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

difference? Aside from sensory details, can placing a digital rose on a virtual memorial truly be said to be different than placing a real one on a gravesite when both are symbolic gestures?

that the dead can remain socially alive because of their sustained presence in memory and the objects that support it.

“Facebook doesn’t connect me to anyone, it connects me to Facebook . . . [as] an accomplice to my own isolation.”

At a funeral, as one Facebook user said, “usually the people who were the closest get to speak. But on Facebook, even if you knew the person just a little bit you can share a memory.”

Recently, however, a new application, aptly called “If I Die,” allows users to craft a final “status update” in the form of text or video that will be published to the user’s profile once one’s three designated trustees report the death to Facebook for verification.

The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead.

First, seeing how other people's experience with the deceased are similar to one's own by reliving those memories authenticates who the deceased was to the bereaved. The bereaved may find comfort in noting such similarities, perhaps because they affirm that the capacity in which the bereaved knew the deceased was demonstrative of the latter's chara

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.

First, a third party can delete the account, either independently if she or he has the password or by requesting that Facebook remove the account, a process that requires proof, such as a death certificate and evidence of the requestor’s immediate relationship to the deceased.