Digital Death Lapper, Ellen
Suomen antropologi : Suomen Antropologisen Seuran julkaisu = Antropologi i Finland : Antropologiska sällskapet i Finland,
02/2024, Letnik:
48, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper reflexively unpicks digital ethnographic methods employed during ongoing online fieldwork on ‘digital deaths’. To do so, this research delves into the digital afterlife, exploring the fate ...of online traces and social media profiles after death, and how social media has changed our relationship with death and grieving. Anthropological studies of online death and grief faced new challenges even before COVID-19 moved research projects online. These include shared vulnerabilities and the ethnographer’s position, online field sites, omnipresent online traces and posthumous personhood, and ethical algorithms and duty to the dead. By transparently detailing my research methods whilst conducting research with Facebook and Instagram users navigating loss, this article contributes an honest and extensive debate on processes, challenges, ethics, and research collaboration. Guided by visual and media anthropology, I advocate for a set of methods rooted in shared anthropology (Rouch 1995) which fosters ongoing dialogue with participants. Thus, this article offers a new perspective on digital death, rooted in collaborative storytelling and reflexive methodologies, facilitating discussions on a still-contentious subject in certain societies. Leveraging the benefits of digital ethnography’s multi-sited nature, the research widens its geographical reach and comments on the sociocultural impacts of digital death.
Keywords: digital afterlife, digital death, digital ethnography, social media, reflexive ethnography, shared anthropology, grief, methodology
The psychological motivations and mechanisms underlying a desire to be remembered after death is an understudied area in the social sciences. While previous research has indirectly investigated the ...pursuit of legacy as a means of coping with death anxiety, little attention has been paid to other potential factors involved in the appeal of leaving an individualistic (usually positive) mark in society that will outlive the self. In the present paper, we broaden the theoretical examination of the human drive for legacy, considering proximate motivations (e.g., alleviating death anxiety, concluding one's “life story” well, etc.) and ultimate causes (i.e., the direct or indirect reproductive effects that post-mortem reputations confer to surviving relatives). Additionally, we consider cognitive factors related to afterlife beliefs and perceptions of post-mortem consciousness, and their potential role in legacy-related desires. We conclude by discussing areas for further empirical investigations of the legacy drive.
•Legacy is an understudied area in the social sciences that is potentially more complex than previous research suggests.•People's legacy desires may be a means for acquiring symbolic immortality and overcoming existential death anxiety.•Legacy provides a satisfying end to one's ‘life story’ and an ability to influence others long after one's death.•The appeal of legacy may be partly influenced by cognitive simulation constraints concerning post-mortem consciousness.•A post-mortem reputation (legacy) may provide adaptive benefits or disadvantages for one's offspring.
This article explores a number of perspectives on the creation of very different Shakespeares as personas by first examining the celebration of the 400th anniversary of his death in ...Stratford-upon-Avon in April 2016 and Shake, Mr Shakespeare, a remarkable Roy Mack 1936 Warner Brothers short. From there it moves on to consider the brief appearance of Shakespeare in the time-travel comedy Blackadder: Back and Forth, in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ episode of Doctor Who and in the off-Broadway musical Something Rotten!, before examining the work of Ben Elton in his screenplay for All Is True and in the seemingly unlikely success of Upstart Crow, the BBC sitcom with Shakespeare as the lead character, which has so far completed three six-episode series and three Christmas specials. The article is concerned with the multiple masks of the sequence of personas that create these Shakespeares, from Shakespeare as perhaps the epitome of the celebrity author to Shakespeare as a sitcom Dad.
Technologies of digital afterlife and posthumous communication are more developed than ever, and the possibilities for communicating with digital representations of people who perished are coming to ...fruition. Studies about digital engagement with death reveals contradicting trends. Whereas technologies designed for interacting with the dead have thus far failed, users reappropriate means of online communication that were not intended to facilitate communication with the dead - to facilitate precisely this practice. This article searches for a fuller understanding of the changing attitudes toward death in light of emerging intentional posthumous communication technologies (PCTs). Drawing on a national survey of Israeli Internet users, the study explores contemporary attitudes toward death and digital afterlife, and analyzes users' perceptions of emerging PCTs. Findings indicate that whereas the general public is still reluctant to adopt such technologies, online activity and willingness to access digital remains are significant predictors for considering digital interactions with the dead.
Studies on episodic future thinking (the capacity to simulate possible experiences in one’s personal future) have ignored future thinking that extends beyond death. We here examined personal ...afterlife projections in comparison with autobiographical memories and future projections in Thai (Study 1) and American (Study 2) samples. Participants reported all three types of events and rated their characteristics. In both studies, the characteristics of afterlife events were rated lower than those of memories and future events. Participants who believed in the afterlife generally rated afterlife events higher than non-believers and those who were uncertain, although this effect was most pronounced in Study 2. The content of afterlife events followed religious beliefs in the afterlife, and the majority of afterlife events were expected to take place immediately after death. The findings show that afterlife thoughts demonstrate characteristics that are comparable to memories and episodic future thoughts, and are shaped by religious beliefs.
