We are born, live, and die with technologies. This book is about the role technology plays in sustaining narratives of living, dying, and coming to be. Contributing authors examine how technologies connect, disrupt, or help us reorganize ways of parenting and nurturing life. They further consider how technology sustains our ways of thinking and being, hopefully reconciling the distance between who we are and who we aspire to be. Finally, they address the role technology plays in helping us come to terms with death, looking at technologically enhanced memorials, online rituals of mourning, and patterns of grief enabled through technology. Ultimately, this volume is about using technology to reimagine the art of life.
Introduction
Zizi Papacharissi
Numerical being and non-being: probing the ethos of quantification in bereavement online
Amanda Lagerkvist
Co-Creating Birth and Death on Social Media
Tama Leaver
Imagining the future through the lens of the digital: parents’ narratives of generational change
Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross
Storytelling the Self into Citizenship: How Social Media Practices Facilitate Adolescent and Emerging Adult Political Life
Lynn Schofield Clark and Regina Marchi
Family life in polymedia
Mirca Madianou
Every Click You Make, I’ll Be Watching You: Facebook Stalking and Neoliberal Information
Ilana Gershon
Formative Events, Networked Spaces, and the Political Socialization of Youth
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Ioana Literat
Defying Death: Black Joy as Resistance Online
Catherine Steele and Jessica Lu
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette
Crystal Abidin
Deconstructing Immortality? Identity Work and the Death of David Bowie in Digital Media
Johanna Sumiala
The afterlife of software
Michael Stevenson and Robert W. Gehl
From Personal to Personalized Memory: Social Media as Mnemotechnology
Robert Prey and Rik Smit
Social media rituals: the uses of celebrity death in digital culture
Jean Burgess, Peta Mitchell and Felix Victor Münch
Ghosts in the Machines: How Centuries of Technological Play with Death Has Helped Make Sense of Life
Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner
Biography
Zizi Papacharissi is professor and head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has collaborated with Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the US.
"Now that the ‘networked self’ has come of age, we need to deal with existential questions about online personhood, adulthood, and parenthood. Internet technologies are transforming everyday practices revolving around birth, friendship, family life, memory and death. This sparkling collection edited by Zizi Papacharissi highlights many profound aspects of this transformation. An eye-opener for every academic interested in online affects!" -José van Dijck, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
