Mediated Death

Johanna Sumiala

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509544554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

How do the dead live among us today?

Approaching death from the perspective of media and communication studies, anthropology, and sociology, this book explains how the all-encompassing presence of mediated death profoundly transforms contemporary society. It explores rituals of mourning and the livestreaming of death in hybrid media, as well as contemporary media-driven practices of immortalization. Sumiala draws on examples ranging from the iconic deaths of Margaret Thatcher and David Bowie to those of ordinary people ritualized on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. In addition, this book examines digital mourning of global events including the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Coronavirus pandemic.

Mediated Death is a must-read for scholars and students of communication studies, as well as general readers interested in exploring the meaning of mediated death in contemporary society.?

1
Mediating Death

Death is ultimately nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the ‘dead’ from the ‘living’: therefore, it affects both equally.

Baudrillard, 1993, p. 127

On 20 January 2014, Mrs Hayley Cropper (played by British actress Julie Hesmondhalgh), terminally ill of pancreatic cancer, took her own life in the iconic Coronation Street, the longest-running soap opera in the history of television (Wilson, 2014). Hayley, with no chance of recovery, decided to end her suffering before the illness could cause her unbearable pain. This decision was not easily made, with the final, decisive act being the culmination of months of slow-building television. The tragic screening was heavily publicized on ITV throughout the previous weekend. British media prepared viewers for it by providing a space for a public debate about whether Hayley’s decision was morally justified. The show’s producers brought experts into the studio to discuss Hayley’s death. The death scene played out in a discreet manner. Hayley was shown sleeping away in the arms of her loving husband, Roy. After the episode, information on several humanitarian helplines appeared on the screen to offer help to any who may have been disturbed by the scene. In the days that followed, Hayley’s death was widely re-screened and discussed throughout British mainstream media. The next peak in public interest in Coronation Street centred around an episode featuring Hayley’s funeral, which was bursting with emotion. Her coffin, brightly decorated with painted flowers, was brought to a ceremony hall accompanied by the iconic Queen song ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. The camera followed the main characters as Hayley’s relatives, friends, and neighbours participated in the ceremony. Many were moved – some were in tears – while Roy struggled silently with his emotions. The feeling of ‘sharing the moment’ was palpable; it could be felt on both sides of the screen.

Many years after Hayley’s mediated death aired on TV, her death and funeral scenes still appear on YouTube and stimulate collective emotion (ReadySalted80, 2014). The comments on these YouTube clips reveal the heterogeneous reactions of ordinary people to this mediated death. At a glance, the comments indicate that many were moved by Hayley’s death. Some say that they still miss her and react positively to the funeral setting, the decorated coffin, and the music. Other commenters make an explicit connection to their personal experiences, stating that Hayley’s death and funeral remind them of points in their lives at which they lost relatives and loved ones. However, there are also commenters who express feelings of antipathy and resentment, saying, for example, that they did not like Hayley’s character in the series. Some commenters even criticize others’ mediated mourning over Hayley – as she was ‘only’ a fictional character and did not die for ‘real’.

The comments do not offer much context. We do not know who these people on social media are or have a sense of their level of involvement with the series. As such, we can say nothing concretely about their motivations for participating in this digital discussion triggered by Hayley’s mediated death. And yet these people are coming together to share this death event on social media. In leaving their mark, they create social life around this peculiar death. Thus, we may characterize this type of death as simultaneously ‘virtual’ and ‘real’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘mundane’, ‘strange’ and ‘ordinary’ – all features that I claim are characteristic of modern mediated death.

Furthermore, Hayley Cropper’s death invites us to think about the workings of death in modern, digitally saturated society. What makes Hayley’s death interesting for our purposes is its obscurity as a social and cultural phenomenon and its ubiquitous and hybrid media saturation. The character, who dies, is fictional; the public, who participate in this death event, are ‘virtual’, as they associate, connect, and identify with Hayley’s fatal story online and through mainstream media. However, as Caroline Kitch and Janice Hume (2008, p. xiv) point out, ‘death stories are less about the dead than about the living’. Additionally, Hayley’s death stirred emotions, morals, and values well beyond the soap opera’s storyline; consequently, her death became an indicator of social life and the way in which it expresses itself in modern society (cf. Metcalf & Huntington, 1997, p. 2) – the topic that I aim to understand in this book.

