Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife

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The consortium Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (hereafter DiDe) is an interdisciplinary research consortium that addresses cultural and social transformation of human death in contemporary society as it is characterised by digital saturation of the current collective social and cultural existence. It brings together the Universities of Durham (UK), Aarhus (Denmark), Bucharest (Romania) and Helsinki (Finland, with Helsinki leading and overseeing the entire programme Throughout history, death has typically been presented alongside and orchestrated by religion and/or other ideological belief systems and societal institutions (Ariès 1977; Davies 2011). DiDe builds on a premise that in contemporary digital society, death is largely and increasingly experienced through and managed by affordances of digital communication and related cultural, social and institutional practices and conventions (Sumiala 2021; Sisto 2020; Stokes 2021). The present circumstance affects death as a social and cultural phenomenon in multiple ways (Jacobsen 2021). It transforms ideas, beliefs and conceptions of death in society, alters relationships between the living and the dead and influences the range and character of bereavement practices, as well as reconditioning values and morals associated with human death, and reconfiguring institutional structures that manage and control death in society (Sumiala 2021; Coeckelbergh 2020; Han 2020). The DiDe consortium investigates the topic of digital death by approaching human death as an object of accelerated cultural and social transformation in digital society. In DiDe, digital death is defined as a concept that is more than just death and death-related practices perceived, experienced and performed in a digital context. DiDe specifies death as a phenomenon articulated, experienced and performed in interaction with digital communication and culture. This refers to a dialectical approach in which the digital is seen to shape perceptions and experiences of death in society and culture, but also being shaped by it.