A post qualitative inquiry into the disruptive effects of digital technology on death, meaning-making, and intergenerational memory and knowledge

Abstract

This study is a post qualitative inquiry into how our engagement with digital technologies have transformed the ways we experience death and mourning, the effects on our meaning-making practices and the intergenerational transference of our collective memory and knowledge. The study draws on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida and Stiegler to think about death, mourning, the importance of meaning making and collective memory and knowledge transfer. From this the study explores how we are ‘thrown’ into a surveilled algorithmic society (Rouvroy and Zuboff) that retain traces of Foucault’s disciplinary societies and how the digital refigures our sense of space (Löw & Knoblauch and Bratton). As Wagner shows, mourning spaces are expanded to the virtual, though no new norms for mourning have really been adopted. This is related to Stiegler’s conception of the recursive doubly epokhal redoubling and how it is disrupted – that is, we are unable to critically think about our engagement with the ‘new’ digital technology because our reasoning and behaviour have become increasingly short-circuited and automatised. Moving to the meaning-making practice of narrative identity formation in the digital sphere through the works of Faccennini and Halsema, it is argued that the digital fragments, hides and automates our identities. This has massive ethical implications in terms of Butler’s thought on giving an account of ourselves, as well as in terms of mourning because, following Derrida, we need to identify and localise the remains of the dead to begin the work of mourning. Underlining the urgency of this, our individuation processes are increasingly disrupted, leading to a streamlining of identity. This is complicated by what Lawtoo calls hypermimesis, where we can no longer distinguish who is mimicking whom – the self or the virtual self. With these threads of thought, this study hopes to prompt the reader to think about our philosophies and practices of death and mourning in the digital age.