ABSTRACT
The ways in which human beings consecrate, bury, mourn and dispose of the dead are extraordinarily varied across cultures, places, religions and beliefs. What has remained constant across the centuries, however, is the facticity of death as absolute stasis, unconditional finality and the termination of all that might be associated with pleasure, joy, satisfaction, achievement or even pain. Whatever else death may be, it is widely acknowledged by anthropologists and archaeologists that death marks the end of relationships, commitments, activities, feelings and thoughts that occupied one’s time and space while one was alive (Scarre 2006).Mourning the death of loved ones, therefore, means mourning the terminal cessation not just of the person herself or himself, but also, arguably, of everything that they enjoyed and consumed while they were alive. More interestingly, perhaps, is the fact that, once I die, others who once either knew or loved me can no longer relate to me as an object of consumption in any meaningful sense of the word. They may lay flowers on my gravestone or have photographs of me around the house, keep a lock of my hair under their pillows or place the urnwithmy ashes on themantelpiece, but the ‘I’ they knewand engagedwith is nomore. Yet, the desire to connect with the dead after their death goes back to Biblical times. As an
act of consumption, therefore, mourning the death of loved ones (or of any others) appears to offer little prospect of change, let alone dynamic change. Even more preposterous is any idea that death can be enjoyed in any way, shape or form. That foremost champion of happy consumption, Epicurus, observed that death has little relevance to either the living or the dead: ‘since for the former it is not, and for the latter, it is no more’ (Epicurus 1926, p. 85). Clearly, then, death is
scarcely relevant to lived enjoyment. It would seem absurd to speak of death as having the potential to offer material possibilities of consumption. Equally, if not more absurd, would be the idea that one could continue to relate to the dead as co-consumers of objects, possessions and experiences. Or would it? In the digital age, memorialization of the dead is undergoing a radical change. When the
British fashion designer Alexander McQueen died last year, over 80,000 ‘fans’ posted messages of grief to him in a week through Facebook (Miller 2010). The sudden death of the Grammy award-winning but troubled British jazz singer, Amy Winehouse, this year generated similar outpourings of grief on Facebook. Virtual mourning has gone mainstream. Facebook itself has responded positively to numerous requests by friends, relatives and survivors of the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 to allow the pages of Facebook friends to remain active in perpetuity (Miller 2010, p. 42). Facebook’s policy as of the 22nd of December, 2010, states: ‘If we are notified that a user is deceased, we may memorialize the user’s account. In such cases we restrict profile access to confirmed friends, and allow friends and family to write on the user’s Wall in remembrance’ (www.facebook.com/policy). The memorialization policy is given a human face by employee Max Kelly through the company’s official Facebook blog: ‘When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network (Kelly 2009). As Miller (2010) notes: ‘This is how we collectively mourn (in the digital age). Globally. Together. Online’ (original italics). As such mass practices gain momentum, it becomes important for consumer researchers to
study the epistemological and ontological issues involved in the digital consumption of death. For instance, how real is virtual mourning? Do we witness the kind of moral and social commitment, relationships, shared values, truth-telling, exchanges of objects and knowledge and durability in space/time of mourners and mourning practices that we see in ‘meatspace’? To what extent does the dead person continue to be a ‘thingly being’ in cyberspace (Kim 2001, p. 88) with whom loved ones can relate to in ways which mimic or, perhaps, even surpass non-digital/ physical commemoration practices and behaviours? How do the grieving mourn the ‘digital-being’ of the deceased? What do such practices reveal about their perceived relationships with the one(s) who has died? A guiding rubric to address these questions is the notion of materiality, by which I mean the ways in which individuals and groups enact and perform their relationship to the deceased. In exploring virtual mourning practices and their implications for death consumption in
general, new questions in the field of consumer research emerge. It is hoped that once we gain some understanding of how online mourning practices illuminate notions of ‘materiality’ and/or ‘embodiment’ in the context of death and dying, we can begin to delineate what is actually new about this phenomenon and what the differences are between online and pre-digital behaviours in the context of the consumption of death. On this basis, then, we can then proceed to ask how consumers’ behaviours of digital death consumption are likely to change in the future. In the rest of this chapter, I explore key insights into the consumption of death in consumer
society today, drawing connections between notions of materiality in physical worlds as well as virtual worlds. I draw upon a number of key disciplines for their insights into these issues: sociology (for theories of the desire to perpetuate the tension between ephemeral pleasures and the finality of death); philosophy and anthropology (for an understanding of how we frame embodiment and imagine ‘materiality’ through the performance of mourning rituals) and computer science (for conceptualizations of interactions on virtual worlds). It is hoped that these explorations can then be synthesized within consumer research theory and practice to enrich our current understandings of how we engage with death consumption in virtual worlds. To understand the ways in which Social Network Site (SNS) users relate to the dead user via
objects and other corporeal practices associated with virtual mourning, exploratory data collection was undertaken. Here, I present a preliminary dataset comprising profile pages of users who
have died (using posts and comments left by the public on Facebook, MyDeathSpace and various blogs). Currently, I have collected five interviews from the relatives and friends of a deceased user and present a small sample of data from one of these individuals in order to demonstrate the nuances of how users frame their experiences of relating to the deceased user. A larger set of SNS data along these lines is planned over the coming months.
