A01=Tamara Kneese
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Author_Tamara Kneese
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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COP=United States
death
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
digital death practices
digital remains
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infrastructure
Language_English
networks
online mourning rituals
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platforms
Price_€20 to €50
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PS=Active
social data
Social media
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technology
Product details
- ISBN 9780300248272
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 10 Oct 2023
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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An accessible yet erudite deep dive into how platforms are remaking experiences of death
“A compelling collection of case studies about how technology breaks down when faced with the messiness of mortality.”—Gabriel Nicholas, Washington Post
Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?
“A compelling collection of case studies about how technology breaks down when faced with the messiness of mortality.”—Gabriel Nicholas, Washington Post
Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?
Tamara Kneese is a visiting scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, CA.
