt
anyone’s heart”, Mansfield dad’, The Chad, published online 5 April 2016.
7 GoFundMe, founded in 2010, has several main categories of campaign, one of which is
‘Funerals & Memorials: Fundraise for final expenses or a loved one’s memory’, www.
gofundme.co/funeral-memorial-fundraising.
8 N. Charity, ‘Mansfield tot Lacie-Mae died regardless of EMAS “human error”’, The
Chad, published online 8 March 2017; J. Curtis, ‘Girl, 2, suffers seizure in the bath and
dies’, Mail Online, published online 9 March 2017.
9 This is just one of a fast-growing number of funerals supported through crowdfunding sites,
which are attracting online commentary, see, for example: J. Power, ‘Fears over GoFundMe
boom in fundraising for funerals’, The Sydney Morning Herald, published online 13 August
2016; ‘Funerals paid for by crowdfunding are on the rise’, BBC News Online, published online
17 January 2017. Larger scale funding raised through crowdfunding has also been noted for a
collective gravesite in Japan for which 2.55 million yen was raised (Kim 2016: 860).
10 N. Charity, ‘“My cheeky little girl had a smile to melt anyone’s heart”, Mansfield dad’.
11 H. Marsh, ‘I had to tell the family her death had been avoidable’, The Sunday Times
Magazine, 23 April 2017, pp. 14–18, quote p. 18.
12 M. Oliver, ‘Parents’ relief after being told grave decorations can remain’, Oxford Mail,
published online 23 February 2015.
13 On the importance of attending to disconnection and detachment as well as relations,
see Candea et al., 2015.
14 Percentages from The Cremation Society of Great Britain, International Cremation

Statistics 2014. www.srgw.info/CremSoc5/Stats/Interntl/2014/StatsIF.html, accessed 13
May 2017. Records for Australia are from 2009.
15 www.ghostbikes.org, accessed 14 May 2017.
16 For a critique of the concept of agency and an argument for the concept of animacy see
Ingold (2011).
17 M. Rice-Oxley and Z. Flood, ‘Can the internet reboot Africa?’, The Guardian, published
online 25 July 2016.
18 A. Adjei, ‘Life in Sodom and Gomorrah: the world’s largest digital dump’, The Guardian,
published online 29 April 2014.
19 Quotations from Omneo publicity, 2016.
REFERENCES
Aarseth, E. (2001). Computer Game Studies, Year One. Game Studies, 12(1), 1–15.
Acland, C. R. (Ed.) (2007). Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Aitken, A. (2009). Online Life After Death. Bereavement Care, 28(1), 34–35.
Allison, A. (2006). Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Apollo Manga (2011, September 11). Two 9/11 Memorials in Second Life. The Examiner.
Retrieved from www.examiner.com.
Ariès, P. (1974). Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ariès, P. (1985). Images of Man and Death. New Haven, CN: Harvard University Press.
Arnold, M. (2002). The Glass Screen. Information, Communication & Society, 5(2), 225–236.
Ashton, K. (2009, June 22). That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing: In the Real World Things
Matter More than Ideas. RFID Journal. Retrieved from www.rfidjournal.com.
Bainbridge, B. S. (2013). Perspectives on Virtual Veneration. The Information Society, 29(3),
196–202.
Barrett, D. (2005, December 14). Funeral Held for Horde Player in Stormwind. WoW
Insider. Retrieved from wow.joystiq.com/.
Barry, E. (2008). From Epitaph to Obituary: Death and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century
British Culture. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(3), 259–275.
Baudrillard, J. & Poster, M. (2001). Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (2nd ed.). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2001). Identity in the Globalizing World. Social Anthropology, 9(2), 121–129.
Baym, N. (2010). Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Belk, R. (2013). Extended Self in a Digital World. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(3), 477–500.
Bell, J., Bailey, L., & Kennedy, D. (2015). ‘We do it to keep him alive’: Bereaved Indivi-
duals’ Experiences of Online Suicide Memorials and Continuing Bonds. Mortality, 20(4):
375–389.
158 References
Bellamy, C., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2013a). Life Beyond the
Timeline: Creating and Curating a Digital Legacy. Paper presented at the meeting of
Prato Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN), Prato, Italy.
Bellamy, C., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2013b). Death and the
Internet: Consumer Issues for Planning and Managing Digital Legacies [Report]. Sydney:
Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.
Bennett, B. (2007). Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New
York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blizzard (2014, November 14). World of Warcraft® Surpasses 10 Million Subscribers As
Warlords of DraenorTM Launch Begins. Blizzard Press Centre. Retrieved from www.blizza
rd.gamespress.com/.
Bloch, M. & Parry, J. (Eds.) (1982). Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bostrom, N. (2008). Why I Want to be Posthuman When I Grow Up. In B. Gordjin & R.
Chadwick (Eds.), Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity (pp. 107–137). New York, NY:
Springer.
boyd, d. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and
Implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on
Social Network Sites (pp. 39–58). London: Routledge.
boyd, d. & Ellison, B. (2008). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Definition, History,
and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230.
Bradbury, M. (1996). Representations of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Death Among Deathworkers and
the Bereaved. In G. Howarth & P. C. Jupp (Eds.), Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of
Death, Dying and Disposal (pp. 84–95). London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Brand, J. E. & Todhunter, S. (2015). Digital Australia 2016. Eveleigh: IGEA.
Brennan, M. (2008). Condolence Books: Language and Meaning in the Mourning for
Hillsborough and Diana. Death Studies, 32(4), 326–351.
Brubaker, J. R. & Callison-Burch, V. (2016). Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing
Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook. Paper presented at CHI Workshop on Human
Factors in Computer Systems, San Jose, California.
Brubaker, J. R. & Hayes, G. (2011). ‘We will never forget you [online]’: An Empirical
Investigation of Post-Mortem MySpace Comments. In P. Hinds, J. C. Tang & J. Wang
(Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 123–132).
New York, NY: ACM Press.
Brubaker, J. R. & Vertesi, J. (2010). Death and the social network. Paper presented at CHI
Workshop on HCI at the End of Life: Understanding Death, Dying, and the Digital,
Atlanta, Georgia.
Bruns, A. & Burgess, J. (2011). The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc
Publics. Paper presented at the 6th European Consortium for Political Research General
Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik.
Bryan, K. (2012, March 17). The Tattered Notebook: The Touching Story of Ribbitribbit
and the EQII Community. Massively. Retrieved from www.massively.joystiq.com.
Burgess, J. & Green, J. B. (2013). YouTube: Online video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Cameron, N. (2007, June 14). US Government Funds Virtual Reality Research. Bioethics.
com. Retrieved from www.bioethics.com/.
Candea, M., Cook, J., Trundle, C., & Yarrow, T. (2015). Introduction: Reconsidering
Detachment. In T. Yarrow, M. Candea, C. Trundle, & J. Cook (Eds.), Detachment:
Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking (pp. 1–31). Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
References 159
Carretero, J. & García, J. D. (2014). The Internet of Things: Connecting the World. Personal
and Ubiquitous Computing, 18(2), 445–447.
Carroll, E. (2014). The Digital Beyond. Retrieved from www.thedigitalbeyond.com.
Carroll, B. & Landry, K. (2010). Logging On and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks
to Grieve and to Mourn. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(5), 341–349.
Carroll, E. & Romano, J. (2011). Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are
your Estate, What’s Your Legacy? Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Chan, K. (2009, October 26). Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook [Facebook
Post]. Retrieved from www.facebook.com.
Christensen, D. F. & Sandvik, K. (2016). Death Ends a Life, Not a Relationship: Objects as
Media on Children’s Graves. In D. F. Christensen & K. Sandvik (Eds.), Mediating and
Remediating Death (pp. 251–272). London: Routledge.
Chua, L. & Elliott, M. (2013). Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell.
Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Clark, J. (Ed.). (2007). Roadside Memorials: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale: Emu Press.
Clark, J. & Franzmann, M. (2006). Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making
of Roadside Memorials. Death Studies, 30(6), 579–599.
Clayden, A., Hockey, J., Powell, M., & Green, T. (2015). Natural Burial: Landscape, Practice
and Experience. London: Routledge.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2012). Growing Moral Relations: Critique of Moral Status Ascription. New
York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coleman, B. (2012). Everything is Animated: Pervasive Media and the Networked Subject.
Body & Society, 18(1), 79–98.
Conan Doyle, A. (1926, October 23). ‘Did Raeburn Print Burns?’ The Evening News.
Conan Doyle, A. (1922, May 8). ‘Doyle Says Ghosts May Use Radio for Spirit Messages.’
The Montreal Gazette.
Consalvo, M. (2007). Cheating: Gaining Advantages in Video Games. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Coyne, R. (1998). Cyberspace and Heidegger’s Pragmatics. Information Technology & People,
11(4), 338–350.
Cumiskey, K. M. & Hjorth, L. (Eds.) (2016). Mobile Media Practices, Presence and Politics: The
Challenge of Being Seamlessly Mobile. New York, NY: Routledge.
Curl, J. S. (1972). The Victorian Celebration of Death. Detroit, MI: Partridge Press.
Davies, D. (2005). A Brief History of Death. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Davies, D. & Rumble, H. (2012). Natural Burial: Traditional – Secular Spiritualties and Funeral
Innovation. London: Continuum Publishing.
de Souza e Silva, A. & Frith, J. (2010). Locative Mobile Social Networks: Mapping
Communication and Location in Urban Spaces. Mobilities, 5(4), 485–505.
de Vries, B. & Rutherford, J. (2004). Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web.
Omega: Journal of Death & Dying, 49(1), 5–26.
‘Death of Net Game Addicts Alerts Others’ (2005, November 1). China View English Edition.
Retrieved from http://news.xinhuanet.com.
Degnen, C. (2013). Placing Personhood: Ontology, The Life Course, and Cemeteries.
Teaching Anthropology, 3(1), 3–16.
DeGroot, J. M. (2014). ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’: Emotional Rubbernecking in Facebook
Groups. Death Studies, 38(2), 79–84.
Delp, R. W. (1967). Andrew Jackson Davis: Prophet of American Spiritualism. The Journal of
American History, 54(1), 43–56.
Dexella (2013, March 4). Player Event: Ribbitribbit Day 2013. Everquest II Forums.
Retrieved from http://forums.station.sony.com.
160 References
Dingman, H. (2014, November 24). World of Warcraft Turns Ten: 10 Unforgettable

