Overview

How digital technology--from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones--is changing our relationship to death. Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts--electronic traces of the dead--appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.

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Reviews

Online Afterlives offers a vivid philosophical meditation on the ways that digital media are changing people's relationship to mortality. Combining profound theoretical insights with examples from popular culture, Sisto eloquently shows how 'digital ghosts' make it harder to deny death itself. - Tamara Kneese, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco Sisto takes the reader on a whirlwind journey through philosophical concepts, fictions, legal cases and digital data service providers that all combine to create the contemporary fascination with death, legacy, and immortality! A must-read for the curious mind. - Stacey Pitsillides, Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow, School of Design, Northumbria University

Author Information

Davide Sisto, a philosopher and authority on thanatechnology, is a Researcher in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin.

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