a great-grandson discovers documents about his great grandfather. Creates a Facebook profile for him. Fascinating way to memorialise the past in the present.
HT @davidfg
"People often wander around cemeteries and look at gravestones and wonder who that person was. By using the QR codes they can find out all they need to know"
—
Interactive gravestones: how the dead live on, online
timely. just finished editing the chapter on death yesterday.
Welcome to Life: what you see when you die
AKA: the singularity, ruined by lawyers
HT @benhammersley
(Source: youtube.com)
"Does the Internet change how we die and mourn? An overview"
—
Walter, T., Hourizi, R., Moncur, W. and Pitsillides, S. (2011). Does the internet change how we die and mourn? An overview. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 64(4): 275-302.
full text (pdf)
Very interesting overview of recent research. Here’s the abstract:
The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialisation, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarises the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society. In particular, social network sites can bring dying and grieving out of both the private and public realms and into the everyday life of social networks beyond the immediate family, and provide an audience for once private communications with the dead.
"In traditional Chinese culture, people burn paper offerings for gods, ghosts, and ancestors. There are paper objects for religious occasions, for festivals, for ceremonial events—part of both public worship and private devotion. In this cosmology, or world view, fire transforms all these paper objects into real things in the other world….I have found all manner of paper technologies—a desktop PC with a Windows operating system, USB ports, and a mouse; a flat panel LCD TV screen with a remote control and HDMI outputs; game consoles with all the buttons and hints of small blinking lights; and a branded mobile phone, prepaid phone cards, a charger and a carrying case. The products are always subtly re-branded—Nakia, Panosonic—and the logos are tweaked, but they are recognizable technology."
— Bell, G. (2011, Dec). Life, Death, and the iPad: Cultural Symbols and Steve Jobs. Communications of the ACM, 54(12): 24-25.
Dan Leviton taught me Death Education at the University of Maryland’s summer school in 1996 when I was topping up my credits for graduation from Oberlin College. It was the best class I’ve ever taken, and the notes that I took then have formed the backbone for the death chapter in Untangling the Web.
Here’s a (draft) excerpt from the introduction to that chapter:
It was the tail end of my undergraduate degree, and I had a few more credits to complete before I could graduate. They were effectively free credits; I had already completed the necessary requirements for my psychology major, and so I could take whatever I wanted. My college, being a liberal arts school, offered all kinds of options: world religions, clown skills, even a class on The Beatles. But rather than take any of them, I decided to head home for the summer and enrol in Death Studies, a course about the psychological, social, political, philosophical, historical, medical, religious, cultural, legal and economic issues that surround the end of life.
Perhaps it was the dormant connection I felt to a previous part of me (I fancied myself a bit of a Goth when I was in high school. I suppose I was actually goth-lite: I only wore the striped tights and black eyeliner, leaving the Sisters of Mercy albums to the real lifestylers). Perhaps it was a reflection of a life-long obsession that most of us share. It was, in the end, the most fascinating class I have ever taken, and I still, almost two decades and countless relocations later, have the notes that I hand wrote over those six weeks.
What I learned from the professor, the now deceased Dan Leviton, is a basic philosophical tenet: death distill us into our psychological and physiological component parts.
On the one hand, death is the denouement in the autobiography of Me. Our minds, our souls, our psychologies also cease to be. Now this is by no means the final chapter in identity, but because we’re no longer able to produce anything new ourselves - despite what spiritualists and others interested in the paranormal believe - who we are is at the liberty of the imaginations of our survivors. When we depart this mortal coil, we step down as the authors of ourselves - the uploaders of our photographs, the creators of our status updates - and continue life as social phenomena, based on other people’s memories and interpretations of what we’ve left behind. Nowadays, we survive as Facebook memorial sites. And anyone can write their versions of our stories on our posthumous walls for everyone to see.
On the other hand, we are in a constant battle to keep our bodies - frail and mortal - functioning like well-oiled machines. Our cells would turn to mush if we lived forever, explained Dan during the medical part of the the class. Our bodies are not built to survive. For this, medical research has provided intelligence (“the science bit”), but not solutions. As Colin Parkes, one of the world’s leading psychiatrists in the field of bereavement describes it, “science may delay death but it can neither prevent it nor can it tell us anything about what, if anything, lies beyond death or what we can do to prepare for that transition.”
More on Death Education - including Dan’s important role in it and the institutions that currently offer courses - is at the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying.
Golly. Rest in Peace, Dan.
"Web-based memorializing bears a diverse array of characteristics, only some of which are consistent with offline memorializing"
—
Foot, K., Warnick, B. and Schneider, S. M. (2005). Web-Based Memorializing After September 11: Toward a Conceptual Framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 4.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Online and offline memorialisation sites may have different forms, but I argue the meanings for the mourners and their functions remain the same.
