Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 49Death, Funerary Practices, and MourningMemory, Trauma, and CommemorationDigital Media and Philosophy

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Online Afterlives: Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture

Sisto, Davide·2020·The MIT Press eBooks
DOI 10.7551/mitpress/12553.001.0001
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

How digital technology—from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones—is changing our relationship to death. Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death. Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people's last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person's account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.7551/mitpress/12553.001.0001

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cited by

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Sisto, D.
Corresponding author
Sisto, Davide
Venue
The MIT Press eBooks
Publisher
The MIT Press
Published
2020-09-01
DOI
10.7551/mitpress/12553.001.0001
OpenAlex
W4230205326
Cited by
49
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 11 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 2
FWCI
5.98
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
The MIT Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Digital Media and Philosophy
Keywords
digital afterlife, chatbots, speech synthesis, online mourning, death and mortality, social media, social isolation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.