of hybrid media invites us – the living – to deal with death through other, more ancient means – gathering around death through hybrid media via symbolic and ritual communication, to overcome the fear of loss and annihilation stirred by the end of life (cf. Morley, 2007). This book positions itself at the heart of this paradox as it attempts to understand better the dilemma of mortality and its consequences in the present hybrid media-saturated society through the scope of mediated death.
The Structure of the Book
In the chapters that follow, I begin my scholarly journey into mediated death by exploring the concept and idea of public death. In chapter 2, I provide a brief historical outline of the main developments in the public mediation of death in the context of the evolution of communication media. The phases described focus on print media, visual media, and digital media. I also examine how the idea of public death began to evolve in news media, and how death became a public spectacle in society. The chapter ends by bringing the idea of mediated death as a public and highly visual phenomenon to the present-day hybrid media, and explains the general features of this mediated transformation, in particular from mass mediation of death orchestrated by journalists to hyper- and hybrid mediation and fragmentation of actors making death a public matter in society.
From this (media-) historical contextualization of mediated death, I move on in chapter 3 to examine public death as an event and a ritual. In my discussion, I draw on sociological event theory (see, e.g., Wagner-Pacifici, 2017) and look in particular at a public death event as a structure – an irreversible occurrence and a rupture in human life of profound sociological meaning (see also Sewell, 1990). By investigating public death as a mediated event, the book sheds light on death events’ special structural features associated with time and space, and connects the idea of the event with that of ritual as a particular formula and a unique structure of mediated death event. Here, the focus is on a category of ritual – life-crisis ritual. The chapter establishes a conceptual framework for the further analysis of mediated rituals and explains anthropological ideas first developed by van Gennep (1960 [1909]) and later elaborated on by Victor Turner (1969) on the workings of life-crisis rituals as ‘rites of passage’ through three key phases – rupture, liminality, and incorporation – and connects them with the work of ritual media events, and in particular, funerals (Dayan & Katz, 1992). The next chapters in the book build on the idea of liminal mourning in various hybrid media contexts, and critically examine how liminality in mediated life-crisis rituals functions in the present-day landscape of hybrid media, and what kind of social consequences result from these actions.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 expand the ritual perspective to mediated death as a public event. In chapter 4, I emphasize mediated mourning and the ways in which it has been re-invented and repurposed across different platforms of hybrid media. This chapter analyses digital mourning as a dispersed practice on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. It also investigates how mourning practices as highly personalized activities embedded in people’s everyday use of social and news media contribute to vernacularizing death as a public matter in society. In this endeavour, I discuss concepts such as phatic communication culture (Miller, 2008) and the platform vernacular (Gibbs et al., 2015) to explain some key social dynamics in the present-day practice of mediated mourning; here, the main focus is on the sociality, rather than the substance and content, of such ritual communication. The purpose of chapter 4, then, is to argue for the ‘vernacularization of public mourning’ in contemporary society and for the increased presence and visibility of death – a condition, I claim, that invites scholarship to revisit some of the earlier theories of mediated death (cf. Walter, 1994) and to pay more attention to death’s mundane and fluid nature.
In chapter 5, I expand my analysis of public death as mediated and vernacularized ritual practice and consider its contested nature. I argue that the multiplicity of actors, practices, and incentives to ritualize death in contemporary society makes death as a mediated phenomenon appear not only more public and visible, but also more ambivalent. I also explore the dilemma of appropriate and/or inappropriate death in hybrid media, and the values and morals entrenched in such public negotiations. I develop my argumentation by approaching the theme of contested death from three interconnected conceptual perspectives. First, I focus on the concept of victimhood (see, e.g., Erner, 2006; Greer, 2004; Morse, 2018) and discuss how death in hybrid media is constructed as grievable and/or non-grievable, and how such articulations shape the public presence of death (Butler, 2004; Chouliaraki, 2006). Second, I turn my attention to the theme of digital witnessing (Ellis, 2009; Ong, 2012; Peters, 2009 [2001]), which I conceptually label as a vicarious practice (Ashuri & Pinchevski, 2009). I argue that the vicarious, digital witnessing of someone’s death is a key condition for death to be seen as grievable and, consequently, worthy of mediated ritualization – or non-grievable, for that matter (see, e.g., Chouliaraki, 2006; Moeller, 1999; Tester, 2001). Third, I investigate public death events as contested from the perspective of death taboos in hybrid media; specifically, I look at the practice of livestreaming (van Es, 2017, 2016; Scannell, 2014) and analyse the impact of social media affordances in challenging certain collective ideas, morals, and values associated with appropriate and/or improper ways of making death a public, ritual matter in present society (see, e.g., Chouliaraki, 2006; Silverstone, 2007). Chapter 5 argues for the necessity to expand critical reflection on the morals and ethics of some of the forms of mediated death representation and their ritual appeal in society.
In chapter 6, I broaden my analysis of mediated ritual by investigating the different ways in which mediated rituals segregate and reintegrate the dead in the modern hybrid media environment. I turn back to Victor Turner (1969) and his idea of life-crisis ritual as transformative, and look at this issue from the perspective of the social construction of victimhood in present society. I ask how victimhood is socially constructed in association with public mourning, and how such mediated ritual practices contribute to keeping certain dead alive in society, while killing the memory of others. In so doing, I critically assess the role that today’s hybrid media environment plays in this ensemble. The chapter also pays special attention to the moral and social hierarchies related to mediated ritual commemoration of the deceased, and analyses in which conditions such memory work (Mitchell, 2007) is activated and when it is pushed aside, in hybrid media and consequently society. This chapter argues that these practices of remembering and forgetting in society are best described as highly situated as well as individualized, but never morally and/or politically neutral as they address important values associated with suffering (see, e.g., Boltanski, 1999) and the mediated politics of pity in today’s society (Chouliaraki, 2011).
All in all, the analyses of ritual in the chapters draw on a wide array of death events as empirical examples. In line with the logic of contemporary hybrid media, which makes mediated ritualization around death a more horizontal than vertical activity (cf. Chadwick, 2013), the examples include both the deaths of ordinary people and those of iconic public figures. The ordinary people being discussed include victims of mass killings, disasters, and terror attacks (such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, and the Christchurch attacks in New Zealand), as well as victims of local crime, accident, or illness (such as Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, whose deaths galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, or the murder of the child Vilja Eerika Tarkki and the online suicide of Molly Russell). The iconic death events discussed, meanwhile, include such cases as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, pop icon David Bowie, and football legend Diego Maradona. Consequently, the ritual practices analysed vary. They include such patterned practices of symbolic communication as posting emblematic