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Preface
My mother died in January 2007. She was 58 years old and had stomach cancer. In one of her last public appearances, less than a month before she passed away, she stood at the corner of the Finnish National Gallery just opposite the National Theatre – a historical site in Helsinki, the capital of Finland – patiently waiting to be taken to a doctor by my father and me. I will never forget her appearance as she waited for us on that breezy day, trying to look as casual as possible while, in reality, she was something else. Her face had lost its gloss and her body had lost its flesh – she was only skin and bones. All joy had abandoned her. This scene struck me: I was miserable, as I knew that I would lose her soon, but I was also perplexed when I realized that I had never seen in public anyone – let alone my own family member – so close to death as my mother was in her ill state standing there in open, urban space. I do not believe that I am alone with these thoughts. As claimed by many modern theorists of death, such as Tony Walter (1994), middleage and middle-class death is carefully hidden behind the doors of hospitals, hospices, or private homes; it is kept away so as to avoid disturbing the busy lives of the living. Modern death is institutionalized and managed by professionals and medical specialists. It is effectively nothing that we – as the living – should be bothered with in our everyday public lives.
Of course, public life in contemporary society is not free of death. On the contrary, death in its mediated form is present everywhere. We cannot walk through a city without encountering at least some form of mediated death. News and tabloid papers sold at stores and kiosks are full of death – because death sells. When we go to the movies, read books in cafes, or play games on our mobile phones on the train on the journey back from work or school, we encounter death. News media and entertainment feature, to a great extent, crime, violence, fatal attractions, illness, and loss. But we do not even need to leave our home to be surrounded by mediated death; no matter where we are or what we are doing, a mere glance at our smartphones is enough to be faced with death, as it is seemingly ever-present on news and social media. We learn about and post about death on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and we mourn, debate, and gossip about death in Messenger and WhatsApp. In this modern state of hypermediation of social life (Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015), death is more present than we even realize. I find this new social reality – which is immersed in mediated death – both intriguing and uncanny; it certainly warrants a scholarly endeavour.
Looking back at 2007, the year my mother passed away, I recognize that this personal encounter with death has influenced my academic writing. While death as an academic topic was not entirely new to me, my first-hand experience of it led me to begin exploring it in more theoretical and empirical detail. I was captivated by the puzzle of the simultaneous presence and absence, exceptionality and everydayness of death in contemporary society. That same year, a school shooting took place near my hometown of Helsinki. A teenage boy, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, opened fire at his high school in Jokela. He killed eight people and wounded many others before ultimately taking his own life. At the time, this type of mass violence by young perpetrators was unheard of in Finland, though it was not totally unknown to the Finnish public. News on school shootings in other parts of the world had previously made headlines. The Jokela school shooting was quickly transformed into a media event of a disruptive nature. As a scholar of media and communication, I wanted to develop a greater understanding of this death spectacle and the role of the media in its public ritualization (Sumiala & Tikka, 2010; Sumiala, 2013a). In the years that followed, I continued on this scholarly path and explored public death as a social phenomenon in various cases and contexts of national and international significance. Some of these subjects are incorporated into this book, including the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Sumiala, 2015), the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris (Sumiala et al., 2018), Finnish school shootings (Sumiala, 2019a), the death of Vilja Eerika Tarkki (Sumiala, 2013b), and the death of pop icon David Bowie (Sumiala, 2019b). Of course, I have also conducted new empirical research for this book on, for example, the death of football legend Diego Maradona, the Christchurch massacre, and the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, two victims of racialized violence in the United States and global symbols of the Black Lives Matter social movement. In addition to case studies, I have also empirically investigated some emerging death-related digital phenomena, such as livestreaming suicides and digital immortalization, not to forget digital ritualization related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the last ten years of my scholarly venture into mediated death, media as a field of research has changed drastically, as have the social and public rituals triggered by death. When my mother died, I did not post the news on Facebook or on any other social media platform. It was not a thing to do in my social bubble at the time. I would have found it odd, and probably disrespectful to her memory. If the same situation were to occur in today’s world, I am uncertain as to what I would do. In recent years, I have learnt about the sudden death of friends through social media. I have sent my digital condolences on Facebook, including broken-heart and crying emojis in my posts in an attempt to express my sympathy for the bereaving family and share my feelings of loss with a virtual community. I have also participated in public mourning rituals organized as Facebook events. For some of us, however, hybrid media mourning and commemoration are not enough. I have noticed an emerging interest in digital afterlife, immortality, and life with ‘digital zombies’, as Debra Bassett (2015) characterizes this type of digitally immersed, post-mortal existence.
This book constitutes an attempt to make sense of these historical, social, and cultural transformations in the mediation of death, and to understand how the shifting dynamics in our communication environment shape the multitude of ritual responses that we, as inhabitants of a society saturated by hybrid media, generate to cope with death, and the fear of annihilation that it triggers. In the words of media theorist Mark Deuze (2012), we can only ‘imagine life outside media’. Hence, every study of death as mediated in present-day hybrid media is, in fact, an investigation into the meaning and significance of death in contemporary society.
As I began to put the various pieces of this manuscript together, a death event of an unimaginable scale was unfolding in hybrid media. In February and March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic stretched across the globe, halting societies, closing borders, and forcing people to stay home. Death as mediated was the main news story for months. Bodies laid on the streets and in hotels, mass graves, overcrowded hospitals, traumatized medical workers, desperate family members, lost politicians, and angry crowds inundated our public lives through all forms of media, making it impossible to escape death.
Importantly, something else happened. People did not just stare at the rising death toll on the news – they started to act. Rituals of mourning, solidarity, and support spread throughout hybrid media. People were clapping, banging kettles, and singing together from their balconies throughout Europe and the world, and these gatherings were recorded and posted on social media. Italians sang the old partisan song ‘Bella Ciao’ to keep up their spirits during the lockdown. In the UK, people gathered to offer thanks to the National Health Service, and children drew rainbows to foster hope (Sumiala, 2021). These symbolic acts demonstrated the power of mediated rituals to unify people in the face of ubiquitous public death. Unsurprisingly, however, many other types of symbolic performances and rituals circulated throughout hybrid media. People held demonstrations against government decisions to restrict people’s right to move freely by closing down businesses and other institutions. Conspiracy theories about the virus
