The Myth of Media Overcoming Death
A study of mediated death that argues for the profound connection between death and society must take into an account the proper historical, social, and cultural context (see also Barley, 1995) in which death is experienced in society. In this book, I examine mediated death in the framework of a modern digitally saturated society, a historical status that cannot be discussed without reference to the very concept of ‘modernity’. John Gray (2003, p. 101), a scholar of European thought, reminds us that the word ‘modern’ first appeared in the English language towards the end of the sixteenth century. The word’s original meaning was simply ‘present-time’, but it later began to convey an added sense of novelty. In other words, ‘modern’ began to refer to something that had not existed before, the idea being that the future would be different from the past, a sentiment not shared with ancient Greek and Roman thought (Gray, 2003, pp. 101–2). By the end of the eighteenth century, ‘modern’ referred to the future as the site of ‘a better world’ in which ‘knowledge, wealth and human happiness were increasing together’ (2003, p. 102). Consequently, technological progress based on science came to be thought of as the foundation of a universal civilization (2003, p. 102; see also Giddens, 1990). For the sake of clarity, it is also worth noting that in this book I use the concept of modern society as an umbrella concept referring to an idea rather than any specific empirically identified constellation. In what follows, I do not make specified demarcations between the different phases of modernity – such as post, late, high, or reflexive modernity – identified in the sociological literature (see, e.g., Bauman, 1997; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1990; Jameson, 1990; Delanty, 2000).
To make our argument about modern society more versatile, we must acknowledge that many critical scholars of modernity and modern thought – such as anthropologists Talal Asad (2003), Webb Keane (2006), and Sara Mahmood (2016), philosopher Charles Taylor (2007), and media theorist David Morley (2007) – agree that the prevailing idea of what it means to be modern is best described as a myth (see also Gray, 2003, p. 103). In Gray’s view, Western societies governed by this myth understand modernity as a universal and, hence, single condition. It is everywhere the same and always benign. According to this myth, when societies become more modern, they become more alike and, more importantly, they become better. Put simply, modernity means that Western values are understood as universal progress, as the victory of science and rational thought over irrational belief (2003, p. 1). As argued by Morley in the credo of the modern myth, ‘The whole world is bound to become as secular, enlightened and peaceful as the West imagines itself to be’ (2007, p. 315).
When assessing the intellectual history of modern Western society through the lens of this myth, we must identify another powerful counter-myth – Romanticism. This is the myth and related narrative of the European Counter-Enlightenment that took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see, e.g., Berlin, 1991). In this narrative, reason was challenged by belief, mysticism, and religious experience (Gray, 2003, p. 25). In the 1930s, two myths took hold in the Nazi regime: the myth of rational progress and success, and the mystical, irrational, and apocalyptic belief in the racial superiority of the Aryan race (see, e.g., Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1991). Cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander articulates the ambivalent soul of modernity as follows: ‘One can no longer conceive modernity as representing a sharp break from orders of a ‘traditional’ kind, if, indeed, it were ever possible at all …. We have witnessed the return of the sacred in our time, paroxysms of apocalypse and utopia, romanticism and chivalry, ecstasy and repentance, barbarism and crusades, localism and difference, blood and soil’ (Alexander, 2013, pp. 2–3).
Not even modern media can escape this paradox. The idea of mass media is itself a modern discovery (Pietilä, 1997; cf. Appadurai, 1996). Progress based on scientific innovation is a crucial aspect of the history of communication media (cf. McLuhan, 1962). In line with the myth of modernity, communication media promises to bring a better future to the moderns and all those who want to become such. It enhances access to information, enabling it to be quickly and efficiently distributed not only locally and nationally, but also globally. The news as a cultural product fundamentally centres around telling stories about new things happening in the world. Journalism is the profession that performs this task (Rantanen, 2009). As communication theorists such as James Carey (1989) remind us, however, modern media has another function beyond conveying information – it is a means of symbolic communication, in what Carey aptly calls the ritual view of communication. The media addresses people’s beliefs, emotions, and desire to belong to something bigger than themselves beyond any rational objectives. Hence, any history of modern mass media must consider the myth of Romanticism, sublime fantasy, pleasure, and irrational dreaming as part of its narrative (cf. Žižek, 2009).
It is difficult to imagine any aspect of life more central to the two myths than death. One of the key elements of the myth of modernity is a desire to overcome death through technology. For example, popular contemporary movements such as transhumanism have garnered substantial public attention in hybrid media (O’Connell, 2017). Modern media technology also promises a faster, more efficient way to convey news about death (cf. Hanusch, 2010). If we are unable to prevent death from happening, we can at least attempt to manage how efficiently and accurately we communicate about it. A growing interdisciplinary research field emerges around the idea and concept of digital afterlife (Savin-Baden & Mason-Robbie, 2020). Recent developments in digital media technology (e.g. artificial intelligence and data mining) offer a great promise through tools that enable us to maintain digital communication with the dead by developing algorithms, opening new ways to think about mortality and immortality in today’s digitally saturated society (Bassett, 2015; Kasket, 2019). Furthermore, as already mentioned, professional journalists are no longer the only actors in the news media with the power to act as gatekeepers and agenda-setters for public death. Today, ordinary people increasingly have access to digital media through various social media applications, enabling them to contribute to the hybrid ways in which death is experienced and performed in modern society (Arnold et al., 2018). What is at stake in the dilemma of mortality in modern society, then, is this: while the rational side of hybrid media promises to overcome segregation between the living and the dead by developing algorithms for a new type of post-mortem communication, the mystical and apocalyptic side 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
