Distant Communications: Beyond Death

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. H. Couclelis, ‘The Death of Distance,’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 23, no. 4, (1996): 387–389, 387. ‘The death of distance’ originated with F. Cairncross, ‘The death of distance: a survey of telecommunications,’ The Economist 336, no. 7934, (1995): 5–28.

2. Ibid.

3. Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg, ‘Sharing Living, Experiences, and Intimacy over Video Chat in Long Distance Relationships’, in Neustaedter, C., Harrison, S., Sellen, A. ed., Connecting Families, (London: Springer, 2013): 37–53.

4. See R. Edwards, B.T.Bybee, J. K. Frost, J. K. Harvey, & M. Navarro, ‘That’s not what I meant: How misunderstanding is related to channel and perspective-taking’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36, 2 (2017): 188–210.

5. James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet, 2^nd Ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 8.

6. Hannah Miller, Daniel Kluver, Jacob Thebault Spieker, Loren Terveen, and Brent Hecht, ‘Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication’, Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 11,1 (2017): 152–161

7. James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet, 2^nd Ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 7–8.

8. Particularly prominent examples include the First Nations Peoples of the Americas and Oceania. For the North American context, see Gerry R. Cox, Sociology of Death and the American Indian (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022). For the Australian context, see Katie Glaskin et al. Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). See also, more generally for historical global perspectives, Erik R Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). There are also hundreds of various cultures, peoples, ‘tribes’, communities and religions which have their own connections and relationships with the dead, outside of the hegemonic western understandings of death, which we do not have space to list here.

9. For examples of studies which set out this western view of death and mourning, see See Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and Family in England, 1480–1750 (London: Clarendon Press, 2000) and Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1976).

10. For an example of a historical analysis of anxieties surrounding distant communication see Rachel Bynoth ‘A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century’, History, 106, 373, (2021), pp. 727–750. For media and communication studies, see James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet, 2^nd Ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); R. Edwards, B.T. Bybee, J. K. Frost, J. K. Harvey, & M. Navarro, ‘That’s not what I meant: How misunderstanding is related to channel and perspective-taking’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36, 2, (2017): 188–210; S.L. Storch and A.V. Ortiz Juarez-Paz, ‘The Role of mobile devices in 21^st-century family communication’, Mobile Media and Communication 7, 2 (2019): 248–264; Gary M. Olson & Judith S. Olson, ‘Distance Matters’, Human–Computer Interaction 15, 2–3, (2000): 139–178.

11. William Merrill Decker, ‘Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now,’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing, eds. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016): 147–167, 147.

12. See Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and Family in England and Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death.

13. For studies which examine Spirituality, especially in its golden era of c.1870–1945, in relation to western attitudes towards death, see Georgina Byrne, Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010) and Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2016).

14. Graham Murdock, ‘Communications and the constitution of modernity,’ Media, Culture and Society 14 (1993): 521–539, 529, 534; see Murdock also for the ‘disembedding’ concept: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Oxford: Polity Press, 1984).

15. Julie Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

16. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001): 6–7.

17. Stanley B. Burns and Elizabeth A. Burns, Sleeping Beauty II Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography American and European Traditions (New York: Burns Archive Press, 2002); Racheal Harris, Photography and Death: Framing Death throughout History (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2020): 12; Katie Barclay and Nina Javette Koefoed, ‘Family, Memory, and Identity: An Introduction’, Journal of Family History 46, no. 1 (2020): 3–12.

18. Douglas Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (London: Bloomsbury, 2017 [1997]): 99.

19. Douglas Davies, A Brief History of Death (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005): 56.

20. Tony Walter, The Revival of Death (London: Routledge, 1994): 9–22, 23.

21. Hannah Malone, ‘New Life in the Modern Cultural History of Death,’ The Historical Journal 62, no. 3 (2019): 833–52, 833–836; Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Towards Death Over the Last One Thousand Years, trans. Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton, 2004 [2000]); David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,’ in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981): 187–242.

22. George M. Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 7; Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Rachel Patrick, ‘Speaking across the borderline: Intimate connections, grief and spiritualism in the letters of Elizabeth Stewart during the first world war,’ History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 109–128; Marina Warner Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

23. Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: 17.

24. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001): 7.

25. Laura Ishiguro, ‘How I wish I might be near: distance and the epistolary family in late nineteenth-century condolence letters,’ in Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, eds. Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry and Henry Yu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015): 212–227, 219.

26. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, ‘“Broke in Spirits”: Death, Depression, and Endurance through Writing,’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 17, no. 2 (1996): 70–86; Stephen Garton, ‘The Scales of Suffering: Love, Death and Victorian Masculinity,’ Social History 27, no. 1 (2002): 40–58, 41, 48; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 30; Alex Mayhew, ‘“A War Imagined”: Postcards and the Maintenance of Long-Distance Relationships during the Great War,’ War in History 28, no. 2 (2019): 301–332, 308; George M. Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

27. Riney-Kehrberg, ‘Broke in Spirits’: 72.

28. Faust, This Republic of Suffering: xiv.

29. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); John Troyer, Technologies of the Human Corpse (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

30. David Arnold, ‘Deathscapes: India in an Age of Romanticism and Empire, 1800–1856,’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26, no. 4 (2004): 339–53; David Arnold, Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Lyndon Fraser, ‘Death in nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand,’ History Compass 15, no. 7 (2017): 1–14, 2; Harold Mytum, ‘Death and remembrance in the colonial context,’ in Archaeologies of the British: explorations of identity in Great Britain and its colonies, 1600–1945, eds. Susan Lawrence (London: Routledge, 2003): 156–173; Robert Travers, ‘Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India,’ Past & Present 196, no. 1 (2007): 83–124; Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,’ History and Memory 18, no. 1 (2006): 5–42.

31. On these questions of imperial identity and memorialisation see, Ellen Smith, ‘Widows, Violence and Death: The Construction of Imperial Identity and Memory by Women in Mourning across British India, 1857–1926’, Gender & History (2023).

32. Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 4.

33. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 8.

Additional information

Funding

The article is associated with small conference grants from Royal Historical Society and the Social History Society, which enabled the conference from which this special issue was formed.

Notes on contributors

Rachel Bynoth

Dr Rachel Bynoth is Lecturer and Historical and Critical Studies Co-ordinator at Bath Spa University. Her research examines letters, emotions, gender, distant communications and experience across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially relating to anxiety. She has just started work on her monograph based on her PhD research which looks at anxiety across the lifecycle in the Canning Family correspondence, 1760-1830.

Ellen Smith

Dr Ellen Smith is a Teaching Fellow in British Social History at the University of Leicester. Her research explores colonial and imperial histories between Britain and South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published her work on the commemorative practices of widows in British India in the journal Gender and History in 2023 and is currently working on her first monograph: a history of the ‘imperial letter’.