Death, after-death and the human in the Internet era: Remembering, not forgetting Professor Michael C. Kearl (1949-2015)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Today, humans have remains that are other than physical, generated within and supported by new information communications technologies (ICTs). As with human remains of the past, these are variously attended to or ignored. In this article, which serves as the introduction to this special issue, we examine the reality, meaning and use of enduring digital remains of humans. We are specifically interested in the evolving practices of remembering and forgetting associated with them. These previously posited considerations of ‘human remains’ and ‘what remains of the human’ are useful for exploring the relationship between the Internet, the body, remembering and forgetting. This article is a first step towards understanding how new technological developments are shaping and revealing our contemporary view of life, death and what it means to be human.

Keywords:

• death
• memory
• the human
• technology

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their hard work, and reserve special thanks for Professor Elizabeth Hallam and Professor Michael C. Kearl for their helpful critique and support. Thank you for your generosity, brilliance and friendship, Mike: we dedicate this special issue to you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors:

Connor Graham is a fellow at Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a research fellow in the Science, Technology and Society Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute at NUS. His research centres on living and dying in the age of the Internet, with a particular focus on new information and communication technologies.

Alfred Montoya is an assistant professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA. His work is on modes of governance around HIV/AIDS prevention and control in Vietnam, and on global health humanitarianism.

Notes

1 Quan-Haase and Wellman, after noting the wide variation in the definitions of the term ‘hyperconnected’ returned with a Google search, noted: ‘None of the uses that we are aware of have applied the term to refer to physical work settings where workers are always on, available for communication anywhere and anytime’ (Quan-Haase and Wellman, 2005, p. 223). Here, we suggest that the term also includes non-work settings.

2 Lingel (2013) defines ‘digital’ remains as ‘online content on dead users’.

3 http://web.archive.org/web/19971210230056/http://www.fnc.gov/Internet_res.html.

4 The reference to Heaney’s poem ‘Punishment’ is quite deliberate. This poem responds to the discovery of the remarkably preserved bodies of ritually murdered individuals discovered in bogs.

5 When cellular networks are taken into account the disparity between developing regions and others shrinks dramatically: Africa’s penetration rate increases to 63% and Asia and Pacific to 89% (http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013.pdf). With network convergence to support multiple services, it is not unreasonable to imagine almost global access to at least some Internet services in the near future.