Moments from WoW’s First Decade. PC World. Retrieved from www.pcworld.com.
Doss, E. (2008). The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of
Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Douglas, S. J. (2004). Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Drazin, A. & Küchler, S. (Eds.) (2015). The Social Life of Materials: Studies in Material and
Society. London: Bloomsbury.
Dyer-Witheford, N. & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video
Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Ebert, H. (2014). Profiles of the Dead: Mourning and Memorial on Facebook. In C. M.
Moreman & A. D. Lewis (Eds.), Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age
(pp. 23–42). Santa Barbara, California: Praeger.
Emke, I. (2007). The Body of the Deceased in Funerary Industry Periodicals. Paper presented at
the meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association, Saskatoon, Canada.
Enns, A. (2005). Voices of the Dead: Transmission/Translation/Transgression. Culture,
Theory and Critique, 46(1), 11–27.
Entertainment Software Association [ESA] (2015). The 2015 Essential Facts About the Computer
and Video Game Industry. Retrieved from www.theesa.com.
Exley, C. (1999). Testaments and Memories: Negotiating After-Death Identities. Mortality,
4(3), 249–267.
Facebook (2015). Memorialized Accounts. Retrieved from www.facebook.com/help/
1506822589577997/.
Falconer, K., Sachsenweger, M., Gibson, K., & Norman, H. (2011). Grieving in the Internet
Age. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 40(3), 79–88.
Feifer, J. (2013a). Selfies at Funerals. Retrieved from www.selfiesatfunerals.tumblr.com.
Feifer, J. (2013b, December 11). Obama’s Funeral Selfie is a Fitting End to My Tumblr –
Selfies at Funerals. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com.
Fourcade, M. & Healy, K. (2007). Moral Views of Market Society. Annual Review of Sociology,
33, 285–311.
Francis, D., Kellaher, L., & Neophytou, G. (2005). The Secret Cemetery. Oxford:
Berg.
Frazer, J. (1915). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (3rd ed.). London: Macmillan
Press.
Fuller, G. & Jeffery, C. P. (2016). ‘There is no Zyzz’: The Subcultural Celebrity and
Bodywork Project of Aziz Shavershian. Celebrity Studies, 8(1), 1–15.
Garces-Foley, K. & Holcomb, J. (2006). Contemporary American Funerals: Personalizing
Tradition. In K. Garces-Foley (Ed.), Death and Religion in a Changing World (pp. 207–227).
Abingdon: M. E. Sharpe.
Gayomali, C. (2014, January 20). Eterni.me Wants to Let you Skype Your Family After
You’re Dead. Fast Company. Retrieved from www.fastcompany.com.
Geismar, K. & Mohns, W. (2011). Social Relationships and Digital Relationships: Rethinking
the Database at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
17(S1), S133–S155.
Gell, A. (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.
Gentry, J. W., Kennedy, P. F., Paul, K., & Hill, R. P. (1995). The Vulnerability of Those
Grieving the Death of a Loved One: Implications for Public Policy. Journal of Public Policy
& Marketing, 14(1), 128–142.
References 161
Gerlitz, C. & Helmond, A. (2013). The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data
Intensive Web. New Media & Society, 15(8), 1348–1365.
Ghemit (2013, January 30). Why I Love World of Warcraft and the Community Within.
Ghemit the Hunter. Retrieved from www.ghemithunts.com.
Gibbs, M., Mori, M., Arnold, M., & Kohn, T. (2012). Tombstones, Uncanny Monuments
and Epic Quests: Memorials in World of Warcraft. Game Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from
www.gamestudies.org.
Gibbs, M., Carter, M., Arnold, M., & Nansen, B. (2013). Serenity Now Bombs a World of
Warcraft Funeral: Negotiating the Morality, Reality and Taste of Online Gaming Practices.
Selected Papers of Internet Research, 14(0), 1–4.
Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015). #Funeral and Instagram:
Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular. Information, Communication and Society, 18(3):
255–268.
Gibbs, M., Carter, M., & Mori, J. (2016). RIP Vile Rat: Makeshift Memorials in EVE
Online. In M. Carter, K. Bergstrom, & D. Woodford (Eds.), Internet Spaceships are Serious
Business: An EVE Online Reader (pp. 129–147). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Gibson, M. (2014). Digital Objects of the Dead: Negotiating Electronic Remains. In L. V.
Brussel & N. Carpentier (Eds.), The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
(pp. 221–229). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gibson, M. (2017). Grievable Lives: Avatars, Memorials, and Family ‘Plots’ in Second Life.
Mortality, 15(1): 1–16.
Giddens, A. (1981). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Gillespie, T. (2014). The Relevance of Algorithms. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot
(Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (pp. 167–194).
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gorer, G. (1955). The Pornography of Death. Encounter, 5(4), 49–52.
Gotved, S. (2015). Privacy with Public Access: Digital Memorials on Quick Response
Codes. Information, Communication & Society, 18(3), 269–280
Graham, C., Gibbs, M., & Aceti, L. (2013). Introduction to the Special Issue on the Death,
Afterlife, and Immortality of Bodies and Data. The Information Society: An International
Journal, 29(3), 133–141.
Graham, C., Arnold, M., Kohn, T., & Gibbs, M. R. (2015). Gravesites and Websites: A
Comparison of Memorialisation. Visual Studies, 30(1), 37–53.
Green, J. W. (2012). Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying. Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Greenfield, A. (2006). Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Berkeley, CA:
New Riders Publishing.
Grider, S. (2001). Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster. New
Directions in Folklore, 5(2), 1.
Gumpert, G. (1988). Talking Tombstones and Other Tales of the Media Age. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Guthrie, M. (2013, March 16). The Tattered Notebook: EQII’s Ribbitribbit Day Celebrates
Community. Massively. Retrieved from www.massively.joystiq.com.
Gygax, G. & Arneson, D. (1974). Dungeons & Dragons. Tactical Studies Rules, Inc.
Hall, F. (2016). Doing the Flowers: An Examination of Materiality, Emotion and Identity Within
Contemporary British Floristry (Unpublished dissertation). Royal College of Art, London.
162 References
Hallam, E. (2016). Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed. London: Reaktion
Books.
Hallam, E. & Hockey, J. (2001). Death, Memory, and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg.
Hallam, E., Hockey, J., & Howarth, G. (1999). Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity.
London: Routledge.
Harmer, R. M. (1963). The High Cost of Dying. New York, NY: Collier Books.
Hartig, K. V. & Dunn, K. M. (1998). Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes
in Newcastle, New South Wales. Australian Geographical Studies, 36(1), 5–20.
Harvey, P. (1996). Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation state and the Universal Exhibition.
London: Routledge.
Harvey, P., Conlin Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E. B., Thoburn, N.,
& Woodward, K. (Eds.) (2014). Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion. London:
Routledge.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers. In N. K. Hayles (Ed.), How
We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (pp. 24–49).
Chicago: The University of Chicago.
Hayman, J., Chamberlain, K., & Hopner, V. (2017). Disembodied Social Life: The Ongoing
Social Presence of the Born-Still on Facebook. Mortality, 12(1), 1–17.
Hjorth, L. & Arnold, M. (2013). Online@AsiaPacific: Mobile, Social and Locative in the Asia–Pacific
region. London: Routledge.
Hockey, J., Komaromy, C., & Woodthorpe, K. (Eds.) (2010). The Matter of Death: Space,
Place and Materiality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hockey, J., Penhale, B., & Sibley, D. (2005). Environments of Memory: Home, Space,
Later Life and Grief. In J. Davidson (Ed.), Emotional Geographies (pp. 135–146). Farnham:
Ashgate Publishing.
Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things.
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hollingsworth, J. (2006). Serenity Now Bombs a World of Warcraft Funeral [Video].
YouTube. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJVolaC8pw.
Horst, H. A. & Miller, D. (Eds.). (2012). Digital Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury.
Hoskins, A. (2009). The Mediatisation of Memory. In J. Garde-Hansen, A. Hoskins, &
A. Reading (Eds.), Save As… Digital Memories (pp. 27–43). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Howarth, G. (1996). Last Rites: The Work of the Modern Funeral Director. New York, NY:
Baywood Publishing.
Howarth, G. (2007). Death and Dying: A Sociological Introduction. London: Polity Press.
Hutchings, T. (2012). Wiring Death: Dying, Grieving and Remembering on the Internet.
In D. Davies & C. Park (Eds.), Emotion, Identity and Death: Mortality Across Disciplines
(pp. 43–58). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London:
Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2012). Toward an Ecology of Materials. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 427–442.
Jalland, P. (1996). Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones, S. (2004). 404 Not Found: The Internet and the Afterlife. Omega: Journal of Death &
Dying, 49(1), 83–88.
Jorgensen-Earp, C. & Lanzilotti, L. (1998). Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction
of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84(2), 150–170.
Kaleem, J. (2012, December 7). Death On Facebook Now Common As ‘Dead Profiles’ Create
Vast Virtual Cemetery. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com.
References 163
Kaplan, L. (2008). The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Karppi, T. (2013a). Death Proof: On the Biopolitics and Noopolitics of Memorializing Dead
Facebook Users. Culture Machine, 14, 1–20.
Karppi, T. (2013b). ‘Change Name to No One. Like People’s Status’ Facebook Trolling and
Managing Online Personas. Fibreculture Journal, 22. Retrieved from www.twentytwo.
fibreculturejournal.org.
Kasket, E. (2012). Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking: Facebook as a
Modern Day Medium. Bereavement Care, 31(2), 62–69.
Kaufman, S. R. & Morgan, L. M. (2005). The Anthropology of the Beginnings and the
Ends of Life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34(1), 317–341.
Keane, H. (2009). Foetal Personhood and Representations of the Absent Child in Pregnancy
Loss Memorialisation. Feminist Theory, 10(2), 153–171.
Kearl, M. C. (1989). Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Keating, F. (2013, March 27). Gamer Who Died of Cancer Aged Just 24 is First to be
Immortalised as Roman Commander in Total War: Rome II. Daily Mail. Retrieved from
www.dailymail.co.uk.
Kellaher, L. & Worpole, K. (2010). Bringing the Dead Back Home: Urban Public Spaces as
Sites for New Patterns of Mourning and Memorialisation. In A. Maddrell & J. D. Sidaway
(Eds.), Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance (pp. 161–180).
Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.
Kellaher, L., Prendergast, D., & Hockey, J. (2006). In the Shadow of the Traditional Grave.
Mortality, 10(4), 237–250.
Kellehear, A. (2009). What the Social and Behavioural Studies Say About Dying. In A.
Kellehear (Ed.), The Study of Dying: From Autonomy to Transformation (pp. 1–26). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, J., Meese, J., & van der Nagel, E. (2016). Regulation and Social Practice Online.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 30(2), 146–157.
Kera, D. (2013). Designing for Death and Apocalypse: Theodicy of Networks and Uncanny
Archives. The Information Society: An International Journal, (29)3, 177–183.
Kern, R., Forman, A. E., & Gil-Egui, G. (2013). RIP: Remain in Perpetuity. Facebook
Memorial Pages. Telematics and Informatics, 30(1), 2–10.
Kim, J. (2016). Necrosociality: Isolated Death and Unclaimed Cremains in Japan. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(4), 843–863.
Kittler, F. A. (1999). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (G. Winthrop-Young & M. Wutz,
Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kleenman, J. (2014, June 7). Web Immortality: The Social Media Sites That Keep You
Alive in the Digital World. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com.
Klicker, R. L. (1999). Funeral Directing and Funeral Service Management. Buffalo, NY: Thanos
Institute.
Kohn, T., Gibbs, M., Arnold, M., & Nansen, B. (2012). Facebook and the Other: Adminis-
tering to and Caring for the Dead Online. In G. Hage (Ed.), Responsibility (pp. 128–141).
Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press.
Kohn, T., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Meese, J., & Nansen, B. (2017). The Social Life of the
Dead and the Leisured Life of the Living Online. In A. Kaul & J. Skinner (Eds.), Leisure and
Death: Lively Encounters with Risk, Death, and Dying. Colorado: University of Colorado
Press.
Kollar, P. (2015, November 16). World of Warcraft Team Responds to Shrinking Subscriber
Numbers. Polygon. Retrieved from www.polygon.com.
164 References
Kopp, S. W. & Kemp, E. (2007). The Death Care Industry: A Review of Regulatory and
Consumer Issues. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 41(1), 150–173.
Kurzweil, R. (2012). How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. New
York, NY: Viking Books.
Laqueur, T. W. (2015). The Work of the Dead. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Larkins, R. (2007). Funeral Rights: What the Australian ‘Death-Care’ Industry Doesn’t Want You
to Know. Camberwell: Penguin.
Lastrogu3 (2015a). My Brother Passed Away in 2013 I Still Visit Him … [Forum Post].
Reddit. Retrieved from www.reddit.com.
Lastrogu3 (2015b). March 8). My Brother and his Skyrim Dark Elf Locked in Time. Imgur.
Retrieved from www.imgur.com/a/Gh20l.
Lawton, J. (2000). The Dying Process: Patients’ Experiences of Palliative Care. London:
Routledge.
Le Goff, J. (1992). History and Memory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Lewis, M. M. (1999). The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story. New York, NY: W. W.
Norton & Company.
Lifton, R. (1979). The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. Washington,
DC: American Psychiatric Press.
Light, B. (2014). Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Light, B. & Cassidy, E. (2014). Strategies for the Suspension and Prevention of Connection:
Rendering Disconnection as Socioeconomic Lubricant with Facebook. New Media &
Society, 16(7), 1169–1184.
Linkman, A. (2006). Taken from Life: Post-Mortem Portraiture in Britain 1860–1910. History
of Photography, 30(4), 309–347.
Linkman, A. (2012). Photography and Death. London: Reaktion Books.
Lisle, D. (2004). Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle. Journal for
Cultural Research, 8(1), 3–21.
Lloyd, A. (2014, July 23). Teenage Son Discovers His Deceased Father’s Ghost Car in Xbox
Rally Game. Motoramic, Yahoo! Retrieved from www.yahoo.com.
Lock, M. (2002). Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Lock, M. & Nguyen, V.-K. (2010). An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lofland, L. H. (1978). The Craft of Dying: The Modern Face of Death. Berkeley, CA: Sage
Publications.
Lombard, M. & Markaridian Selverian, M. E. (2008). Telepresence After Death. Presence:
Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 17(3), 310–325.
Lowood, H. & Nitsche, M. (2011). The Machinima Reader. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Lucas, F. (2012, April 29). Is Your Social Media Account Now Part of Your Estate? Socially
Skilled. Retrieved from www.sociallyskilled.com.au.
Lustig, N. (2012). Facebook Death Rate. Retrieved from www.nathanlustig.com.
Maguire, J. S. & Matthews, J. (2012). Are we all Cultural Intermediaries Now? An Introduction
to Cultural Intermediaries in Context. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(5), 551–562.
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Margry, P. & Sánchez-Carretero, C. (Eds.) (2011). Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Mem-
orializing Traumatic Death. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Marsh, H. (2017, April 23). I had to Tell the Family Her Death Had Been Avoidable. The
Sunday Times Magazine, pp. 14–18.
Marsh, S. (2012, July 27). Store Your Loved One’s Ashes in a 3D-Printed Urn in the Shape
of Their Head. Wired Magazine. Retrieved from www.wired.co.uk.
References 165
Marwick, A. & boyd, D. (2011). ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately’: Twitter

Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience. New Media & Society, 13(1),
114–133.
Marwick, A. & Ellison, N. (2012). ‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ Negotiating Visibility
on Facebook Memorial Pages. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3),
378–400.
Massimi, M. & Baecker, R. M. (2010). A Death in the Family: Opportunities for Designing
Technologies for the Bereaved. Paper presented at CHI ’10: The 28th International
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, Canada.
McFall, L. (2009). Devices and Desires: How Useful is the ‘New’ New Economic Sociology
for Understanding Market Attachment? Sociology Compass, 3(2), 267–282.
McGarry, M. (2008). Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-
Century America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
McIlwain, C. D. (2005). When Death Goes Pop: Death, Media & the Remaking of Community.
New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Meese, J., Gibbs, M., Carter, M., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2015). Selfies at
Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms. International Journal of
Communication, 9, 1818–1831.
Meese, J., Nansen, B., Kohn, T., Arnold, M. & Gibbs, M. (2015). Posthumous Personhood
and the Affordances of Digital Media. Mortality: Special Issue on Death, Memory and the
Human in the Internet Era, 20(4), 408–420.
Menon, V. (2012, March 14). Virtual EverQuest 2 Community Makes Dying Boy’s Wish
Come True. Toronto Star. Retrieved from www.thestar.com.
Merrin, W. (1999). Crash, Bang, Wallop! What a Picture! The Death of Diana and the
Media. Mortality, 4(1), 41–62.
Metcalf, P. & Huntington, R. (1991). Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary
Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Metro (2014, March 10). ‘Live forever: Would you like to become a digital avatar after you
die?’ Retrieved from www.metro.co.uk.
Meyer, E. (2014, December 24). Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty [Blog Post]. Retreived
from www.meyerweb.com.
Miller, D. (2016). Social Media in an English Village. Or How to Keep People at Just the Right
Distance. London: UCL Press.
Mitford, J. (1963). The American Way of Death. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Moller, D. W. (1996). Confronting Death: Values, Institutions, and Human Mortality. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Mollick, S. (2005). Mapping the Dead. Paper presented at the ESRI Conference. Retrieved
from www.proceedings.esri.com.
Moore, R. L. (1972). Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit
Rappings. American Quarterly, 24(4), 474–500.
Moravec, H. (1998). When Will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain? Journal of
Evolution and Technology, 1(1), 1–12.
Mori, J., Gibbs, M., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2012). Design Considerations for
After Death: Comparing the Affordances of Three Online Platforms. In V. Farrell, G.
Farrell, C. Chua, W. Huang, R. Vasa, & C. Woodward (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th
Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (pp. 395–404). New York, NY: ACM
Press.
Mosco, V. (2004). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Moss, M. (2004). Grief on the Web. Omega: Journal of Death & Dying, 49(1), 77–81.
166 References
Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., & Kohn, T. (2014). The Restless Dead in the Digital
Cemetery. In C. Moreman & D. Lewis (Eds.), Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the
Online Age (pp. 111–124). Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., & Kohn, T. (2015). The Stories of Zyzz – Distributed
Memories on Distributed Networks. In C. Lohmeier, A. Hajek, & C. Pentzold (Eds.),
Social Media and Social Memories. Remembering in Digitally Networked Times. New York,
NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nardi, B. (2015). Virtuality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44(1), 15–31.
Natale, S. (2012). A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early
Cinema. Early Popular Visual Culture, 10(2), 125–145.
Noakes, R. (2002). ‘Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits’: Technologizing the Bodies of
Victorian Spiritualism. In I. R. Morus (Ed.), Bodies/Machines (pp. 125–163). Oxford: Berg.
O’Dell, J. (2011, April 13). Make Surrealist, Twitter-Fuelled Comedy With This Web App.
Mashable. Retrieved from www.mashable.com.
Odom, W., Harper, R., Sellen, A., Kirk, D., & Banks, R. (2010). Passing on & Putting to
Rest: Understanding Bereavement in the Context of Interactive Technologies. Proceedings
of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1831–1840).
Atlanta, GA: CHI Press.
Olivetti, J. (2012, April 5). The Perfect Ten: MMO Tributes to Real-Life People. Massively.
Retrieved from www.massively.joystiq.com.
Ostrow, A. (2011). After Your Final Status Update [TED Talk]. Retrieved from www.ted.com.
Owen, A. (2004). The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Parikka, J. (2011). Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste.
London: Open Humanities Press.
Parker, L. (2014, April 4). How to Become Virtually Immortal. The New Yorker. Retrieved
from www.newyorker.com.
PBS Game/Show (2014). Can Video Games Be A Spiritual Experience? | Game/Show
[Video]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK91LAiMOio.
Peppers, M. (2014, March 14). Video Gamer Uses Minecraft to Honor His Late Wife With
Elaborate Virtual Monument. Daily Mail. Retrieved from www.dailymail.co.uk.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Phillips, W. (2011). LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to
Grief Online. First Monday, 16(12). Retrieved from www.firstmonday.org.
Phillips, W. (2015). This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between
Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Pink, S., Ardèvol, E., & Lanzeni, D. (2016). Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology.
London: Bloomsbury.
Purchese, R. (2013, March 18). 24-year-old Total War Fan Immortalised in Rome 2
Shortly Before Losing Battle With Cancer. EuroGamer. Retrieved from www.euro
gamer.net.
Roberts, P. (2004). The Living and the Dead: Community in the Virtual Cemetery. Omega:
Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 57–76.
Roberts, P. & Vidal, L. A. (2000). Perpetual Care in Cyberspace: A Portrait of Memorials
on the Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 40(4), 521–545.
Ruby, J. (1995). Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Rugg, J. (2013). Churchyard and Cemetery: Tradition and Modernity in Rural North Yorkshire.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
References 167
Rumble, H., Troyer, J., Walter, T., & Woodthorpe, K. (2014). Disposal or Dispersal?
Environmentalism and Final Treatment of the British Dead. Mortality, 19(3), 243–260.
Russell, N. (2014, March 11). Death and Life in Cyberspace. Sunday Star Times. Retrieved
from www.stuff.co.nz.
Sanders, G. (2009). ‘Late’ Capital: Amusement and Contradiction in the Contemporary
Funeral Industry. Critical Sociology, 35(4), 447–470.
Sanders, G. (2012). Branding in the American Funeral Industry. Journal of Consumer Culture,
12(3), 263–282.
Santino, J. (Ed.) (2006). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Schoonover, K. (2003). Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography. Art Journal, 62(3),
30–41.
Sconce, J. (2000). Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Servais, O. (2015). Funerals in the ‘World of Warcraft’: Religion, Polemic, and Styles of
Play in a Videogame Universe. Social Compass, 62(3), 362–378.
Shakespeare, W. (1998 [1602]). Hamlet. In S. Wells & G. Taylor (Eds.), The Oxford Shakespeare:
The Complete Works (pp. 653–690). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sherlock, A. (2013). Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of
Society. The Information Society: An International Journal, 29(3), 164–176.
Sidaway, J. D. (Ed.) (2016). Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance.
London: Routledge.
Sloane, D. C. (2005). Roadside Shrines and Granite Sketches: Diversifying the Vernacular
Landscape of Memory. Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 12, 64–81.
Sobchack, V. (1984). Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation,
and Documentary. Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 9(4), 283–300.
Socolovsky, M. (2004). Cyber-Spaces of Grief: Online Memorials and the Columbine High
School Shootings. A Journal of Composition Theory, 24(2), 467–490.
Sofka, C. J. (1997). Social Support ‘Internetworks,’ Caskets For Sale, and More: Thanatology
and the Information Superhighway. Death Studies, 21(6), 553–574.
Speight, R. N. (1926, May 22). Famous Photographer at a Séance: Experiences in Taking a
Spirit Picture. The Dundee Advertiser and the Courier.
Squier, S. M. (2003). Wireless Possibilities, Posthuman Possibilities: Brain Radio, Commu-
nity Radio, Radio Lazarus. In S. M. Squier (Ed.), Communities of the Air: Radio Century,
Radio Culture (pp. 275–303). Durham: Duke University Press.
Staley, E. (2014). Messaging the Dead: Social Networks Sites and Theologies of Afterlife. In
C. M. Moreman & A.D. Lewis (Eds.), Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age
(pp. 9–22). Santa Barbara, California: Praeger.
Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the
Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Stanyek, J. & Piekut, B. (2010). Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane. TDR: The
Drama Review, 54(1), 14–38.
Starck, N. (2006). Life after Death: The Art of the Obituary. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Publishing.
Stein, A. (2012, February 2). Robot Blurs Biological Boundaries. Addison County Independent.
Retrieved from www.addisonindependent.com.
Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Stokes, P. (2012). Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy &
Technology, 25(3), 363–379.
168 References
Stolow, J. (2006). Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the

