Many of us will have turned to the Internet to grieve and remember the dead — by posting messages on the Facebook walls of departed friends, for instance. Yet, we should give more thought to how the dead and dying themselves exert agency over their online presence, argues US sociologist Timothy Recuber in The Digital Departed.
In his expansive scholarly analysis, Recuber examines more than 2,000 digital texts, from blog posts by those who are terminally ill to online suicide notes and pre-prepared messages designed to be e-mailed to loved ones after someone has died. As he notes, “the digital data in this book are sad, to be sure, and they have often brought me to tears as I collected and analyzed them”. Yet, they are well worth delving into.
Recuber brings a fresh lens to studies of death culture by focusing on the feelings and intentions of the people who are dying, rather than those of the mourners. For example, he finds that a person’s sense of self can be altered through blogging about their illness. Writing freely helps people to come to terms with their deaths by making their suffering “legible and understandable”. Reflections on family and friends also reveal a sense of self-transformation. Indeed, many bloggers “attested to the positive value of the experience of a terminal illness, for the way it brought them closer to loved ones and especially for the wisdom it generated.”
This theme of self-transformation, which Recuber refers to as ‘digital reenchantment’, continues throughout the book. This terminology relates to the work of German sociologist Max Weber, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, argued that humans’ increasing ability to understand the world through science was robbing life of magic and mystery — a process he called disenchantment. When the dead seem to be resurrected through digital media, Recuber argues, they regain that mystery.
Recuber explores how X (formerly Twitter) hashtags can act as a form of collective online rememberance. He focuses on photos and stories shared in posts that use two hashtags, sparked by violent deaths of Black people in the United States: #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, in response to Sandra Bland’s death in prison in Waller County, Texas, in July 2015, and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, which remembers Michael Brown, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The “thousands of individual micro-narratives” posted in these threads, Recuber writes, amount to a “collectively composed story affirming the value of all Black lives and legacies”. They are memorials for the lives that have already been lost and for those that might be in future.
You can read the entire article at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00016-9.