Tomorrow, Dr Pat Stokes will be hosting a workshop at the Burwood Corporate Centre titled ‘Living with the Digital Dead’.

Researchers across a number of disciplines have noted that the internet, and especially the increasing ubiquity of social media, is changing the ways in which the dead figure in the lives of the living. New means of commemorating, remembering, forgetting, interacting with and even denigrating the dead have emerged in online contexts, from online memorial sites, to new conventions of public mourning, to Facebook users continuing to post on the walls of deceased friends, to speculative new technologies that will create interactive avatars of the dead. Such practices raise important questions about the ontological, ethical, and social standing of the electronically-mediated dead and the digital ‘remains’ in which they are instantiated.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on this topic from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

For further information, see this page.