Foot and Schneider argue primarily that the hypertextuality - i.e., being able to link around (with the associated personal political decisions implicit or explicit therein) - and the opportunity for those “besides the original site producer” to contribute their own politics/agendas to the place of mourning/memorialisation, are the things that make the web different for this purpose.
I wonder, however, whether the public-ness of the web makes mourning for an individual more like mourning for a public event (e.g., 11 Sept 2011, 7 July 2007 etc) or whether the public-ness is simply another public placeholder, like a physical tombstone: no one is restricted from visiting it and paying his or her respects.
To wit, they make this interesting observation/draw this conclusion:
these Web sites and others served as scenes of collective action and cultural performance (Browne, 1995). They enabled witnesses to contribute to rescue efforts, express their shock and horror, and provide comfort to others. In so doing and insofar as they were archived, these sites presently contribute to the historical record of the attacks. They represent a version of the past which, when taken in concert with other versions, can provide a variegated picture of the forms of social action and reaction that marked post-September 11 events—and this picture contributes to our present understanding of how these events were experienced and understood.
emphasis added
"..all societies see death as a transition for the person who dies. How people prepare themselves for this transition and how the survivors behave after a death has occurred varies a great deal but even here there are common themes…Crying, fear and anger are so common as to be virtually ubiquitous and most cultures provide social sanction for the expression of these emotions in the funeral rites and customs of mourning which follow bereavement…Western cultures, which tend to discourage the over expression of emotion at funerals, are highly deviant."
—
from Parkes, C.M., Laungani, P. and Young, B. (1997). Death and Bereavement Across Cultures. Psychology Press: Hove, UK.
And a nice reality check for Modern (Wo)Man:
Each generation and each society has come up with its own solutions to the problem of death and has enshrined them in a complex web of beliefs and customs which, at first glance, seem so diverse as to be impossible to digest. Yet there are common themes that run through all of them.
Let’s see how they present themselves on the web then, shall we?
The authors of this edited volume are psychiatrists, and highly respected in the field of grief and bereavement.
A trove of conceptual information on mourning from The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. Topics on this page include conceptual development:
Concepts from three theoretically and clinically related domains are being incorporated into the thinking about mourning. Each has generated a number of important implications about mourning
distinctions from grief:
Grief refers to the process of experiencing the psychological, behavioral, social, and physical reactions to the perception of loss
[Mourning] refers to… the consequent conscious and unconscious processes and courses of action that promote three operations, each with its own particular focus, that enable the individual ultimately to accommodate the loss
requirements for healthy mourning:
According to Rando, there are six specific “R” processes that must be completed successfully by the individual in order for the three reorientations—in relation to the deceased, self, and external world—of healthy mourning to occur
duration and course:
There is no general time frame for the length of mourning, it is dependent upon the unique constellation of factors associated with the mourner’s particular bereavement
and “mourning in a changing sociocultural milieu” (my favourite bit):
Twentieth-century sociocultural and technological trends in Western society have significantly increased the prevalence of complicated mourning by causing a rise in virtually all of the seven high-risk factors predisposing to complicated mourning. The trends that have contributed most substantially to this include, among others, urbanization, technicalization, secularization, deritualization, increased social mobility, social reorganization, multiculturalism, escalating violence, wide economic disparity, medical advances, and contemporary political realities
More specific cultural differences about mourning and death traditions are described on Wikipedia, BeliefNet (ten “transition rituals” in spiritual customs from Baha’i to Pagan Presbyterianism) and, oddly, the Entertaining pages of About.com (funerals and mourning rituals for the five major world religions) and About’s Chinese Culture pages.
"spiritualism is an excellent focal point from which the various dynamics inherent in the Victorian society can be examined and understood"
—
One example of the cultural contextuality of death practices and beliefs:
As with Victorian religion and society at large, spiritualism sought to successfully integrate the traditional spiritual beliefs with the new tenets and methods of science (and the new confidence inspired by science). One writer claimed that “authority, in the world of physical science is backed up by the knowledge that it can always be checked,” as assertion that the modem religions of the nineteenth century and spiritualism hoped to be able to duplicate.
emphasis added
Thanks, medical science.
Interesting also that the author describes the relationship between “the scientific approach to spiritualism” and “the new field of psychology”, particularly how spirtualists rationalised their science using theoretical constructs of the self that were emerging in my own field:
One writer applauded the discovery of the concept of “personality,” of a mental being wholly separate from the physical self, and related this as a “scientific proof” of the possibility of the “survival of the human personality after physical death.”
Points to a new rationalisation during that period of the concept of a soul separate from the physical human: “The general principle of spiritualism, that the soul was immortal, was seen to be proven by science”. This has been under debate throughout human history, and seems to be learned at an early age.
Frankenstein was, of course, the artificial intelligence debate of the Romantic Period.
In Gregory, C. (1989-1990). A Willing Suspension of Disbelief, The Student Historical Journal, Vol 21: Loyola University.
HT Ben
