Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age

(Hardback)

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This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny. With DeadSocial one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way. Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived.

Reviews

Recommended. All levels/libraries. * Choice *
This book certainly has the potential to stimulate fascinating interdisciplinary exchanges. This reviewer is hopeful that academics, researchers, clinicians, and educators will find ways to develop creative partnerships as a result of these discussions. * Omega Journal of Dying and Death *

Author Bio

Christopher M. Moreman, PhD, is associate professor in philosophy at California State University, East Bay, with expertise in comparative religion, death and dying, and religious and paranormal experience. A. David Lewis, PhD, is adjunct assistant professor at several colleges across the greater Boston area and is a steering committee member of the America Academy of Religion's Death, Dying, and Beyond program unit.