Death In Media Research Articles

Dancing with Death: (Re)Embodying Grief and Dying

Indigenous death in media and culture often becomes divorced from the human, embodied experience of grief. In this article three creative works from the 2010’s surrounding Indigenous death are analyzed: Robert LePage’s Kanata, The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Going Home Star, and Joanna Jolly’s Red River Girl. It is argued from a combined death doula and critical perspective that the witnessing of death, particularly Indigenous death, needs to return to the body, through a metaphor of dancing with one’s own death.

Suicide-memes as exemplars of the everyday inauthentic relationship with death

ABSTRACT Depictions of death in media produced for young audiences are not limited to melodramas or action films; there are frequent depictions of death in new media, often produced not only for, but also by, young adults. Despite the fact that new media in general, and memes in particular, are standard means of communication and expression for young people, memes about suicide (hereafter suicide-memes) are not thoroughly studied in their own right. This article presents a phenomenological analysis of contemporary suicide-memes. Although suicide-memes seem, on the surface, to be just gallows humour or hyperbole that has little to do with death, we argue that this is deceptive. We contend that suicide-memes are characteristic of what Heidegger calls our everyday, inauthentic relationship with death. This relationship is one of trivialisation and avoidance, which obscures the personal reality, and inevitability, of one’s own death.

Media, mortality and necro-technologies: Eulogies for dead media

Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a ‘material death’ that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.

“Pliks es nācu no mātes klēpja, un pliks es turp atgriezīšos!”: māksla nomirt patērētāju sabiedrībā

Today, we do not talk about death very much; if we do, we talk about mass death in media which is an estranged tragedy and does not appeal to us. On the other hand, the spirit of the time which we live in tries to prevent us from aging mostly by using consumerist philosophy, thus placing death and dying, and, especially, the consciousness of our own death in the grey zone. In this article, we aspire to sketching the main attitudes toward death in consumerist society, using theories of consumerism and also Google Analytics in order to define the lifestyle of the contemporary consumerist. Then, with some examples from the point of view of philosophy of religion and also keeping in mind the theology of Book of Job from the perspective of philosophy of religion, we will try to find an answer to the question – “how does the theology of the Book of Job or the interpretations thereof can help us to form our style of death?” Two main ideas are synthesised in the course of the article: firstly, consumerist lifestyle can be characterised as “desire for the desire”, while in Book of Job, when it is read from the consumerist’s perspective, one can see the repeating of faith, which is also an essential part of the theology of Soren Kierkegaard. Thus, the synthesis of these conclusions can construct consumer’s “death style”, which can be defined as “desire for the everlasting”.

Rock, Paper, Scissors: On Media Revolution and the Death Penalty

Rock, Paper, Scissors: On Media Revolution and the Death Penalty Katie Chenoweth (bio) Ceci tuera cela. —Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris The words cited above are what I will be calling Victor Hugo’s formula, or law, of media revolution. They are pronounced by the archdeacon Claude Frollo in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, a novel initially published in 1831 and set in the Paris of 1482, that is, twenty-seven years after the printing of the forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible and just twelve years after books were first produced in Paris using the new technology. The term ceci (this) is the new medium of the printed book; cela (that) refers to Notre-Dame Cathedral. For Hugo, the printing press arrives in a city where another medium has held sway: not the manuscript book, as more recent narratives of the printing revolution would lead us to anticipate, but rather the stone of architecture. The city of Paris appears as “a chronicle in stone,” while Notre-Dame operates as a monumental text (“each stone . . . is a page”1) in which, prior to mass literacy, human life gets externalized and recorded.2 The stone “book” would thus be the ancestor of the printed book but also its double: “mankind has two books, two records, two testaments: masonry and printing, the [End Page 3] stone Bible and the paper Bible.”3 Print and stone operate in Notre-Dame de Paris as historical rivals in a media revolution, the impact of which is, in Hugo’s reimagining, already being felt in 1482. This feeling presents itself as a presentiment of violence: the printed book is coming to “kill” Notre-Dame. This is what Frollo announces in Book Five: The archdeacon silently contemplated the gigantic building for a while, then sighed as he stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and looked sadly from the book to the church. “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” [ceci tuera cela]. . . . “[T]he book will kill the building.”4 Media revolution in Frollo’s foretelling implies not only a succession of (technical, aesthetic, material) regimes but also an act of violence or even a calculated execution—albeit a strange kind of execution we have yet to understand, performed by one medium upon another. Indeed, the new medium would seem to possess the power—or perhaps even the sovereign right—to put the other to death. Hugo’s formula in which new media give death to the old, ceci tuera cela, is all the more striking given that the novel Notre-Dame de Paris prominently features the death sentence and ends on the dramatic execution of a central character, La Esmeralda. What’s more, Victor Hugo was an outspoken advocate for the abolition of capital punishment and had just two years earlier published the overtly anti–death penalty novel Le dernier jour d’un condamné. This backdrop of capital punishment invites us to take seriously—and literally, as it were—Hugo’s verb tuer (to kill) and its death-sentencing simple future tense, tuera. In what follows, this is precisely what I will be doing: tracking the relationship between, on the one hand, the life and death of media—particularly this strange killing of stone by the printed book—and, on the other hand, the logic of the death penalty. What would it mean to read the history of the death penalty as a history of mediation and media change and vice versa? This will be my central question, beginning in Paris with a coincidental story of stones that resurface during the twilight of the death penalty in 1977; I then return to Victor Hugo and his killer printing press of 1482, passing by way of 1793 and pausing on Jacques Derrida’s recently published Death Penalty seminar. This risks being a story that turns in circles, since I will be arguing (with Hugo but also against him) that both media change and the death penalty are best understood as phenomena in which substitution is violently at work and always already taking place. Ultimately, I [End Page 4] wish to argue...

Death in media

This paper discusses the role of media in a construction of public image speech and presentation of death. The main research questions could be posed as follows: does the media discourse confirm a thesis about modern society as the one which intensely avoids encounter with Death, or does it defy it? Frequent images or hints of death in visual media in films informative and entertainment programs-suggest certain changes related to this issue in the past few decades. This analysis focuses on printed media hence the paper assesses numerous issues of the daily journal Politika from 1963, 1972, 1973, 1979, 1985, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2007 and 2008, as well as some other daily journals after 2000. The analysis confirms a strong connection between the current political systems and ideology and speech about death. In addition, it reveals a political usage of this event but also speaks up about cultural and historical models, underlying all other constructions. During the 1960's and 1970's, the presentations, including the speech about death relied on the traditional understandings about inevitability of death and dying, and alternatively on atheistic beliefs related to the progress and wellbeing of the society. In this particular discourse, death was present to a limited degree, serving primarily to glorify socialist order. The end of the 1970's witnessed an increase in the glorification of the death, correlated with the decrease of the dominant political ideology. On the other hand, the 1990's brought about more presence of the national and religious symbolism and glorification of the dead as heroes. After 2000, mercantilism is evident throughout the media. All of the media broadcast drastic images of death and dead, thus providing an answer to the posed question at the beginning of this paper about the relationship of the modern society towards death but nevertheless, this still leaves out many implicit consequences and possible meanings.

African-American Media Images of Death and Mourning

Death and the process of mourning is a cultural haunting for the members of the African American community, given the ubiquitous regularity that this theme was in their lives, more so than for other Americans. Historically, the societal attributes of the African American community reflect the intrinsic differences between media's death and morning images for the African American and other ethnic groups in the United States.