Circum-Atlantic World of the 19th Century [Working Paper]. Retrieved from The
Globalization and Autonomy Online Compendium website: www.globalautonomy.ca.
Stuart, K. (2014, September 17). UK gamers: More Women Play Games Than Men,
Report Finds. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com.
Sumiala, J. (2014). Mediatized Ritual – Expanding the Field in the Study of Media and
Ritual. Sociology Compass, 8(7), 939–947.
Tan, N. (2012, September 20). Gearbox’s Tribute to Michael Mamaril (R.I.P.) in Borderlands 2.
Gamer Revolution. Retrieved from www.gamerevolution.com.
Tarlow, E. (2000). Landscapes of Memory: The Nineteenth-Century Garden Cemetery.
European Journal of Archaeology, 3(2), 217–239.
Taussig, M. (1999). Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Thomas, K. (2009). The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England. Oxford:
Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tifentale, A. & Manovich, L. (2015). Selfiecity: Exploring Photography and Self-Fashioning
in Social Media. In D. M. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation
and Design (pp. 109–122). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist
Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Turbine (2006). Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach [Game]. Atari.
Turner, V. W. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Vaczi, M. (2014). Death in the Cathedral: Mortuary Practices in Sport Stadiums. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(4), 635–652.
van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
van Dijck, J. (2008). Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory. Visual Com-
munication, 7(1), 57–76.
van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford:
van Gennep, A. (1960[1908]). The Rites of Passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.).
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Veale, K. (2004). Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape
For Remembering The Dead. The Fibreculture Journal, 3. Retrieved from www.three.
fibreculturejournal.org.
Vercillo, K. (2011). QR Codes on Tombstones Provide Info About the Deceased. Mobile
Phone Reviews. Retrieved from www.dialaphone.co.uk/blog.
Wachowski, E. (2013, January 10). Around Azeroth: A Send-Off to the Happy Hunting
Grounds. WoW Insider. Retrieved from www.wow.joystiq.com.
Wachowski, E. (2014, January 4). Around Azeroth: I Will Remember You. WoW Insider.
Retrieved from www.wow.joystiq.com.
Walter, T. (1997). Secularization. In C. M. Parkes, P. Laungani, & B. Young (Eds.), Death
and Bereavement across Cultures (pp. 166–187). London: Routledge.
Walter, T. (2005). Three Ways to Arrange a Funeral: Mortuary Variation in the Modern
West. Mortality, 10(3), 173–192.
Walter, T. (2011). Angels Not Souls: Popular Religion in the Online Mourning for British
Celebrity Jade Goody. Religion, 41(1), 29–51.
References 169
Walter, T., Littlewood, J., & Pickering, M. (1995). Death in the News: The Public Invigilation
of Private Emotion. Sociology, 29(4), 579–596.
Walter, T., Hourizi, R., Moncur, W., & Pitsillides, S. (2011–2012). Does the Internet
Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis. OMEGA: Journal of Death and
Dying, 64(4), 275–302.
Walther, J. B. & Boyd, S. (2002). Attraction to Computer-Mediated Social Support. In C.
A. Lin & D. Atkin (Eds.), Communication Technology and Society: Audience Adoption and Uses
(pp. 153–188). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer of the 21st Century. Scientific American, 265(3), 66–75.
Williams, A. & Merten, M. (2009). Adolescents’ Online Social Networking Following the
Death of a Peer. Journal of Adolescent Research, 24(1), 67–90.
Wilson, E. (2012). Love, Mortality and the Moving Image. New York, NY: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wojcik, D. (2009). Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography. Visual
Resources, 25(1–2), 109–136.
Wouters, C. (2002). The Quest for New Rituals in Dying and Mourning: Changes in the
We-I Balance. Body and Society, 8(1), 1–27.
Zelizer, V. A. (1978). Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death
in 19th-Century America. American Journal of Sociology, 81(3), 591–610.
Zelizer, V. A. (1979). Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Those followed by ‘n’ refer to notes with the
number following ‘n’ being the note number.
3D printed urns 99, 118, 154 ANC see Arlington National Cemetery
4Chan 58 (ANC)
1000memories 35 ‘ancestry testing’ 120
angels 27, 28, 79, 81, 144–145
Abre Los Ojos 124 answering machines 23, 89, 126
advertisements: by funeral directors 42, 101; anthropology 10, 12
for cemeteries 46; for digital apps 116, 128
commemorations 112; memorial websites Ariès, P. 17, 24
1, 34, 35, 42, 44, 47, 101; Omneo cubes Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) 116
154; search engine optimisation 105–106; Arneson, Dave 78
social media 69, 101, 105 artificial intelligence 6, 8, 14, 124–125,
affordances 8, 12; adaptation of traditional 132–136
customs 28; artificial intelligence 134; ashes: cremation jewellery 5, 44, 103,
digital games 77, 86–87; digital 119–120, 154; Omneo 154; and place 43,
materiality 9; memorial websites 35, 38, 44, 148–149; urns 31, 99, 118, 154
40, 41, 47, 48, 66; person-self distinction ‘at-need’ technologies and services 3, 14, 99,
136; social media 38, 53, 56, 57–58, 59, 107–114
63, 66, 70, 74, 138, 146, 151 audio recordings 22–23, 89, 125–126, 127,
agency 6, 7, 11, 27, 40, 49, 79–80, 132, 128, 130, 131
136–137, 145, 152 augmented reality 2, 14, 125, 128–129, 153
algorithms: artificial intelligence 124, 133, Australia 6, 9; cremation jewellery 119;
134, 136; condolence message death sector’s financial value 2; DNA
composition on memorial websites 41; legacy products 120; funeral arrangement
engagement analytics 105; Facebook 67, 106, 107, 109; funeral industry
70–71; Google Dashboard 65; corporatisation 26; HeavenAddress 33,
posthumous personhood 136–137; 41, 42–43, 44, 45, 66; Melbourne
YouTube 57, 63 General Cemetery 30, 31, 32, 36, 38–39,
Allen, Woody 126 41, 43, 44, 46; multimedia shows at
The American Way of Death, The (Mitford) funerals 110; natural burial 149;
25, 102 RIP-Trolls 52; Tobin Brothers 104, 105;
Index 171
trade shows and expos 11, 14, 99, 100, graveyard 154; defacement 58; digital
106; video recording and streaming enhancement 127–130; digital games 86;
funerals 111; see also Shavershian, Aziz governance/control 46, 147; and the
Sergeyevich importance of place 43–44; location
autobiography 37, 67, 125 technology 45, 115–118, 117; online
autopsy, digital 121–122 advertising 46; as places of contemplation
avatars 7–8, 14, 122, 124, 125, 133, 134; see 41; plot charges 43–44; rest and sleep
also non-player characters (NPCs) 117–118; see also graves
Cemetery 360 116, 117
‘bad’/‘offending’ deaths 10, 59, 62–64, 108 cemetery owners 100; see also funeral
Bainbridge, Bill 86 providers
barcode technology 115, 129 Children’s Garden Cemetery
Baudrillard, J. 103 (Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom)
Bauman, Z. 24, 27 142–144, 152
Bell, Alexander Graham 21 Christianity: accommodation and secularism
Berlin, John 71 27, 28, 93; commendation of a soul to
‘bill shock’ 109 God 26; death as sleep 117; digital
BINA48 134–135 games 81, 84, 93; a ‘good’ death 18;
biographies: digital dynamism 4, 9; early return of the body to nature 43; and
newspapers and pamphlet obituaries 17; trade shows 107
memorial websites and gravestones 13, Church of England 107
33, 36–37, 38–39, 40, 47, 48, 50; Cline, Patsy 126
multimedia presentations 3, 110–111; and coffins 4, 14, 99, 100, 103, 127–128, 153
the shift to vernacular memorialisation Cole, Natalie 126
26, 27; social media 9, 13, 63, 67; Cole, Nat King 126
temporality 9 columbarium 43, 118, 129
biological death 4, 125, 137, 142, 147, 152 commemorative battles 83, 92, 93
biomedical accounts of death 146 commercial-care balance 26, 99,
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. 75, 80, 81 101–103, 122
Bloch, M. 108 community: communal function of funerals
Bodybuilding.com 61, 62 112; digital game-players 1, 75–76,
body disposal 5, 9, 103, 142, 148–150, 151; 85–86; fundraising 85, 143; funeral
see also ashes; cremation; graves industry trade shows 100; memorial
body identification 115 websites 41–43; personalising funerals 93;
book dedications 77 social media 56
Borderlands games 78, 79, 90, 93 computer graveyard 154
Bradbury, M. 108 Conan Doyle, Arthur see Doyle, Arthur
Bridenbecker, Bradford 81 Conan
Brubaker, J. 6, 34, 55, 68, 70, 74 condolence books 28, 35, 38, 40, 41–42,
57, 58, 59, 60, 106
candles: digital games 84, 94; memorial Connecting Directors magazine 105, 122
websites 34, 35, 38, 41, 42, 47; contestation 4–5; advertisements 44; digital
personalising funerals 93; roadside games 87–88, 90–92, 94–95; RIP-Trolls
shrines 28, 149 13, 52, 54, 58–59, 61, 64, 68; social
care-commercial balance 26, 99, 101–103, media 13, 56–57, 59, 60, 62–64, 92, 108
122 context collapse 57
CARL robot 113 conventions see trade shows and expos
CataCombo Sound System 127–128 corpse tagging 115
Caylee Dak 80–81 CremainGem 119
celebration discourse 7, 26, 30, 84, 93 cremains see ashes
celebrities 10, 18, 28, 63, 126, 154; see also cremation 4, 25, 43, 106, 148; see also ashes
Diana, Princess of Wales; Goody, Jade cremation jewellery 44, 103, 119–120, 154
cemeteries: Children’s Garden Cemetery Cremation Solutions 118, 119, 120
(Nottinghamshire) 142–144, 152; crematoriums 5, 12, 104, 105, 107, 111
compartments 39, 42, 43, 44; computer crowdfunding see GoFundMe
172 Index
Crusader Bridenbrad quests 81 eulogy 4, 22–23, 37, 78, 79, 93, 94,
Curl, J. S. 25 105, 126
cyberpunk 124–125 EVE Online 82–84, 86, 92, 93
EverQuest 85, 86
daguerreotype camera 18 Ever-Sculpt 119
Dandalyn 84–85 expos see trade shows and expos
Davies, D. 101, 108, 149, 151
Davies, Jonathan 33–34 Facebook: auto-curation features 70–71;
DDO see Dungeons and Dragons Online death notification 4; direct
(DDO) communication with the dead 146;
Dead Man’s Switch 66, 130 download and storage facilities 65; funeral
DeadSocial 130, 131 home promotion 105; and GoFundMe
Dearly Departed, Memorial Online 35 143; ’memorialised profile status’ 13,
death notification 3, 4 67–68, 70; memorial pages 3, 60, 61,
Death Switch 130 62–63, 66, 68, 147; proxy account use
dedications 77–78 69, 70, 74; publics 54, 73; real name
DeGroot, J. M. 6 policy 58, 74n3; RIP-Trolls 13, 52, 58;
Diana, Princess of Wales 26, 28, 95 technology companies 105; trends in
digital autopsy 121–122 social media 53, 59
digital estate management services 65–67 Facebook Live 1, 113
digital games 6, 13–14; contestations 87–88, family-run funeral providers 26, 101, 104
90–92, 94–95; developer-led F.A.R.S.I.G.N. see Friends Along the Road
commemoration 75, 76, 77–82, 90–91; Sanctuary For Those In Grief Network
mixing repertoires 77, 78, 80–81, 82, 86, (F.A.R.S.I.G.N.)
93–94, 95, 138–139; player-led in-game films 23, 25, 77, 102, 126
commemorations 1, 14, 75, 76–77, 80, Fisher, Carrie 126
82–87, 91–92, 95; playing as an act of Forest Lawn Cemetery (Los Angeles) 43–44,
commemoration 87–89, 92; social life 109, 111