Can performance art be conserved? If so, how, and if not, why not? Enhanced by short philosophical reflection surrounding conservation and its entanglement with the world, this essay reviews the ...debates that took place on the occasion of the international colloquium devoted to the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Care. The colloquium was organized at Bern University of the Arts on May 29-30, 2021 within the research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (Swiss National Science Foundation, 2020-24). The essay investigates the notion of performance through the lens of its conserveability and through a multidisciplinary perspective represented by a diversity of voices during the colloquium. It ultimately presents both performance and conservation as inherently unstable categories that require a careful and reflective approach.
1. Litter drives a wide variety of important functions in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. However, the role of litter in regulating community dynamics and ecosystem processes has mostly been ...studied in terms of litter presence or amount. Besides in biogeochemistry, we still do not know how litters from distinct plant species differ in their effects on other ecosystem processes and services including biodiversity support. 2. We briefly synthesize the multiple litter functions and services by using the afterlife legacy of interspecific variation in plant morphological, physical and chemical traits as a unifying tool. We do so by explicit reference to two highly distinct but possibly interacting 'trait spectra': the widely known Resource Economic Spectrum, and the Size and Shape Spectrum, a trait-based axis ranging from small and relatively simply shaped distal plant organs to large and more intricately shaped ones. 3. Synthesis. Ecosystem services provided by plant litter are driven by either one of the trait spectra or by both. In this way, the Size and Shape Spectrum-Resource Economic Spectrum concept is a promising tool for understanding and predicting the contributions of different plant species, through the afterlife effects of their litter traits, to various important services in different ecosystems and human contexts.
The article discusses different but related figures of trans-generational heritage in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Heine, and Sigmund Freud. The common ground of these ...German-Jewish authors is an interpretative pattern within the theory of history/memory based in the idea of a strong bond of subsequent generations and their interrelation, which refers back to the biblical origins of the idea of ‘heritage’. Both Heine and Benjamin hypothesize a secret agreement between the generations, which might be read as the origin of the idea of solidarity. In Freud’s psychoanalysis we find a complementary concept in the figure of ‘archaic heritage’ elaborated in Monotheism, namely a trans-generational trans- feral of repressed memories of the ancestors to their offspring. While Freud, not coincidentally after the First World War and during the rise of Nazism, discovers the unconscious transfer of guilt, Arendt seeks – after the Second World War – to regain, in the space between human beings, action as the space of the political. By emphasizing ‘natality’ as a basic human condition she invests policy in the acting of men in history with the condition of the possibility of a new beginning. The future, according to the insight of these authors, will not be created in abstract images or produced by means of a program, but will come into being by the treatment of the past and the heritage of those who lived before us and by the way in which we act in the present.
SIGRID WEIGEL: ACTING AND MEMORY, HOPE AND GUILT: HERITAGE AS THE BOND OF GENERATIONS IN ARENDT, BENJAMIN, HEINE, AND FREUD
The article discusses different but related figures of trans-generational heritage in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Heine, and Sigmund Freud. The common ground of these German-Jewish authors is an interpretative pattern within the theory of history/memory based in the idea of a strong bond of subsequent generations and their interrelation, which refers back to the biblical origins of the idea of ‘heritage’. Both Heine and Benjamin hypothesize a secret ag- reement between the generations, which might be read as the origin of the idea of solidarity. In Freud’s psychoanalysis we find a complementary concept in the figure of ‘archaic heritage’ elaborated in Monotheism, namely a trans-generational trans- feral of repressed memories of the ancestors to their offspring. While Freud, not coincidentally after the First World War and during the rise of Nazism, discovers the unconscious transfer of guilt, Arendt seeks – after the Second World War – to regain, in the space between human beings, action as the space of the political. By emphasizing ‘natality’ as a basic human condition she invests policy in the acting of men in history with the condition of the possibility of a new beginning. The future, according to the insight of these authors, will not be created in abstract images or produced by means of a program, but will come into being by the treatment of the past and the heritage of those who lived before us and by the way in which we act in the present.
The Law Of The Upload Marinotti, João; Lubin, Asaf
Belphégor,
01/2024, Letnik:
22
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In April 2020, Amazon released a new comedy series called “Upload.” The show extrapolates a future in which human consciousness is successfully simulated in silico. In this world, individuals pay to ...be “uploaded” into a digital afterlife. When uploaded, human consciousness is converted into data and executable code, which can be edited, reset, or even deleted depending on each upload’s membership and payment plan. The show breaks the boundaries between reality and virtual reality, consciousness and artificial intelligence, and even life and afterlife, entangling existing legal questions in novel ways. By addressing three of these legal issues, we hope to highlight how science fiction may help launch a more nuanced conversation about what is artificial in artificial intelligence, what is virtual in virtual reality, and what is digital in digital rights. We argue that becoming early adopters of a new reconceptualized language around “us” and “them”, the “self” and the “other,” can perhaps future proof our society from the technological perils that await us.
This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com. By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog ...outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped images, (b) altering other people’s selfies and/or reposting them as your own, (c) misunderstandings from separating text from image (caption-stripping), (d) disrespecting the self-shooters’ way of curating their blogs. Boundary theory as well as concepts of social afterlife of content and assumed trust are used to illuminate that images, including selfies, have significant, yet different meanings to different people and play an important part in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships and communities.
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