The place of data: Mobile media, loss and data in life, death and afterlife

Abstract

Increasingly, mobile media play a crucial role in how we make sense of life, death and afterlife. In times of disaster and trauma, mobile media are on hand as a vehicle for witnessing and companionship in which memories of dead and living are entangled. Mobile media help with continuity bonds – sometimes through perceived connections with the deceased, other times through allowing the bereaved to ‘feel’ connected through the memories of the deceased as part of everyday feeds. In the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March 2011 known as 3/11, we saw the power of mobile media to not only magnify cultural beliefs but to also play a key role in memorialisation processes. This article explores the role of mobile media for memorialising place and connection during and after 3/11 through firstly ethnographic fieldwork and then creative practice projects to intervene and enact social change.