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 phase consisting of elements of denial of death. The era that characterizes the first millennium, ‘tame death’, describes the condition of a natural acceptance of death as the end of life. In this period, death was considered too common to be feared; people observed, in Ariès’s thinking, an explicit connection between the afterlife or otherworld and life on Earth. During the era of ‘death of the self’, which, according to Ariès, lasted until the eighteenth century, people began to play a more reflexive and active role in their perception of death. In this era, death no longer meant merely the weakening of life but, rather, the destruction of the self. Hence, the role of institutional religion (the Church) was crucial in maintaining authority over death during this period. Later, amid the development of natural science and the declining role of religious institutions in society, authority over death was gradually transferred to medicine and medical doctors. In this era, that of ‘death of the other’, death began to be seen as a social problem demanding scientific and professional control. By the nineteenth century, death was viewed as a staging post for reunion in the hereafter. There was a shift from the demise of the self to that of loved ones (family members and kin). Finally, according to Ariès, the twentieth century is characterized by an era of ‘forbidden’ or ‘invisible death’, a historical condition in which death is removed from ‘public’ display – such as at home, where loved ones can easily gather to say their goodbyes – and moved to hospitals and nursing homes. Ariès refers to this phase as ‘the lie’ in modern Western society. While he believes that the original motive was to shield the dying from the unpleasant reality of terminal illness, in the early twentieth century it became ‘no longer for the sake of the dying person, but for society’s sake, for the sake of those close to the dying person’ that this ‘procedure of hushing up’ had to occur. In this era, death was not to be mentioned so as to avoid ‘the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the ugliness of dying and by the very presence of death in the midst of a happy life, for it is henceforth given that life is always happy or should always seem to be so’ (Ariès, 1974, 87; see also Zimmermann & Rodin, 2004). For Ariès, death in modern society is ‘shameful and forbidden’; it is something that must be ‘hushed up’
