Margaret Gibson

Death and mourning in technologically mediated culture

Abstract This paper examines the expansion of death and grief from private experience and spaces, into more public spheres via a range of media events and communication technologies. This shift is increasingly acknowledged and documented in death studies and media research. The modern experience of ‘sequestered death’ has passed. Death images and events are now thoroughly mediated by the visual and communication technologies used and accessed by a vast number of citizens across the globe. At the same time, the proliferation and accessibility of death imagery and narratives does not necessarily mean that the Western world has moved forward and beyond ‘death denial’. Indeed, one of the key arguments of this paper is that mediated death – death as televisual, cinematic, and journalistic image and narrative – does not necessarily equate to a familiarity, and especially an existential acceptance of death, as it is faced and experienced in everyday life and relationships. Indeed, what we may be facing, and witnessing, is a widening gap and experiential differential between media/technological death culture and ‘real life’ contexts and temporalities of death and bereavement.

Some thoughts on celebrity deaths: Steve Irwin and the issue of public mourning

On 4 September 2006, Steve Irwin, otherwise know as the ‘‘crocodile hunter’’ and ‘‘wildlife warrior,’’ died after being fatally wounded from a stingray barb. Since his death there has been a huge outpouring of public grief in Australia and overseas. The extent and reach of Irwin’s popularity among adults and particularly, children, was perhaps not fully known and registered until his passing. Glaringly obvious in the media frenzy is the commercial gains to be made by celebrity deaths. On the same day as his death, eBay was auctioning off t-shirts, mugs, and other memorabilia. Significant deaths have the power to create ‘‘communities of mourning.’’ These communities surface quickly with flowers, cards, and other paraphernalia of grief laid at significant sites. In the case of Steve Irwin, Australia Zoo became the main site of pilgrimage. Once the process of pilgrimage starts it tends to build as people enjoy a rare opportunity to generate, through their own action, a bond of shared feeling among strangers. What all these strangers have in common is a powerful identification with a celebrity or a world leader—someone they believe in, trust, or admire because of the work they do or simply because of who they are. In recent years, various communities of mourning on a global scale surfaced in response to Princess Diana’s death (1997), Mother Teresa’s death (1997), the tragedy of September 11 (2001), and the death of Pope John Paul II (2005). At the same time, modern media, far from documenting a process outside its own making, creates and enables this phenomenon. Communities of mourning have a period of intensity and then they dissipate. The main event, usually the memorial service or funeral, marks the climax. Once the cameras are turned off and the headline stories change, the deep grieving begins for those whose connection was close and heartfelt. Death is reported everyday in the media because of wars, civil unrest, disasters, accidents, and disease. Celebrity deaths, however, are of a different order. Celebrities have the power to harness and sustain the attention of large populations across the globe. From these deaths, media corporations create news headlines, programmes, stories, and products for profit. Just days after Steve Irwin’s public memorial service at Australia Zoo, negotiations were already underway to produce a DVD of the event. While the proceeds of the DVD will no Mortality, Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2007

YouTube and bereavement vlogging: Emotional exchange between strangers

Through a qualitative study of YouTube bereavement vlogs and posts by young people about parental death, this article examines the rise and significance of intimate mourning between strangers. An unexpected finding of this research has been the speed with which young people create vlogs or post messages of their bereavement; very often within hours of a death. The question of time in relation to bereavement grief is thus a feature of this article’s analysis. The article argues that YouTube, like other social media, exposes and contests the disenfranchising of grief in offline social settings and relationships while, at the same time, enfranchising disaffected and excluded bereavement discourse via media sociality. It also argues, conversely, that YouTube, like other social media, is now a primary social space (not secondary or supplementary); it provides the where and how and who to connect with regarding personal grief and bereavement.

The Truth Machine: Polygraphs, Popular Culture and the Confessing Body

This paper discusses the technology of polygraph machines and lie detector tests in relation to the body as a specific site of truth investments. It discusses the way the machine is imagined or constituted in popular culture and scientific literature as a means of discovering guilty knowledge or getting the truth objectively and painlessly. It argues that the history of this technology turns truth or the sign of concealed knowledge into a bodily manifestation that is graphically capturable and ultimately readable. The graphic tracings multiply the scene or site of confession from a voluntary or involuntary verbal process to a bodily one. This technology does not operate on a model of truth represented through the body, where it is imagined as hidden within the interior of the body−an interior that houses or contains secrets. On the contrary, whether for better or worse, this technology constitutes truth or the sign of deception as an animate, graphic sign in and through a body that speaks. Breathing patterns, pulse rates and secretions of sweat are constituted as meaningful, and this opens the way for potentially limitless decipherability.

