Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age

Professor Tony Walter of the University of Bath describes the quiet revolution occurring in grief counseling which once emphasized “detachment achieved through the working through of feelings,” but now emphasizes “the continued presence of the dead and a continuous conversation with and about them.”

Jacques Derrida writes: “I believe that ghosts are part of the future and that the modern technology of images [. . .] like cinematography and telecommunication [. . .] enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to

The Living Headstone, for example, attaches or engraves a QR code to a headstone, which is then readable by smartphone and connected to a unique, personalized online memorial page. This digital space is “similar to a personal Facebook page,” where, a “Living Headstone” archive site contains information you and friends can add about your loved one,

haunt us.”21 For Derrida, the dead haunt the living in their absence, and photos of the dead remain forever present, a spectral ghost in a virtual web, both here and not here.

“When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting,”

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”