The futures of grief

Abstract

This provocation raises questions about the future of grief through digital vestiges that offer the animated presence of the biologically dead in the lives of the bereaved. The vast amount of digital data produced and shared with others accumulating on social media, on phones and computers, creates a substantial archive in which the dead continue to be and also not be with the living. The digital data that is left behind after biological death provides new ways in which to create replicas– holograms of the deceased as well as voice bots in which the bereaved might speak to those they miss and hear their voice answering back to questions much like Apple’s Siri. Bereavement is about living with ghosts (often about discovering that the dead ghost our own bodies) and the digital has ushered in new forms of ghostliness in which we find ways of staying connected to the loved and missed. Digital remains of the dead, while often lively with algorithms generating messages from accounts of the deceased, also, arguably, expose the corporeal, emotional and cognitive difference and limit between a living biological human presence and a digital human presence. The latter can never truly substitute for the former. This provocation suggests that holograms and voice bots can be just as much tools for grieving and acknowledging loss, as they might be tools in the service of denying death and prolonging grief.