Bodies without Histories: Cosmetic Surgery and the Undoing of Time

To look upon faces is always to sense this death that is latent, visible in the frail freshness of youth, the wrinkles of age. (Lingis 1994, 167) As a practice and industry, cosmetic surgery brings...

Digital Objects of the Dead: Negotiating Electronic Remains

Dominant ideas of the way groups and individuals should respond to a loss are socially constructed, and a number of scholars have pointed out this constructed nature of grief and mourning, suggesting that ‘human response to loss is not genetically determined but culturally learned’ (DeSpelder and Strickland, 1999, p. 96). Doka and Martin (2002, p. 339) emphasise the importance of culture in constructing grief and mourning, arguing that ‘culture affects more than simply the expression of grief’, but also impacts on ‘patterns of attachments, defining the meaning of different losses, influencing who one mourns as well as the intensity of that grief’.

Death and the Transformation of Objects and Their Value

It is often through conversations about household objects, jewellery or other items that the very subject of death is broached within families. Objects mediate and produce death discourse just as death mediates and produces value and meaning. The movement of objects within, across and between private/personal spaces and relationships, public spaces and relations, and commercial domains and relations is about value transformation. Value is a fluctuating, comparative or relative measure and in the sphere of personal life and spaces objects attain, maintain or transform in both value and meaning through the life course and through events such as death and bereavement. While objects are always on the move in consumer capitalism, bereavement and household disbandment instigate emotionally charged processes of decision-making about what things might mean, their value (and for whom) and where they should go. This paper examines shifting classifications of objects — sacred, profane and abject — in relation to shifting registers of meaning and economies of value. It argues that the same type of object can have quite different, even contradictory, value attributions.

Automatic and automated mourning: messengers of death and messages from the dead

Death is one of the most significant human events and rites of passage, fundamentally shaping the life course of individuals, families and social networks. For this reason, recognizing that someone has died and ritualizing this loss requires forms of communication and mediation between individuals and families in relation to wider social networks. Media has always played a significant part in how people are informed of a death, enabling rituals to proceed such as death notices and obituaries in newspapers. Today, information communication technologies (ICTs) and social media are routinely part of how people are informed about death, and enact a range of socially shared mourning and remembrance processes. This paper explores the current deployment of ICTs and social networking within practices and rituals of mourning, applying media theory. It focuses on the temporality of mourning in a culture of speed and the activation of mourning from the announcement of death to the cycles of anniversaries via social networking culture and through technological forms of automation. The question of how the bereaved (those significantly effected by a death) take or lose control of when and how they mourn and remember the dead in a technologically networked culture is this papers central concern.

Living and Dying in a Virtual World: Digital Kinships, Nostalgia, and Mourning in Second Life

This book takes readers into stories of love, loss, grief and mourning and reveals the emotional attachments and digital kinships of the virtual 3D social world of Second Life. At fourteen years old, Second Life can no longer be perceived as the young, cutting-edge environment it once was, and yet it endures as a place of belonging, fun, role-play and social experimentation. In this volume, the authors argue that far from facing an impending death, Second Life has undergone a transition to maturity and holds a new type of significance. As people increasingly explore and co-create a sense of self and ways of belonging through avatars and computer screens, the question of where and how people live and die becomes increasingly more important to understand. This book shows how a virtual world can change lives and create forms of memory, nostalgia and mourning for both real and avatar based lives.

Surfing and ocean-based death ritual: the paddle-out ceremony

Abstract This paper is based on interviews with self-identified surfers from both Australia and Hawaii who have extensive histories of participation in the surfing funeral or post-funeral ritual of the paddle-out ceremony. The paddle-out is an ocean-based death ritual in which the deceased are symbolically, and often materially through cremains, placed in the ocean and farewelled through highly physical ritual actions. In a paddle-out, surfing communities located at specific, and sometimes multiple places, come together to acknowledge, remember and tell stories of a member who is missing in the line-up. As a rite of passage, the paddle-out does not neatly fit anthropology’s, and particularly van Gennep’s idea of the funeral as primarily a separation ritual. Indeed, our research suggests that ideas of separation and connection, departure and continuing to mingle with the living all operate in how the ritual is experienced and interpreted. While co-extensive with Hawaiian surfing traditions, the paddle-out is also an adaptive, modern, flexible ritual open to personalisation in its form and meaning. The paddle-out ceremony is a rite passage for both the living and the dead and the deeply physical nature of the ritual provides a transformational experience of emotional release while also creating and renewing bonds and group solidarity. The circle formation, a key symbolic practice in the ritual, is central to production and self-recognition of community as participants face each other with the bereaved often placed inside the circle’s centre in a visual, physical act of support. The deceased are also symbolically placed in the centre as the ritual mourns their loss and invariably celebrates their life and surfing identity.