MEDIATED DEATH AND REAL-LIFE DEATH: THE CONFUSION

GEM1902S: Death and After-Death in the Internet Age Assignment I An Initial Critical Response Mediated Death and Real-Life Death: The Confusion Adeline Chang Submitted 9th February, 2013 . . . White, the flash Like a crack of lightning Sense of winding Down -

Black and purple Entwine and tremble Urgency escalating, we Become one . . .

Communality Communal grieving, increasingly, seems to be making a comeback in developed societies (Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, and Pitsillides, 2012), the result of the Internets spread and the ease that social platforms like Facebook lend to the gathering of people. By enabling us to cross and overcome many of the physical and social boundaries present in real life, the Internet brings together far larger groups of people, far more often than was possible before. Thus, grieving for the dead has been transforming from a predominantly private affair to one shared with and experienced in a oneness with others.

Importantly, this includes often groups of people who were very much on the periphery of the deceaseds social circle, or, even more wondrously (or strangely), people who never knew them

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at all. How can we know how far such grief is really authentic, versus being self-serving and self-gratifying? Is there really a line dividing these two, or are they intertwined? Over and above the formation of an intimate mass public (Rose, 2010), I perceive deindividuation to be at play here; in groups, people are losing their sense of self, unwittingly going along instead with cues from their environment (McRaney, 2011).

The widening gulf A similar diminishing of self-awareness can be observed in the way we deal with and draw inferences from death in the media. Media is ubiquitous in todays world, with sounds, videos, pictures and text a constant relentless presence on all sides. In relatively developed countries, many people have their first experience with death not in real life but through these media, in an encounter that seems far removed from reality. Clarke argues that in the absence of personal experience with death people rely on media, among other things, for information, attitudes, beliefs and feelings about death and its meanings' (Clarke, 2005, cited in Gibson, 2007), and this is probably true: death, being very much a part of life, is a recurring theme which we encounter in many different forms, from animated films such as The Corpse Bride to songs such as Elton Johns Candle in the Wind, to reports in the news of death in war and conflict. While this increasingly casual exposure to death could theoretically bring us comfort when death does confront us in real life, Gibson argues that mediated death does not give rise automatically to a familiarity and acceptance of the death we face in real life. Instead of closing the gap between these two types of death (which at their core are still the same concept), I find that our constant exposure has led to an increasing gulf between our perceptions of and reactions to death in media and death in real life, and this discrepancy is something dangerous and confusing to our inner compass.

Symbols & interpretations Clearly, then, what we perceive death to be and mean doesnt arise from what it actually is. In A Sociology of Death and Dying, Kearl speaks about death as a social construct: the fears, hopes and orientations people have regarding it are not instinctive, but... learned, with cultural opinions and explanations of death so thoroughly ingrained that they are believed to be right by [that cultures] members. Such is also how language works, based on symbols and on the sense we make of words, not the words themselves. A case in point: the word dead has wormed its way into numerous expressions in the English language, always meaning anything but dead; faced with actual death, we resort to all sorts of euphemisms (Kearl, 1989). With the Internet, this Peircean concept of semiosis - of meaning arising not from content but from interpretation (Chandler, 2011) - is occurring on an unimaginable scale.

MEDIATED DEATH AND REAL-LIFE DEATH: THE CONFUSION

As the Internet brings together various media forms, it itself transforms into a new sort of mass media by and for the people. Any of us can now - and many are - shift our personal experiences with death from the physical to the digital realm of the Internet, where they transform into a type of mediated death. They become symbols subject to the allocation of meaning by each viewer, perpetuate the trend of collective grieving and further complicate the division in our responses to mediated death and real life death.

. . . Full circle is run Boldly Forms leap, in the wee small beckoning hours Now the sun Rises oer the lee Reveals a chasm unwittingly has formed Separated Blinking Confused Bewildered stares meeting What now? . . .

These issues and questions which I am concerned about have yet to be addressed as an interlinked whole. I envision that this could be done by gathering opinions from various perspectives and driving this to culminate in the formation of visual art or some other media piece. Such a medium would be apt as the interface for bringing attention to and addressing the issue of the widening gulf between our recognition and comprehension of mediated death and real-life death. How do people assign meaning to mediated deaths? Has this ever come to

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conflict with their personal experiences? And what are their opinions on the sincerity of communal grieving on the Internet? The piece should contain elements that aggressively encourage viewers to reflect on and question their own views, and even interact with each other in some way based on these opinions. Viewers will be transformed from observers to participants. In this way, I hope to bring some resolution to my concerns regarding the issues of Internet grieving and varying perceptions of death.

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MEDIATED DEATH AND REAL-LIFE DEATH: THE CONFUSION

References

Chandler, D. (2011, Oct 11). Semiotics for http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

beginners.

Retrieved

from

Gibson, M. (2007). .Death and mourning in technologically mediated culture. The International Jounal of Health Sociology: Policy, Promotion, Equity and Practice, 16 (5), 415-424. Retrieved from http://hsr.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/16/issue/5/article/1936/death-andmourning-in-technologically-mediated

Kearl, M.C. (1989). Endings: a sociology of death and dying. New York: Oxford University Press. McRaney, D. (2011, Feb 10). Deindividuation. http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/02/10/deindividuation/ Retrieved from

Rose, G. (2010). Doing family photography: The domestic, the public and the politics of sentiment. Ashgate: Farnham. Walter, T., Hourizi, R., Moncur, W., and Pitsillides, S. (2012). Does the internet change how we die and mourn? Overview and analysis. Omega: Journal of Death Dying, 64 (4), 275-302.