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Key research themes
1. How does digital technology mediate mourning and memorial practices after death online?
This theme examines the transformation and hybridization of grief, mourning, and memorialization practices through digital media platforms and online environments. It focuses on how the accessibility, interactivity, and permanence of online spaces influence traditional rituals and foster new modalities of remembrance, while also considering the social dynamics between bereaved kin and broader communities, including strangers. Understanding these changes matters for anthropology, media studies, and HCI design to support respectful, meaningful, and ethical commemorative practices online.
Key finding: This empirical study analyzing three distinct online platforms (MySpace, YouTube, and an online condolence book) following a teenager's death reveals how differing platform affordances shape participation from close friends... Read more
Key finding: Through ethnographic fieldwork in Upper Merabello, Crete, this work demonstrates the coexistence and interplay of customary onsite mortuary rituals with emergent online mourning practices mediated by social media. It finds... Read more
Key finding: This chapter synthesizes digital ethnographic methodologies for studying online memorialization, focusing on fragmented and contested memorial practices across multiple social media platforms. By analyzing the diverse and... Read more
Key finding: Through case studies including high-profile celebrity deaths and online religious and gaming communities, this chapter demonstrates how digital media fundamentally reshape dying, grieving, and memorial processes by providing... Read more
2. What are the ethical, economic, and political implications of the digital afterlife and online presence of the deceased?
This research theme explores how commercial enterprises and platforms shape, monetize, and regulate the online presence of deceased individuals, raising ethical concerns about dignity, data ownership, and human rights. It critically analyzes the emergent Digital Afterlife Industry, including practices such as profile memorialization, data preservation, and personality replication, and examines the social and political challenges posed by treating digital remains as economic resources. These insights contribute to debates about privacy, digital legacy governance, and the rights of the dead in an increasingly data-driven society.
Key finding: This critical analysis introduces the concept of the Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI), identifying its politico-economic interests in monetizing the digital remains of deceased users. Drawing on Marxian economics, the study... Read more
Key finding: Using demographic data and Facebook user statistics, this study projects that between 1.4 billion and 4.9 billion Facebook profiles of deceased users will accumulate globally by 2100, with a majority belonging to non-Western... Read more
Key finding: Although focusing on suicide, this analysis sheds light on how online platforms and communities can influence life-and-death decisions, highlighting ethical risks in digital spaces. The study finds that online interactions... Read more
3. How is death represented, experienced, and philosophically thematized within digital games and virtual environments?
This theme investigates the portrayal and function of death in video games, encompassing its narrative, metaphysical, and player-experiential dimensions. Studies explore death as a gameplay mechanic, a sales concept, a site of spiritual or philosophical inquiry, and a trigger of emotional and moral engagement, examining how game design mediates players' encounters with mortality. Such research bridges anthropology, game studies, philosophy, and psychology, contributing to understanding of experiential death, virtual immortality, and ethical reflection in mediated spaces.
Key finding: Analyzing the video game Blasphemous, this article argues that death functions not only as a gameplay mechanic but also as a key promotional and narrative element appealing to players’ existential curiosity. Drawing on... Read more
Key finding: This study examines how dystopian video games like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Cyberpunk 2077, and Death Stranding embed technopagan spiritualities and transhumanist ideologies through their representations of death and... Read more
Key finding: Addressing the ‘gamer’s dilemma’—the ethical tension between simulated murder and simulated paedophilia in games—this paper reveals that player emotional responses (especially self-repugnance) and imaginative engagement vary... Read more
Key finding: This thematic collection explores death and death rituals within digital games, highlighting how ritualized practices of mourning and remembrance occur in virtual spaces and how online and offline experiences of death... Read more
Key finding: This student journal compiles critical analyses of death as a fundamental gameplay element, elucidating its narrative, mechanic, and symbolic functions across video game history and genres. It discusses death as a tool for... Read more