Overview

A fascinating exploration of the social meaning of digital death From blogs written by terminally ill authors to online notes left by those considering suicide, technology has become a medium for the dead and the dying to cope with the anxiety of death. Services like artificial intelligence chatbots, mind-uploading, and postmortem blog posts offer individuals the ability to cultivate their legacies in a bid for digital immortality. The Digital Departed explores the posthumous internet world from the perspective of both the living and the dead. Timothy Recuber traces how communication beyond death evolved over time. Historically, the methods of mourning have been characterized by unequal access to power and privilege. However, the internet offers more agency to the dead, allowing users accessibility and creativity in curating how they want to be remembered. Based on hundreds of blog posts, suicide notes, Twitter hashtags, and videos, Recuber examines the ways we die online, and the digital texts we leave behind. Combining these data with interviews, surveys, analysis of news coverage, and a historical overview of the relationship between death and communication technology going back to pre-history, The Digital Departed explains what it means to live and die on the internet today. In this thought-provoking and uniquely troubling work, Recuber shows that although we might pass away, our digital souls live on, online, in a kind of purgatory of their own.

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9781479814947

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"""The Digital Departed asks a compelling question: what becomes of the digital self once we die? At a time when more than six million have died from the pandemic, this investigation explores the many ways of dying and grieving through mediated spaces. Recuber's exploration of death-related digital platforms is an exemplary work of digital sociology, which combines classical sociological theory with empirical work on a variety of technologies. Written in an accessible style, I look forward to using this book in my sociology classes.""-- ""Jessie Daniels, author of Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It"" ""The Digital Departed uses a diverse array of data -- from digital suicide notes to blogs maintained by the terminally ill - to uncover a compelling web of complex relationships among digital technologies, broad cultural shifts, and the most intimate of human experiences, death. At once peculiar and profound, it is a memorable read bound to leave readers doing some digital soul searching.""-- ""Sarah Sobieraj, author of Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy"" ""Methodologically rigorous and theoretically rich, The Digital Departed offers the first comprehensive treatment of death and dying online through the voices of those who have passed. At times moving and always beautifully written, the book is at once a theory of self in the digital age and a focused statement on the nature of life, death, community, and society.""-- ""Jenny L. Davis, author of How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things"" ""Timothy Recuber's The Digital Departed is an innovative and timely study of digital approaches to commemorating, coping with, and avoiding death. Tracking digital afterlives from the birth of what he calls the digital soul to the quest for virtual immortality, he concludes with cautionary notes about what he calls the limits of digital transcendencies. Recuber uses various instances of life-prolongation to address the key question: what becomes of the digital self when we die? The underlying desires to avoid death and remember lost loved ones often animate technological adoption and yet go unnamed and understudied in much of the research that makes up the emergent field of Critical Tech Studies. The book is highly readable and teachable. I plan to use it in my Sociology of Robots and AI course in years to come. Recuber's voice is accessible, and he manages to link seemingly disparate rituals and activities where the digital, ephemeral and algorithmic meet questions of power, selfhood and ontological frailty. Highly recommended.""-- ""Karla A. Erickson, author of How We Die Now: Intimacy and the Work of Dying"""

The Digital Departed asks a compelling question: what becomes of the digital self once we die? At a time when more than six million have died from the pandemic, this investigation explores the many ways of dying and grieving through mediated spaces. Recuber's exploration of death-related digital platforms is an exemplary work of digital sociology, which combines classical sociological theory with empirical work on a variety of technologies. Written in an accessible style, I look forward to using this book in my sociology classes. -- Jessie Daniels, author of Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It The Digital Departed uses a diverse array of data -- from digital suicide notes to blogs maintained by the terminally ill - to uncover a compelling web of complex relationships among digital technologies, broad cultural shifts, and the most intimate of human experiences, death. At once peculiar and profound, it is a memorable read bound to leave readers doing some digital soul searching. -- Sarah Sobieraj, author of Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy Methodologically rigorous and theoretically rich, The Digital Departed offers the first comprehensive treatment of death and dying online through the voices of those who have passed. At times moving and always beautifully written, the book is at once a theory of self in the digital age and a focused statement on the nature of life, death, community, and society. -- Jenny L. Davis, author of How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things Timothy Recuber's The Digital Departed is an innovative and timely study of digital approaches to commemorating, coping with, and avoiding death. Tracking digital afterlives from the birth of what he calls the digital soul to the quest for virtual immortality, he concludes with cautionary notes about what he calls the limits of digital transcendencies. Recuber uses various instances of life-prolongation to address the key question: what becomes of the digital self when we die? The underlying desires to avoid death and remember lost loved ones often animate technological adoption and yet go unnamed and understudied in much of the research that makes up the emergent field of Critical Tech Studies. The book is highly readable and teachable. I plan to use it in my Sociology of Robots and AI course in years to come. Recuber's voice is accessible, and he manages to link seemingly disparate rituals and activities where the digital, ephemeral and algorithmic meet questions of power, selfhood and ontological frailty. Highly recommended. -- Karla A. Erickson, author of How We Die Now: Intimacy and the Work of Dying

Author Information

Timothy Recuber is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Smith College. He is the author of Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster, winner of the Outstanding Recent Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotions section.

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