Mediated Death. Johanna Sumiala

post-mortem communication with the dead. Different empirical cases and ritual examples are used to illustrate mediated ritualization of death in hybrid media as a complex theoretical and empirical phenomenon. The book argues that theorizing mediated death in contemporary society must escape any simple empirical assumptions of the workings of rituals and their expected social and cultural outcomes, and instead acknowledge its multifaceted nature.

In the final chapter, I return to the dilemma of mortality in modern society and bring together the book’s theoretical and empirical threads in order to interpret and reflect on the social and cultural meanings embedded in mediated death, as well as its presence in and impact on society. I argue that, as we address the dilemma of mortality in modern society, we must understand how death has become mediated and ritualized in present-day society on an unprecedented scale. We may call this development the hypermediation of death in society (cf. Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015). This relocation of death has profound consequences for the ways in which we maintain our social lives with the dead in society. It has also forced the social and moral hierarchies associated with death and the departed into unrest. In addition to the vernacularization of death, I argue for the commodification, instrumentalization, and manipulation of death in contemporary media and related society. This cultural and social development, I contend, tends to make mediated rituals more unstable (Turner, 1969), enforce trends of banalization (Baudrillard, 1993), if not pornographization, of death (cf. Gorer, 1955) – all themes addressed in the introduction to this book as symptoms of the problem of death in modern society. I conclude this book by looking further afield than the everyday social life of death and venturing into digital eschatology (cf. Jacobsen, 2017b), in order to address the ultimate quest for immortality. I ask what this quest means in today’s society. In other words, what does it mean for us, the living, to be capable of digitally blurring the boundary between life and death, and to live with ‘digital zombies’ (Bassett, 2015) in a society that we may describe as entering a phase of the ‘post-mortal’ (Jacobsen, 2017a). How, ultimately, should we live our lives in this reality of digitalized infinity?