after death 1, 7–8, 75, 76, 77, 81–82, 89, Forrest Gump 126
153; unique affordances 77 Fox sisters (Kate and Margaret) 19
disposals see body disposal Friends Along the Road Sanctuary For
DISRUPT Media 104, 105 Those In Grief Network (F.A.R.S.I.G.
DIY: Dead Social 66; funerals 25, 149; N.) 116
memorial websites 33, 47, 48 #funeral 71, 72, 73
DNA legacy products 120–121 funeral arrangement 3, 108–109
Douglas, James 16 funeral costs 25–26, 102, 106–107, 108, 111
Doyle, Arthur Conan 16, 19, 21, 22 funeral directors see funeral providers
Duncan, Bruce 134 funeral homes see funeral providers
Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) funeral industry 1, 2; pre-digital era 13,
78–79, 93 25–26; professionalisation 25; see also
Dunton, John 18 funeral providers
Dyer-Witheford, N. 91 funeralOne 66, 104–105, 106
funeral providers: ‘at-need’ technologies and
‘Easter eggs’ 90, 138 services 99, 107–114; cemetery memorial
Ebert, Chaz 69 styles 46; commercial-care balance 26,
Ebert, Roger 69 99, 101–103, 122; conservatism 2–3, 101;
ectoplasm 19, 20, 21 corporatisation 26, 104; digital advertising
Edison, Thomas 22 42, 63; gatekeeper role 14, 66, 100–101;
Elloric 75–76, 76, 77, 79, 95 local community positioning 103–104;
emails 57, 65, 122, 124, 125, 126, 130, locating death 19, 150, 153; ‘pre-need’
134, 151 technologies and services 103–107; trade
emoticons 57 fairs and expos 99–100; up-selling 102,
Eter9 134, 137 109, 118
Eternal Memoria 128–129 funerals: in digital games 1, 14, 75, 76, 80,
Eterni.me 124, 125, 134, 135 82, 84, 91–92, 95; eulogy/readings 80;
Index 173
historical changes 25; multimedia Hallam, Elizabeth 18, 32, 71, 141–155
presentations 3, 93, 110–111; Harmer, Ruth M. 102
personalisation 4, 26–27, 93, 103; Harper’s grave 30, 38
photographs 19, 53, 71–73; remote Harvey, Penny 100, 153
attendance 99, 111–112, 113–114; robots hashtags 57
113–114; technology for arranging Hayes, G. 6, 34, 55, 70
108–109; Thomas Allen Horne’s Hayles, N. K. 9, 35, 137
gramophone recording 22–23; variation headstones see gravestones
9; video recording and streaming 3, 99, hearses 99, 106
101, 111–113 Heartland Hills Memorial 35
FuneralStudios 106 HeavenAddress 33, 41, 42–43, 44, 45, 66
Highgate Cemetery 44
Garbow, Zachary 105 Hillsborough stadium disaster 28, 95
The Garden of Remembrance 35 ‘His Master’s Voice’ 22
Gas Bandit 85–86 Hockey, Jenny 18, 32, 71, 142, 152
Gearbox 78 Hollywood Forever Cemetery 44
Gell, A. 151, 152 holograms 4, 129
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 115 Holt, Thomas ‘Sdshill’ 84, 92
ghost bikes 149–150 home death 24–25
Ghostmemo 130 Hope, William 16
Gibson, William 124 Horne, Thomas Allen 22–23
Giddens, A. 27, 49–50 Howarth, Glennys 107, 108
GIS see Geographic Information HTML 33, 35, 47
Systems (GIS) Hutchings, Tim 5, 54, 81
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) 115, 129
GoFundMe 143, 144, 145, 152 ICCFA conference (2015) see International
Goh, Derek 44 Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral
Golders Green Crematorium 104 Association (ICCFA) conference (2015)
GonetooSoon.org 48 ICCFA conference (2016) see International
‘good’ deaths 10, 18, 81, 107 Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral
Goody, Jade 27, 79, 81, 145 Association (ICCFA) conference
Google 4, 65, 105–106, 132 (2016)
GPS see Global Positioning Systems (GPS) identification technologies 115–118
gramophone 22–23 If I Die 130, 131
grave markers 13, 116, 149; see also iGene 121
gravestones Ihde, Don 31
graves: displayed items 32, 38, 54, 142, 144, iMorial 34
145, 152; maintenance 36, 54, 145; Incubate 131
natural burials 43, 149, 151; online Ingold, Tim 154
indexes and databases 45–46; and place inscriptions: biographical information 36–37,
43; publics 4, 13, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 38–39, 50; design 46; durability 31;
42, 49, 58; temporality 50; see also Harper’s grave 30, 38; memorial
cemeteries; gravestones websites 32, 33, 37–38, 39–40, 50, 138;
gravestones: architecture 30, 46 144; Peppa Pig grave 144; place 33, 42;
augmented reality 14, 125, 128–129, publics 37, 39–40; relationality 39–40,
153; authorship 41; inscriptions 30, 31, 49; social media 55, 57, 60; Zappula
32, 33, 36–39, 41, 42, 46, 49, 50; brothers’ grave 30
marking social status 39, 47; Instagram 71, 72, 73
materials/durability/temporality 31, insurance 25, 102, 105, 106
34–35, 36; smartphone connectivity Intellitar Inc. 133, 135
99, 115, 153; ‘talking tombstones’ interdisciplinary approach 10–12, 138, 150
127, 153 intermediality 153
graveyards see cemeteries International Cemetery, Cremation and
Gray, Steve 113 Funeral Association (ICCFA) conference
Gygax, Gary 78 (2015) 98–99, 101, 102, 110
174 Index
International Cemetery, Cremation and 78–79, 87, 89, 152; laying out 18, 19;
Funeral Association (ICCFA) conference shaping commemorative possibilities 13;
(2016) 104, 154 and sociality (memorial websites and
Internet of Things 2, 114 gravestones) 32, 39–43, 50; social media
intimate publics 53, 54, 55, 56–57 platform 53, 57, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 73;
InvoCare 26, 104 trade show displays 98; see also ashes;
iPads 71, 129 coffins; cremation; graves; place
iTunes 67 mediation 8; augmented reality 118, 128,
129; digital immortality 124, 133, 137;
jewellery 44, 103, 119–120, 154 memorial websites 35, 45, 49; pre-digital
Jews 104; see also Mount Sinai memorial 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 29; social media 53,
Parks and Mortuaries 54, 65, 72, 74, 137, 139
Jobs, Steve 86 ‘medicalisation of death’ 24–25, 149,
John, Elton 26 150, 153
mediums 13, 19, 21, 22
Kaufman, S. R. 147, 151 Melbourne General Cemetery 30, 31, 32,
Kearl, M. C. 36 36, 38–39, 41, 43, 44, 46
keep-sakes 78–79, 87, 89, 152; see also 3D memorial websites 3, 138; authorship 40,
printed urns; jewellery 48; as community spaces 41–43; design
Kensington Palace 28 constraints 46–47; first appearance of 13,
Kittler, Freidrich 22 33; inscriptions 32, 37–38, 39–40, 50,
Kosak, Dave 75 138; and place 43, 44, 45, 49; promoting
funeral homes 106; scholarship 5, 34;
Lastrogu3 88–89 subjectivity and intersubjectivity 39, 40,
Lawnmower Man 124 49, 50; transience 34–36, 44; and the
Laycock, Craig 90 trend towards social media 54; use of
laying out 18, 19, 72 social media affordances 66; variability 33
Lennon, John 126 methodology 10–12
life insurance industry 102 Mevisto 119
Lifenaut 134, 135 Meyer, Eric 71
Lifton, Robert 127 Mezcua, Bruno 154
‘Lillypad Jungle’ 85 Microsoft 132
Lindrum, Walter 30, 31, 46 Miller, D. 151, 153
LivesOn 132, 134, 135 Minecraft 85–86, 87
live streaming services 3, 99, 101, 111, Mitford, Jessica 25, 102
112–113 mobile technology 3, 53, 109, 116, 128;
locative media 45, 114–118 see also smartphones
Lodge, Oliver 22 moderation and governance 13, 47, 52, 54,
Look Back Video 70–71 56, 59, 63
The Loved One, (Waugh) 25 Moller, D. W. 24
Lucas, F. 68 Monkhouse, Bob 126
monuments: in digital games 78, 85, 86, 93,
machinima 84 94; see also gravestones
Mamaril, Michael John 78, 79, 90 Moravec, Hans 125
Mandela, Nelson 71 Morgan, L. M. 147, 151
Marsh, Henry 146 Mount Sinai memorial Parks and Mortuaries
materiality 8–9, 12, 14, 138, 141, 142, 150; 101, 105, 110, 112, 116
architecture and design (memorial Much Loved 33, 34
websites and graves) 46–48; body disposal multidisciplinarity 11
5, 9, 103, 142, 148–150, 151; digital multimedia shows 3, 110–111
traces on social media 67, 74; endurance Mumler, William 20
(memorial websites and graves) 31, Murphy: Natalie 70
33–36; inscriptions (memorial websites Murphy, Greg 70
and gravestones) 30, 36–39, 57, 138; music: iTunes 67; memorial websites 47;
Instagram (#funeral) 72, 73; keep-sakes multimedia use at funerals 3, 110; playlists
Index 175
for the dead 14, 127–128, 153; profanity 4; Phoenix Memorial Diamonds 119
YouTube videos of in-game funerals 84 phonography 13, 22–23
MyDeathSpace 44, 56, 57, 59 photography: digital games 95; posthumous
MyGoodBye Message 130 messaging services 131; post-mortem 13,
My Social Book 65 18–19, 72; smart phones 19, 53, 71–73;
Myspace 6, 41, 53, 55–56, 57, 58, 59, spirit 16–17, 20, 21
60, 138 place: bodily remains 43–44, 148–149;
cemeteries 43–44; commemoration sites
Nardi, B. 151, 154 in digital games 81, 82, 88–89, 94;
narrative communication theory 137 locatedness of death 19, 24–25, 150, 153;
natural burials 43, 149, 151 locative media 45, 114–118; memorial
Needleman, Rafe 133 websites and gravestones 33, 43–46, 49,
Netscape 3.0 47 50, 54, 138; roadside shrines 5, 28, 89,
Neuromancer (Gibson) 124 92, 94, 116, 149–150; social media 54
NeverGone 34 platform architectures and policies see
newspaper obituaries 17–18, 126–127 technological trends and obsolescence
non-player characters (NPCs) 75–76, 76, platform relatedness (‘polymedia’) 151
79, 80, 82, 90–91, 95, 138 ‘platform vernaculars’ 57–58, 61–62,
Norris, James 131 66, 151
Nottinghamshire cemetery 142–144, 152 playlists for the dead 14, 127–128, 153
NPCs see non-player characters (NPCs) Pokémon Go App 128
political propaganda 17–18, 96n16
Obama: Barrack 71 ‘polymedia’ 151
obituaries 17–18, 126–127 Porcelains Unlimited 99
‘offending’/’bad’ deaths 10, 59, 62–64, 108 Positron Emission Tomography (PET) 128
Oklahoma City bombing 5 The Post-Angel 18
Omneo memorial cube 154–155 posthumanism 125
One Room Funerals 101 posthumous messaging 4, 66, 130–132
online worlds see digital games post-mortem photography 13, 18–19, 72
open casket/laying out 18, 19, 72 ‘post-need’ technologies and services 3, 14,
Orbis Robot Service 113–114 99, 112, 114–121
organ transplant 146–147 pre-digital era: funeral industry 25–26;
Oskin’s Medal 79 gramophone 22–23; medicalisation of
Ostrow, Adam 133 death 24–25; mediums and spiritualism 19;
obituaries 17–18; post-mortem
pamphlets 17 photography 18–19; radio/wireless 21–22;
Parry, J. 108 secularisation 26–27; spirit photography
Payne, James 90 16–17, 20, 21; telegraph 13, 19–20, 22;
Peppa Pig 143–144, 152 telephone 20–21, 22; television and film
Pere Lachaise Cemetery 44 23; vernacular shift 13, 27–29
Periscope 113 prenatal deaths 145, 147
personhood 12, 14, 141, 142, 150; ‘pre-need’ technologies and services 3, 14,
anthropological definition 151; digital 99, 103–107
autopsy 121–122; digital games 7–8, 76, profiles and accounts of deceased people 52,
77, 81, 82, 138, 153; ‘extended self’ 64, 53–54, 56, 62, 65–71, 74, 101
67, 76, 77; graves 38, 39, 43, 50, 142, proof of life tests 22, 66, 130
144, 145, 147, 152; keepsakes 89, 152; proxy use of social media 69, 70, 74
narrative communication theory 137; Prudential Insurance Company 25
Omneo memorial cube 154–155; social publics: condolence books/web pages 38,
media 4, 6, 53, 60–65, 74, 138; technical 41, 57; Facebook 54, 73; graves 4, 13, 32,
innovations 14, 124–125, 127, 130, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 49, 58, 112, 116;
132–136, 137; see also biographies Instagram 73; memorial websites 4, 13,
PET see Positron Emission Tomography (PET) 32, 37, 38, 39–43, 49; social media 4, 6,
Peters, J. D. 20, 21, 22, 24 52, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 58, 59, 61–62, 64,
Phillips, Andrew 113 68; YouTube 57, 63–64
176 Index
QR codes 115, 129 SEO see search engine optimisation (SEO)

