Introduction to the Special Issue on the Death, Afterlife, and….docx

1、Introduction to the Special Issue on the Death, Afterlife, and Immortality of Bodies and DataConnor GrahamTemhusu College and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, SingaporeMartin GibbsDepartment of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Austr

2、aliaLanfranco AcetiFaculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey and DepartmentUnited Kingdomof Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, London,This special issue poses questions concerning death, afterlife and immortality in the age of the Internet. It extends previo

3、us work by examining current and emerging practices of grieving and memorializing supported by new media. It suggests that peoples lives today are extended, prolonged, and ultimately transformed through the new circulations, repetitions, and recontextualizations on the Internet and other platforms.

4、It also shows that publics are being formed and connected with in new ways, and new practices and rituals are emerging, as the traditional notions of the body are being challenged. We argue that these developments have implications for how people will be discovered and conceived of in the future. We

5、 consider possible extensions to the research presented here in terms of people, practices, and data. First, some sections of the population, in particular those who are the dying and populations in developing countries and the Global South, have largely been neglected to date. Second, practices suc

6、h as (online) suicide and sacrilegious or profane behaviors remain largely uninvestigated. Third, the discussion of the management of the digital self after death has only begun. We conclude by posing further questions concerning the prospect of emerging cities of the dead.Keywords (after-)death, th

7、e Internet, hybridization, publics, rituals, historicization Connor Graham, Martin Gibbs, and Lanfranco AcetiAddress correspondence to Connor Graham, Tembusu College, National University of Singapore, 28 College Avenue East, #B1-O1, Singapore 138598. E-mail: onecalledconnornus.edu.sgWhat is death in

8、 an era of ubiquitous and encroaching digital life? What is afterlife in an age of mass digital production and consumption? What is immortality in a time of the digital celebrity and the digital mob? In this special issue, contributing authors engage with such questions, and their analysis suggests

9、that new technologies, specifically the Internet, change the way death and after-death are experienced, performed, and discovered.The existing research has focused heavily on online memorials, in particular on the content of these sites (e.g., de Vries and Rutherford 2004; Jones 2004; Foot et al. 20

10、05) and the grieving processes of their users (e.g., Sofka 1997; Veale 2003). More recently, attention has turned to social network sites with particular focus on the practices and meanings of online memorializing by teenagers (Carroll and Landry 2010; Williams and Merten 2009). In general this rese

11、arch has tended to be connected with a wider literature in the social sciences that examines death, grieving, and memorialization (e.g., Hallam and Hockey 2001; Hockey, Woodthorpe, and Komaromy 2010; Metcalf and Huntington 1991).The articles in this special issue advance work on the concept of (afte

12、r-)death1 through a series of contrasting analyses of current and emerging practices of grieving and memorializing online. They show that, even after death, peoples lives are extended, prolonged, and ultimately changed in the present, future, and in history through new circulations, repetitions, and

13、 recontextualizations to the variously constituted publics (Warner 2002, 66) “that come into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.” These findings are discussed in the following in terms of bodies and hybridization, constituting publics, new practices and rituals, and excavation and

14、 historiciza- tion.BODIES AND HYBRIDIZATIONFrom the beginning, discourse in popular media steered us toward a growing sense of an other self, a notion of a self that is digitally distributed across text messages, Web pages, social networking sites, blog comments, and so on: a digital self. Around th

15、e time that the proposal was conceived, in Time magazine Faure (2009) suggested that the capacity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) raised important questions regarding legacy and curation: “As people spend more time at keyboards, theres less being stored away in dusty attics for

16、family and friends to hang on to” (online). But Faure went further than simply describing concerns about archiving and storage to ask a question that suggested some anxiety and even resentment about a burgeoning and enduring self: “The pieces of our lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself, but what happens to our virtual identity after we die?” (online). Bollmer (2013), in this issue, suggests that this tension bet