[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 people’s 
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, there’s 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 dead’s 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 dead’s 
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 dead’s 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): 255–268

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 (SIMTech’08). 
Lancaster University.

Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 
Twenty-First Century, London: Routledge.







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