quests 81 Serenity Now video 91, 92, 95
quotidian spaces 87–89 Shavershian, Aziz Sergeyevich 13, 53,
60–65, 74, 138
R76983 84 Shavershian, Said (‘Chestbrah’) 61
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Simplyshredded 61, 62
chip 115 site administrators see moderation and
radio/wireless 21–22 governance
rapping 19 Skype 113, 137, 151
Rasheed, Nizar 128 Skyrim 88, 89
‘recommender system’ websites 106 sleep 117–118
Reddit 58, 87 smart bar-code technology (QR code)
Reeves, Jim 126 115, 129
relationality 8, 12, 14, 50, 53, 54, 137–138, smartphones: affordances 8; funeral
141, 142, 144, 150, 153 photographs 19, 53, 71–73, 112;
religion 2, 7, 39, 42, 43, 44, 112; see also gravestone interactivity 99, 129;
Christianity; Jews memorial website apps 45; Omneo
Remembering the Children 35 154–155; photographs and videos as
Rex, Brad 101, 109 posthumous life 126; proliferation of 2
RFID chip see Radio Frequency Smith, Sean see Vile Rat
Identification (RFID) chip Snapchat 71
Ribbitribbitt 85, 94 Sobchack, Vivian C. 23
RIP-Trolls 13, 52, 54, 58–59, 61, 64, 68 social media: advertising funeral services 3,
rituals: assigning monetary value 102; 63, 101, 105; Anna Svidersky 53, 54,
domestic 18; funerals 73, 112; in-game 55–58, 59–60, 65, 74; archive facilities
commemoration 76–77, 80, 82, 95; 65; changing trends and technical
memorial websites 34; potential for obsolesence 53, 54, 59–60, 65, 138;
posthumous presence 126; refashioned communicating with the dead 4, 52, 53,
on social media 53; visiting graves 44; 55–56, 57, 146; contestation 13, 56–57,
see also funerals 59, 60, 62–64, 92, 108; data-mining/
Roadside Memorial project 116–117 artificial intelligence 132, 133, 134; death
roadside shrines 5, 28, 89, 92, 94, 116, notification 3, 4; fundraising 85, 143,
149–150 144; funeral industry use 66, 104–106;
Roberts, P. 5, 34, 37 funeral photo-sharing 71–73; gravestone
RoboCop 124 interactivity 128; memorial pages 60, 61,
robots 78, 93, 113–114 62–63, 64, 66, 68, 147; orientation 9;
‘Rochester Rappings’ 19 ’polymediality’ 151; posthumous
Roderick, Shane 84 messaging services 4, 66, 125, 130–131;
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story 126 profiles and accounts of deceased people
Rome Total War II 90, 93 52, 53–54, 56, 62, 65–71, 74, 101;
Royalty and notables see celebrities remembering and reconstructing Zyzz
Rumble, H. 101, 148, 149, 151 60–65; RIP-Trolls 13, 52, 54, 58–59, 61,
Russell, N. 70 64, 68; scholarship 34, 54; subjectivity
and intersubjectivity 37, 74, 137, 139;
San Antonio ICCFA see International YouTube videos and digital games 84,
Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95
Association (ICCFA) conference (2015) Socolovsky, M. 5
Sanders, George 6, 7, 25, 26, 66, 102, 103 Sofka, Carla J. 5, 34
séances 19 souls 26, 27, 79, 118
search engine optimisation (SEO) 105–106 sound recordings 22–23, 89, 125–126, 127,
Second Life 86, 87, 150 128, 130, 131
secularisation 17, 24, 26–27, 43, 107 spam 59
SeeYou 119 Speight, R. N. 16
selfies at funerals 71–72 spirit photography 16–17, 20, 21
sensationalism 10, 17, 18, 55, 59, 61 spiritualist movement 19, 21
Index 177
spirituality 2 Tsing, Anna 154

