Online Afterlives

Download or read book Online Afterlives written by Davide Sisto and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How digital technology--from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones--is changing our relationship to death. Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts--electronic traces of the dead--appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.