Death Online

This article is about death, mortuary rituals and aspects of change, within physical/offline-onsite and virtual/online environments and blending onsite and online observation and participation. I examine how virtual/online and offline/actual onsite practices intersect in modern death related perceptions and procedures such as mourning and memorialisation. I will use as a case study the area of Upper Merabello in Eastern Crete, where especially during the last decade, social media and the internet are increasingly used, however customary ritual practices hold a prominent position in the local context. Death related practices, although influenced by the economic crisis and the recent Covid-19 pandemic, they still retain a vital centrality in the individual and social life. Utilising the notion of powerful knowledge for explaining how change is enacted as well as the concepts of "polymedia" and "PolySocial reality", I attempt to picture the dynamic process of transformation and to propose a way of approaching and accounting for changes or adaptations that occur over time, especially as related to the impact of new technologies.

We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-Western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration. We call for a scalable, sustainable, and dignified curation model that incorporates the interests of multiple stakeholders.

We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-Western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration. We call for a scalable, sustainable, and dignified curation model that incorporates the interests of multiple stakeholders.

The notion that ‘death is a taboo’ pervades private, public and academic discourses around death, dying and bereavement in contemporary Western societies. The rise of digital media within the last decades further complicates the appreciation of the stance that death is a taboo, given the increased opportunities afforded in social media environments for embracing death, fostering new intimacies with strangers and semi-strangers but also for turning death into a spectacle (Jakobsen, 2016). The study of death-related practices online and the tensions they raise has rapidly been growing in the interdisciplinary field of Death online studies. However, in this field there is a need for developing shared conceptual and analytical frameworks and ensure methodological and theoretical robustness in line with developments in the study of social media communication. There is a need to synthesize insights from death sociology and interdisciplinary death online studies in order to shape an agenda...