This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny.With DeadSocialT one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way. Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived.

Places death and dying in the digital age in historical perspective, showing how beliefs about and approaches to death and dying have changed constantly over time

IntroductionA. David Lewis and Christopher M. MoremanPart I: Death, Mourning, and Social Media1 Messaging the Dead: Social Network Sites and Theologies of AfterlifeErinn Staley2 Profiles of the Dead: Mourning and Memorial on FacebookHeidi Ebert3 Virtual Graveyard: Facebook, Death, and Existentialist CritiqueAri Stillman4 Tweeting Death, Posting Photos, and Pinning Memorials: Remembering the Dead in Bits and PiecesCandi K. CannPart II: Online Memorialization and Digital Legacies5 eMemoriam: Digital Necrologies, Virtual Remembrance, and the Question of PermanenceMichael Arntfield6 The Restless Dead in the Digital CemeteryBjorn Nansen, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, and Tamara Kohn7 The Social Value of Digital GhostsPam Briggs and Lisa Thomas8 Mythopoesis, Digital Democracy, and the Legacy of the Jonestown WebsiteRebecca MoorePart III: Virtual Worlds beyond Death9 Remembering Laura Roslin: Fictional Death and a Real Bereavement Community OnlineErica Hurwitz Andrus10 Necromedia-Reversed Ontogeny or Posthuman Evolution?Denisa Kera11 Infinite Gestation: Death and Progress in Video GamesStephen Mazzeo and Daniel Schall12 The Death of Digital WorldsWilliam Sims BainbridgeBibliographyAbout the ContributorsIndex