Haunting hands: mobile media practices and loss

摘要

There's no lack of scholarship concerned with the primacy of digital mediation and its repercussions on how we now constitute ourselves as subjects. However, less attention has been devoted to the specific role of mobile media on how we register and index human presence or lack thereof. Mobile media refers to portable multifunctional devices such as smartphones and tablets, the interactive and distributed mode of communication proliferated by such devices, as well as the mobility of their contents. The ubiquity and personal nature of mobile devices, combined with new media's impact on perceptions of time and space, has exponentially increased the entanglements of the embodied self with its symbolic aggregations across techno-prosthetic spaces. Mobile devices and network technology allow for immediate access between individuals and interaction with their digital extensions. Yet few studies have engaged with the conceptual disruptions precipitated by such a continuously interconnected and embedded model of selfhood, namely the potential it creates to deny absence and finitude. Social media platforms, for example, are no longer strictly hubs for the living but also virtual graveyards, haunted by the digital remains of deceased users. With mobile devices, we now carry those uncanny, lively traces with us at all times, emotionally complicating the legibility and tangibility of death. Haunting Hands comes as a much needed survey of mobile media's role in coping with death and dying in the twenty-first century. Death, despite its universality, is a singular process and as such the book takes an appropriately cross-cultural and anecdotal approach. Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth explore a complex and developing affective terrain through experiences of loss ranging from breakups to national tragedies, analyzing continuities as well as ruptures between old and new forms of mourning along the way.