Death, Spirituality, and Digital Afterlife

The chapter begins with a brief history of the representation of death in communication media asking how and for what purpose death is represented in news media beginning with early newspapers, the visual representation of death in photography, television, and finally the Internet and social media. It turns to Carey's ritual view of communication and investigates death representation in different media from the perspective of symbolic and religiously and spiritually inspired communication. The chapter considers the emerging research field of digital death pointing out some questions for current scholarly thinking about how the digital representation of death in hybrid media may challenge existing philosophical, sociological, and theological categories of life and death. New vernacular acts of mediated ritual engagement with death have evolved and expanded as ordinary media users have gained the capacity to create and share such acts through social media.