[Air-L] CFP: The Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data
Sawhney, Harmeet Singh
hsawhney at indiana.edu
Thu Jul 22 09:10:37 PDT 2010
SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
The Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data
GUEST EDITORS
Connor Graham (University of Melbourne:
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/cgraham/)
Martin Gibbs (University of Melbourne:
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/martinrg/)
Dave Kirk (University of Nottingham: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~dsk/)
John Phillips (National University of Singapore:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/elljwp/)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Anticipation
does not evade the fact that death is not to be
outstripped
Heidegger (1993:308)
As emergent information technologies increasingly pervade peoples
lives, they are also increasingly a part of their dying and their
deaths. For example, when someone dies, the connectivities and virtual
communities supported by and lived through Facebook, MySpace and the
like are transformed from viscous, living portrayals of individuals
in burgeoning personal social networks to digital memorials and
components in more inert structures for someone who was. (Digital)
photographs and video clips become a way to remember, commemorate,
preserve and define various forms of digital immortality. Digital
fragments such as text messages, Web pages, social networking sites,
blog comments and so on populate an identity that promises to linger
through these shards of ourselves as never before. However, as bodies
decay and decompose after death, so do the digital fragments of the
deceased slowly ossify and become fixed yet fragmentary traces of the
life that once was. These digital life documents (Plummer, 1983) are
then not only dependent on the producer and their immediate
connections. They are also supportive of connections that remain after
the producer is no longer alive as a part of larger ecologies of
interests and exchanges where rules and customs are still evolving.
They move from being part of the milieu of simultaneity (Jaureguiberry,
2000) to the property of history and glacial time (Urry, 2000).
As people spend more time at keyboards, theres less being stored away
in dusty attics for family and friends to hang on to
The pieces of our
lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself,
but what happens to our virtual identity after we die?[Faure, 2009]
Attention has recently turned to how social networking sites can become
a form of memorial (Fletcher, 2009; Faure, 2009; Kera and Foong, 2009;
van den Hooven, 2008) and how emergent technologies can define new
forms of immortality and afterlife. As demonstrated by the quotation
above, there is a temptation to apply what we know of the analogue
world to the digital and argue, as with paper and offices (Sellen and
Harper, 2002), that digital media will simply replace the physical
stuff of rituals, ceremonies and ongoing remembering. These are the
kinds of assumptions we wish to question and probe through this special
issue. Our interests extend beyond commentary, discussion and debate
around remembering and commemoration. They also extend beyond
consideration of issues of access (i.e. who can get at the remains of
the dead and how), representation (i.e. how the dead and their remains
can be represented), control (i.e. who manages the transition from
being to being remembered and how this is done) and maintenance (i.e.
who is responsible for keeping the deads fragments available,
accessible etc). Through examples drawn from actual cases, thorough
analyses and well-argued conceptual discussions we also wish to address
the practical, social, conceptual and ethical issues with:
- dealing with the physical and digital remnants of the once living.
- the ongoing management of the social ties between the living and the dead.
- the management of the stuff (i.e. bodies, data, objects) involved
in death.
- the possible extension of being-in-the-world through the
hybridisation of once living, sentient beings with other biological and
robotic entities.
- support for death cults (e.g. www.vhemt.com) and desecration through
digital technologies.
- the potential for immortality through digital macabre celebrations
of death (e.g. www.mydeathspace.com), digital mashups of the deads
digital fragments (e.g. www.dziga.com/human-victor).
- new forms of grieving and commemorating via emerging technologies
through, for example, the generation of digital archives for
individuals and those that follow alike (e.g. www.croptrust.org).
- different visions of the preservation, afterlife and immortality of
self and society through the digital.
- cultural issues with dying, death, afterlife and technology.
We also wish to reflect on how the apparent ubiquity and uniformity of
new technologies contrasts starkly with the diversity of beliefs and
cultural practices with regard to dying, death and afterlife. Some of
the questions we wish to address through this special issue include
(but are not restricted to):
- How do we appropriately design, store and archive the deads digital
fragments and how can grieving, remembering and letting go be
supported through them?
- What are the issues around ordinary technologies transforming into
memorials, evoking powerful memories, nostalgia etc?
- How will this ever-increasing mass of dead data be managed and by whom?
- Should freedom of choice concerning death be
supported/promoted/safeguarded against through technologies such as
social networking tools?
- What are the legal and ethical implications of digital desecration
and the hybridisation of (the remains of) the dead with the living?
- What are the implications of and insights provided by the inevitable
end of civilisation for the design and management of digital
resources?
These issues promise not only to stretch our analytical approaches and
tools but also our methods, methodologies and ethical frameworks. Thus
we wish to elicit submissions that address themes relevant to this call
and, more generally, to The Information Society journal
(http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/). Through eliciting these responses we
hope to gather together in a single volume a series of high quality,
scholarly articles that are accessible to non-specialists to deepen our
understanding of issues concerning technology, death and afterlife and
immortality through new data, perspectives, conceptual treatments
and/or analyses.
SUBMISSIONS
Appropriate longer submissions (up to 7,500 words) include:
- Extended reports from the field;
- Critical literature reviews;
- Discursive pieces exploring themes;
- Deployments/evaluations of relevant technologies.
Shorter submissions (4,000 words) can include:
- Reflections on approaches and methods;
- Opinion pieces;
- Early reports on studies of technologies in situ;
- Design proposals addressing particular themes.
Papers will be due on 8th November 2010. We will aim to return reviews
with feedback on acceptance/rejection and the need for any changes four
months after that.
We recommend authors familiarise themselves with the scope and demands
of The Information Society journal (http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/)
before submitting. Submission guidelines for authors are available
from: http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/contributors/authors.html. Authors
should send digital manuscripts to: Martin Gibbs (martin [dot] gibbs
[at] unimelb [dot] edu [dot] au) or Connor Graham (cgraham [at] unimelb
[dot] edu [dot] au). Authors should also feel free to correspond with
the special issue editors if they have any questions or are planning to
submit an article.
REFERENCES
Faure, G. (2009). August 18, 2009. How to Manage Your Online Life When
You're Dead. Available online
[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1916317,00.html].
Accessed November 2009.
Fletcher, D. (2009). What Happens to Your Facebook After You Die? Time.
October 28, 2009. Available online
[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1932803,00.html ].
Accessed November 2009.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie &
Edward Robinson. New York: Harper.
Jaureguiberry, F. Mobile Telecommunications and the Management of Time.
Social Science Information (Information sur les Sciences Sociales).
2000; 39(2): 255268
Foong P.S. & Kera D. 2008. Applying Reflective Design To Digital
Memorials. SIMTech 08. Cambridge, UK.
Plummer, K. Documents of Life: An Introduction to the Problems and
Literature of a Humanistic Method. London: Allen & Unwin; 1983
Sellen, A., & Harper, R. H. R. (2002). The Myth of the Paperless
Office. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
van den Hoven, E., Smeenk, W., Bilsen, H., Zimmermann, R., de Waart,
S., and van Turnhout, K. (2008) Communicating Commemoration. In Graham,
C. and Rouncefield, M. (2008) Proceedings of the Second International
Workshop on Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies (SIMTech08).
Lancaster University.
Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the
Twenty-First Century, London: Routledge.
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