Haunted profiles; social networking sites and the crisis of death

Abstract

How do perceptions of death shift or alter in relation to newly emerging technologies? In this paper I look at examples of mourning rituals, namely online memorials using social networking sites, through the looking-glass of media theories such as ‘Reflections on photography’ in Roland Barthes’ La chambre Claire and the spectral archive in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. I locate these new conceptions in the context of the history of human perceptions of death as described by Philippe Ariès in Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident. I look at these histories and conceptualizations, as expressed in changing media, as a way into the question of whether contemporary mourning rituals begin to insinuate a new tradition of mourning, and as a means to elucidate how the online applications these rituals are based upon and their uses enhance/flatten/affect our perceptions of death.