Squier, S. M. 22 Twitter: archiving 65; data-mining 132,
Starck, N. 17 134; funeral industry use 105; and
start-up companies 14, 98, 100–101, GoFundMe 143; gravestone interactivity
104–105, 106, 128–129, 134, 136; see also 128; LivesOn 132; ‘platform vernacular’
Eterni.me 58; ’polymediality’ 151; posthumous
Sterne, J. 19, 22, 23, 24 posting 69, 125, 130, 131
Stokes, P. 6, 54, 74, 125, 136
Stolow, J. 19, 20 ubiquitous computing 2, 114–115
streaming funeral services 3, 99, 101, 111, undertakers see funeral providers
112–113 ‘Unforgettable’ (Natalie Cole and Nat King
Sullivan, David 55 Cole) 126
Svidersky, Anna 13, 53, 54, 55–58, 59–60, United Kingdom 9; cemeteries 32, 46,
65, 74, 138 142–144, 147, 152; digital autopsy 121;
DNA legacy products 120–121; funeral
tablets 71, 109, 129 industry 2, 6, 11, 14, 26, 99, 100, 104,
‘talking tombstones’ 127, 153 107, 109, 111; locatedness of death 25;
technological trends and obsolescence 35, monuments replicated in digital games
53, 54, 59–60, 65, 112, 127, 138 86; natural burial 149; post-mortem
telegraph 13, 19–20, 22 photography 18
telephone 20–21, 22 United States of America 6, 9; 3D printed
telephone answering machines 23, 89, 126 urns 118; angels 144–145; artificial
television 23, 28, 126 intelligence research 132, 134; cemetery
temporality 9, 12, 14, 138, 141, 142, 150; governance 46; cemetery mapping
and the construction of personhood 33; technology 116; corporatisation 26; DNA
digital-enhanced cemeteries 129–130; legacy products 120; financial value 2, 98;
Gidden’s layers of 49–50; gravestones 31, Forest Lawn Cemetery (Los Angeles)
50; memorial websites 34–35, 50; 43–44, 109, 111; funeral cost concerns 25,
Omneo memorial cube 154–155, 155; 102; individualism 103; legal personhood
player changes in online worlds 86–87; 7; memorial websites 34; monuments
see also technological trends and replicated in digital games 86; Mount Sinai
obsolescence memorial Parks and Mortuaries 101, 105,
Terasem Movement Foundation (TMF) 134 110, 112, 116; multimedia shows at
Thomas, K. 17 funerals 110; nature burial 149;
Time Delay Manager 131 post-mortem photography 18; Roadside
TMF see Terasem Movement Foundation Memorial project 116; small towns 104;
(TMF) spiritualism movement 19; trade shows and
Tobin Brothers 104, 105 expos 11, 14, 98–99, 100; use of screens for
Total War games 90, 93 making funeral arrangements 109; video
tourism 44, 115–116 recording and streaming funerals 111
trade shows and expos 11, 14, 122, 139; up-selling 102, 109, 118
‘at-need’ technologies and services urns 31, 99, 118, 154
107–114; community 100; methodology Ursache, Marius 124
11–12; ‘post-need’ technologies
and services 114–121; ‘pre-need’ vernacular commemoration: ‘angels’ 27,
technologies and services 103–107; as 79–80, 145; celebration discourse 7, 26,
research site 99–100; see also International 30, 84, 93; funeral personalisation 4,
Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral 26–27, 93, 103; photo-sharing apps
Association (ICCFA) conference (2015); 71–73; and place 45; roadside shrines 5,
International Cemetery, Cremation 28, 89, 92, 94, 116, 149–150; and
and Funeral Association (ICCFA) secularisation 26; see also digital games;
conference (2016) memorial websites; social media
Transcendence 124 Vertesi, J. 6, 74
Tributes.com 34, 44, 112 video commemoration 110–111
trolls see RIP-Trolls video games see digital games
178 Index
video recordings 5, 23, 125, 126, 127, World of Warcraft (WoW): dedications 78;
128–129, 130, 131, 132, 139 Elloric 75–76, 76, 77, 79, 95; in-game
Vile Rat 82–84, 92 funerals and memorial services 1, 3, 75,
Vimeo 105 82, 91–92, 95; machinima 84–85;
Virtual Eternity 133, 134 non-player characters 75, 76, 80;
Virtual Memorial Garden 33 temporary nature of player changes 86;
virtual reality 116, 117 virtual-real relationship 151
voicemails 126, 128 World War II Online: Battle Ground Europe
84, 92, 93
Walter, Tony 7, 23, 26, 27, 54, 72, 79, 81, Wouters, C. 85, 93, 94
99, 145, 150 WoW see World of Warcraft (WoW)
war graves 36, 42
war memorials 79, 86 YouTube: Anna Svidersky video 57, 59;
Watson, Thomas 20–21 archiving facility 65; and digital games 84,
webcasts 99, 104 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95; funeral providers’
The Web Memorial 35 promotional videos 63; public
web memorials see memorial websites accessibility 57, 63; video games as a
Wesley Media system 111 spiritual experience 88; ‘Zyzz – the
We Were Soldiers 84 Legacy’ video 61, 63
Wikipedia 60
Wilson, E. 23 Zelig 126
wireless/radio 21–22 Zelizer, Viviana A. 25, 102
Wojcik, D. 20 Zemeckis, Robert 126
woodland burials 43 Zuckerberg, Mark 70
World of Tanks 79, 93 Zyzz see Shavershian, Aziz Sergeyevich

Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen - Death and Digital Media-Routledge (2018)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen - Death and Digital Media-Routledge (2018)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DEATH AND DIGITAL MEDIA

Martin Gibbs is Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information

Tamara Kohn is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social and

James Meese is Lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of

Bjorn Nansen is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University

Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn,

Afterword by Elizabeth Hallam

ISBN: 978-1-138-91795-8 (hbk)

List of ﬁgures viii

1 Death and digital media: an introduction 1

2.1 Arthur Conan Doyle and ectoplasm in a ‘spirit photograph’ 21

how technological innovation participates in reimagining the deceased and reimagining

resistant to new technologies, certainly in comparison to other service industries. In this

Understanding digital commemoration

We position the aforementioned literature and our own research in relation to

Mapping the ﬁeld

commemoration practices through digital media. The chapter outlines a signiﬁcant

In 1921 Mr. R. N. Speight, a well-known photographer working out of Bond Street in

Dead encounters with print and photography

their deaths functioned as continuation of Royalist propaganda, and were not

Communications media, mediums, and the dead

FIGURE 2.1Arthur Conan Doyle and ectoplasm in a ‘spirit photograph’.

telephone was ‘possessed by something supernatural’, and Bell himself attempted to

unfamiliar and strange to a naturalised part of everyday life. Questions of the

Mediating death: from institutional to vernacular commemoration

While public acts of commemoration and memorialisation have always been

FIGURE 3.1 Graves at Melbourne General Cemetery.

The ephemeral and the enduring

But herein lies something of a paradox. The restless, energetic performance of

As the days go by I have had opportunity

Headstone inscriptions are generally authored by next of kin, but at a funeral

others,7 with a family mausoleum in a prime location costing around US$825,000

Architecture and design

FIGURE 3.2 DIY options oﬀered by GonetooSoon.org.

personhood presented through what can be richly descriptive, multi-authored

People, publics, and platforms

Anna Svidersky’s commemorative publics

ummm. How are those people posting comments? Wtf.

Trolls, strangers, administrators

Remembering and reconstructing Zyzz

Forever mirin in your name brah! reps in peace

conduct can be encouraged and policed. Memorialising on ostensibly participatory

I will shred 4life thanks to zyzz

Expressions of fandom on the Facebook memorial were further reinforced with

Digital traces and legacies

These diﬀerent services speak to the growing phenomena and signiﬁcance of

Media mobility, funeral vernaculars

2017). We also considered the implications of this vernacular mode of visual

Memorialising and living on through games

signiﬁcance is a common commemorative practice, such as treasuring a father’s

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

Game rituals and player commemorations

FIGURE 5.2 A tribute to Sean ‘Vile Rat’ Smith.

World of Warcraft milieu and to Dandalyn’s character in the game.25 Numerous

Ritualised play in quotidian spaces

Contestations: matter out of place and/or ﬁtting tribute

Animating and remembering the dead

of these as discussed previously is the YouTube video ‘Serenity Now bombs a

The funeral industry and the expo

Antonio ICCFA, presentations on ‘Understanding family grief’ sat alongside ‘101

Pre-need technologies and services

discussions promoting the threat of disruption and their company’s solutions.

At-need technologies and services

Screened funeral arrangements