In this effort, I am interested in the kind of mediated death that attracts public attention in digital media, whether through online news stories by journalists or posts uploaded on social networks by ordinary people. Hannah Arendt (1990 [1958]) has famously argued that the public is the essence of the social. In her work, acting in the public space – shared by others – is essential to a fulfilled human existence. Today, not only journalists but also ordinary people using diverse digital media platforms have the means to act in public space and establish communication between life and death and, therefore, shape social reality as it pertains to the loss of life and how it impacts the living. It is fair to assert that, today, death in its public and profoundly hypermediated form (cf. Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015), a concept that points here to the complex processes that shape the public presence of death in today’s society, has also become hybridized (Chadwick, 2013; Graham et al., 2013; cf. Kraidy, 2005). Andrew Chadwick (2013, p. 9) argues that ‘hybridity alerts us to the unusual things that happen when distinct entities come together to create something new that nevertheless has continuities with the old’. In his work, Chadwick (2013) refers in particular to the interaction between journalistic news media and social media. I wish to argue in this book that the digitally immersed hybridization of death across different communication platforms alerts us to the curious phenomena that take place as death meets modern media, and the social implications embedded in these hypermediated assemblages (see also Sumiala et al., 2018).

‘Madness That Is Shared Is Not Madness’

The concept of thinking about death through the lens of social life and, in turn, society is by no means new (cf. Howarth, 2007a). Hence, we must turn for a while to classical social theory. Already in the writings of the founding fathers of sociology, death bears a role in understanding the nature of social life. Émile Durkheim (1995 [1912]), one of the key thinkers in the early social theory of ritual, created a theory of the origin of social life in which the funerary rituals of aboriginal people play a significant role. Max Weber (1930) developed his theory of the spirit of capitalism by emphasizing death in his analysis of the Puritan belief in predestination. For both Durkheim and Weber, death was not primarily a question of the end of individual human life, but one of rituals and beliefs that were critical in the formation or development of society (Walter, 2008).

Among more contemporary social and cultural theorists, Zygmunt Bauman (2001), Peter Berger (1969), Ernest Becker (1973), Philippe Ariès (1977), Norbert Elias (1985), and Jean Baudrillard (1993) have all theorized death in modern society. Zygmunt Bauman (2001, pp. 2–3) discusses society as a tragic act of sharing. For Bauman, society constitutes a fatal condition associated with our mortality and is something that we, as human beings, cannot change.

‘society’ is another name for agreeing and sharing, but also the power which makes what has been agreed and is shared dignified …. ‘Living in society’ – agreeing, sharing and respecting what we share – is the sole recipe for living happily (if not forever after). Custom, habit and routine take the poison of absurdity out of the sting of the finality of life.

Bauman, 2001, p. 2

Society … is ‘a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning’. ‘Mad’ are only the unshared meanings. Madness is no madness when shared.

Bauman, 2001, p. 2

For Bauman, society is a collective arrangement for muddling through with the tragic condition of mortality. He claims that we need customs, habits, and routines to take ‘the poison of absurdity out of the sting of the finality of life’. Taking inspiration from Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]), Weber’s (1930), and Bauman’s (2001) work on death and society, I wish to advance thinking about mediated ritual as a central means of coping with death and its social consequence in modern society immersed in hybrid media communication. Another influential figure who has contributed to our understanding of death in social theory is Peter Berger (1969, p. 52); he argues that ‘every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death’. In other words, we create social order to stave off the chaos and anomie brought about by death. Although they come from different intellectual traditions, Durkheim, Weber, Bauman, and Berger all presume that death is a powerful element in the constitution of social life.

The Problem of Mortality

While the connection between death and society is well established in the social theoretical literature, it remains a connection that is considered highly ambivalent and complex. We may call this the dilemma of mortality in modern society. In the literature, modern society is often characterized in social thought as ‘death denying’. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker claims that ‘the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity … to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man’ (Becker, 1973, p. ix). This denial, Becker argues, is a key mechanism for modern social life (to overcome death) and, consequently, for the continuation of society.

