relatives, friends, and neighbours participated in the ceremony. Many were moved – some were in tears – while Roy struggled silently with his emotions. The feeling of ‘sharing the moment’ was palpable; it could be felt on both sides of the screen.
Many years after Hayley’s mediated death aired on TV, her death and funeral scenes still appear on YouTube and stimulate collective emotion (ReadySalted80, 2014). The comments on these YouTube clips reveal the heterogeneous reactions of ordinary people to this mediated death. At a glance, the comments indicate that many were moved by Hayley’s death. Some say that they still miss her and react positively to the funeral setting, the decorated coffin, and the music. Other commenters make an explicit connection to their personal experiences, stating that Hayley’s death and funeral remind them of points in their lives at which they lost relatives and loved ones. However, there are also commenters who express feelings of antipathy and resentment, saying, for example, that they did not like Hayley’s character in the series. Some commenters even criticize others’ mediated mourning over Hayley – as she was ‘only’ a fictional character and did not die for ‘real’.
The comments do not offer much context. We do not know who these people on social media are or have a sense of their level of involvement with the series. As such, we can say nothing concretely about their motivations for participating in this digital discussion triggered by Hayley’s mediated death. And yet these people are coming together to share this death event on social media. In leaving their mark, they create social life around this peculiar death. Thus, we may characterize this type of death as simultaneously ‘virtual’ and ‘real’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘mundane’, ‘strange’ and ‘ordinary’ – all features that I claim are characteristic of modern mediated death.
Furthermore, Hayley Cropper’s death invites us to think about the workings of death in modern, digitally saturated society. What makes Hayley’s death interesting for our purposes is its obscurity as a social and cultural phenomenon and its ubiquitous and hybrid media saturation. The character, who dies, is fictional; the public, who participate in this death event, are ‘virtual’, as they associate, connect, and identify with Hayley’s fatal story online and through mainstream media. However, as Caroline Kitch and Janice Hume (2008, p. xiv) point out, ‘death stories are less about the dead than about the living’. Additionally, Hayley’s death stirred emotions, morals, and values well beyond the soap opera’s storyline; consequently, her death became an indicator of social life and the way in which it expresses itself in modern society (cf. Metcalf & Huntington, 1997, p. 2) – the topic that I aim to understand in this book.
In this effort, I am interested in the kind of mediated death that attracts public attention in digital media, whether through online news stories by journalists or posts uploaded on social networks by ordinary people. Hannah Arendt (1990 [1958]) has famously argued that the public is the essence of the social. In her work, acting in the public space – shared by others – is essential to a fulfilled human existence. Today, not only journalists but also ordinary people using diverse digital media platforms have the means to act in public space and establish communication between life and death and, therefore, shape social reality as it pertains to the loss of life and how it impacts the living. It is fair to assert that, today, death in its public and profoundly hypermediated form (cf. Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015), a concept that points here to the complex processes that shape the public presence of death in today’s society, has also become hybridized (Chadwick, 2013; Graham et al., 2013; cf. Kraidy, 2005). Andrew Chadwick (2013, p. 9) argues that ‘hybridity alerts us to the unusual things that happen when distinct entities come together to create something new that nevertheless has continuities with the old’. In his work, Chadwick (2013) refers in particular to the interaction between journalistic news media and social media. I wish to argue in this book that the digitally immersed hybridization of death across different communication platforms alerts us to the curious phenomena that take place as death meets modern media, and the social implications embedded in these hypermediated assemblages (see also Sumiala et al., 2018).
‘Madness That Is Shared Is Not Madness’
The concept of thinking about death through the lens of social life and, in turn, society is by no means new (cf. Howarth, 2007a). Hence, we must turn for a while to classical social theory. Already in the writings of the founding fathers of sociology, death bears a role in understanding the nature of social life. Émile Durkheim (1995 [1912]), one of the key thinkers in the early social theory of ritual, created a theory of the origin of social life in which the funerary rituals of aboriginal people play a significant role. Max Weber (1930) developed his theory of the spirit of capitalism by emphasizing death in his analysis of the Puritan belief in predestination. For both Durkheim and Weber, death was not primarily a question of the end of individual human life, but one of rituals and beliefs that were critical in the formation or development of society (Walter, 2008).
Among more contemporary social and cultural theorists, Zygmunt Bauman (2001), Peter Berger (1969), Ernest Becker (1973), Philippe Ariès (1977), Norbert Elias (1985), and Jean Baudrillard (1993) have all theorized death in modern society. Zygmunt Bauman (2001, pp. 2–3) discusses society as a tragic act of sharing. For Bauman, society constitutes a fatal condition associated with our mortality and is something that we, as human beings, cannot change.
‘society’ is another name for agreeing and sharing, but also the power which makes what has been agreed and is shared dignified …. ‘Living in society’ – agreeing, sharing and respecting what we share – is the sole recipe for living happily (if not forever after). Custom, habit and routine take the poison of absurdity out of the sting of the finality of life.
Bauman, 2001, p. 2
Society … is ‘a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning’. ‘Mad’ are only the unshared meanings. Madness is no madness when shared.
Bauman, 2001, p. 2
For Bauman, society is a collective arrangement for muddling through with the tragic condition of mortality. He claims that we need customs, habits, and routines to take ‘the poison of absurdity out of the sting of the finality of life’. Taking inspiration from Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]), Weber’s (1930), and Bauman’s (2001) work on death and society, I wish to advance thinking about mediated ritual as a central means of coping with death and its social consequence in modern society immersed in hybrid media communication. Another influential figure who has contributed to our understanding of death in social theory is Peter Berger (1969, p. 52); he argues that ‘every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death’. In other words, we create social order to stave off the chaos and anomie brought about by death. Although they come from different intellectual traditions, Durkheim, Weber, Bauman, and Berger all presume that death is a powerful element in the constitution of social life.
The Problem of Mortality
While the connection between death and society is well established in the social theoretical literature, it remains a connection that is considered highly ambivalent and complex. We may call this the dilemma of mortality in modern society. In the literature, modern society is often characterized in social thought as ‘death denying’. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker claims that ‘the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity … to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man’ (Becker, 1973, p. ix). This denial, Becker argues, is a key mechanism for modern social life (to overcome death) and, consequently, for the continuation of society.
The idea of modern society as death denying has not developed separately from history. One of the most cited thinkers in the history of Western death is Phillippe Ariès (1977), who asserts that there have been four overlapping periods in the social and cultural history of ‘Western’ death: the eras of ‘tame death’, ‘death of the self’, ‘death of the other’, and ‘invisible death’ – the last