The idea of modern society as death denying has not developed separately from history. One of the most cited thinkers in the history of Western death is Phillippe Ariès (1977), who asserts that there have been four overlapping periods in the social and cultural history of ‘Western’ death: the eras of ‘tame death’, ‘death of the self’, ‘death of the other’, and ‘invisible death’ – the last phase consisting of elements of denial of death. The era that characterizes the first millennium, ‘tame death’, describes the condition of a natural acceptance of death as the end of life. In this period, death was considered too common to be feared; people observed, in Ariès’s thinking, an explicit connection between the afterlife or otherworld and life on Earth. During the era of ‘death of the self’, which, according to Ariès, lasted until the eighteenth century, people began to play a more reflexive and active role in their perception of death. In this era, death no longer meant merely the weakening of life but, rather, the destruction of the self. Hence, the role of institutional religion (the Church) was crucial in maintaining authority over death during this period. Later, amid the development of natural science and the declining role of religious institutions in society, authority over death was gradually transferred to medicine and medical doctors. In this era, that of ‘death of the other’, death began to be seen as a social problem demanding scientific and professional control. By the nineteenth century, death was viewed as a staging post for reunion in the hereafter. There was a shift from the demise of the self to that of loved ones (family members and kin). Finally, according to Ariès, the twentieth century is characterized by an era of ‘forbidden’ or ‘invisible death’, a historical condition in which death is removed from ‘public’ display – such as at home, where loved ones can easily gather to say their goodbyes – and moved to hospitals and nursing homes. Ariès refers to this phase as ‘the lie’ in modern Western society. While he believes that the original motive was to shield the dying from the unpleasant reality of terminal illness, in the early twentieth century it became ‘no longer for the sake of the dying person, but for society’s sake, for the sake of those close to the dying person’ that this ‘procedure of hushing up’ had to occur. In this era, death was not to be mentioned so as to avoid ‘the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the ugliness of dying and by the very presence of death in the midst of a happy life, for it is henceforth given that life is always happy or should always seem to be so’ (Ariès, 1974, 87; see also Zimmermann & Rodin, 2004). For Ariès, death in modern society is ‘shameful and forbidden’; it is something that must be ‘hushed up’ so as to avoid interrupting the pleasant rhythm of modern social life (cf. Jacobsen, 2016). In other words, it must be repressed.

Yet another important contributor to the ‘denial of death’ thesis is social theorist Norbert Elias (1985), whose analysis of the social abandonment of dying people in modern society draws its power from the civilizing process. Elias argues: ‘Death is the problem of the living. Dead people have no problems’ (1985, p. 3). While Elias does not agree with Ariès’s depiction of death in medieval life as peaceful and ‘tame’ – pointing out that life in medieval feudal states was ‘passionate, violent, and therefore uncertain, brief and wild’ compared with the relatively predictable life we lead in highly industrialized societies – he shared the view that mortality in modern society is put into hiding. According to Elias (1985), the repression of death and dying in modern society (cf. Becker, 1973; Bauman, 1992a, 1992b) stems from a societal lack of adequate conceptual and emotional tools to face one’s own death.

The dilemma of mortality in modern society cannot be properly addressed without considering death as a taboo. Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was one of the first scholars to popularize the notion that conversation about death constitutes a taboo in modern society. His work was clearly influenced by Freudian psycho-analytical theory. In his article ‘The Pornography of Death’, originally published in 1955 and reprinted in Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain in 1965, Gorer draws a parallel between death and sexuality, stating that the twentieth century has seen ‘an unremarked shift in prudery … copulation has become more and more mentionable, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies’ (Gorer, 1965, p. 193). Gorer connects this ‘prudery’ concerning death directly with what he terms the ‘pornography of death’. In Gorer’s thinking, social prudery in modern society prevents ‘natural’ death from being openly discussed. This leads to the pornographization of death, forcing society to come to terms with the inevitability of death in some other form – such as, I will argue in this book, hybrid media.

Finally, one of the most radical theories pertaining to the problem of mortality in modern society and related denial of death is from Jean Baudrillard. In his seminal book L’échange symbolique et la mort (1976), translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993), Baudrillard evaluates the ambivalent relationship between death and modern life through the lens of the suppression of symbolic exchange in modern capitalist society. Baudrillard maintains that modern capitalist society aims to abolish death and eliminate it from symbolic exchange in life. He argues: ‘We have desocialised death by overturning bioanthropological laws, by according it the immunity of science and by making it autonomous, as individual fatality’ (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 131). Elsewhere, Baudrillard claims:

today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 Mediating Death
• 2 A Brief History of an Idea
• 3 The Event of Death
• 4 Rethinking Mourning Rituals
• 5 Ritual Contestations
• 6 Rituals Connect and Separate
• 7 The Quest for Post-Mortality
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement