Abstract
Ubiquitous media is not just a matter of (digital) media being everywhere and embedded in various objects (clothing, household hardware, buildings…). Using the practices of bereavement and commemoration as displayed by parents on children’s graves and online memorial sites as a case, this paper claims that ubiquitous media as a concept also relates to processes of mediatization (Cf. Hjarvard 2008, Lundbye 2009, Hepp 2013); to the ‘thingification of media’ (Lash & Lury 2007) and to everyday practices through which we (re)appropriate and change existing media ‘to suit our needs’ (Cf. Jensen 2010).
Bereavement strategies like the use of objects (toys, teddy bears etc.) for communicational purposes on children’s graves are examples of how objects are embedded with media affordances: the possibility to establish, maintain and alter connections and relations. When it comes to bereavement practices as they materialize on children’s graves, it is the accommodation and decoration of the graves themselves that function as media with their variety of physical objects as ritual and relational tools for communication. Based on observation studies and qualitative content analyses of both children’s graves and online memory profiles (Christensen & Sandvik 2013, 2014), it is demonstrated how bereaved parents perform practices on children’s graves – ubiquitously mirrored in other media practices such as online memorial sites – that transform the dead child into a being with whom an altered relationship may be built, maintained and developed so that the bereaved can, eventually, re-integrate the dead into his or her ongoing life.
While most people still share the mundane idea of grief that its end-point is to let go of the dead and move on in life, both the practices we are empirically observing as well as research within death sociology (Walter 1999) and palliative care (Stroebe et.al. 2005, Taubert et.al. 2014) have moved towards a new and more profound understanding of grief processes not as a matter of ’letting go of the relations to the deceased’ and ’moving on’, but rather ’keeping hold’ as a basic condition for moving on. In the logic of this new paradigm, grief is an integration and re-integration process the aim of which is to establish and develop lasting bonds to the dead that makes it possible for the bereaved to gradually re-integrate themselves into society. This perspective implies that grieving is not allocated to a specific period of time (a time of mourning) but that grieving and the social technologies like media, materiality and ritualization related to it are embedded in everyday life practices and have to be conceived of as processes rather than events that (suddenly) occur and then are over (Romano 2009, Knudsen & Christensen 2014). Grief practices are indeed integrated in everyday life. Here, small-scale (compared to institutionalized periods of mourning) ritualizations and repetitions are central as are the convergence of deathstyle and lifestyle since the ritual responses to death are not outside ordinary life.
The societal context of bereavement in relation to the death of a child is very complex: on the one hand, death in general, and children’s death in particular, are still subject to silence and alienation: even though there are changes, most people are still reluctant to talk about death and have great difficulties relating to people who have lost, for instance, a child. At the same time, it seems that the practices of bereaved parents are the forefront of new ways of performing and sharing grief that might cause Western society to move away from socially isolating and marginalizing bereaved parents: what may be observed, is bereaved parents breaking the isolation by reaching out and being very explicit in their grief, and, at the same time, more socially including. They take up more social space, both online and offline. This development is particularly apparent at children’s graves in urban cemeteries. It is, however, also similarly apparent in the formation of network and peer-to-peer associations and, not the least, in the establishment of online networks and sites of grief and commemoration on social media. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are media alive with discussions, comments and personal recountings dealing with topics like illness, disease, death and dying (Taubert et.al. 2014, Walter 1996, 1997, Gustavsson 2011). In fact, one might argue, that humans share death, loss and grief like never before and, furthermore, that this sharing of death and mourning is a central example of how both offline and online practices can creatively constitute new communal spaces for designing and performing rituals of grief and commemoration empowered by the use of media.
These practices are not discrete or segregated. Rather, they seem integrated in everyday life when it comes to the media, the materiality and the ritualizations involved. The lifestyle and deathstyle (the ways in which we perform practices around death, see Davies 2005, Davies & Rumble 2012) of present day’s bereaved parents seem to coexist in very complex and intriguing ways.
By referring to grief as an everyday practice, we imply practices initiated by the parents themselves and/or performed according to systems and structures invented by themselves as a response to the lack of formal grief formats for the everyday. These practices are designed, maintained and negotiated in a social continuum running from the very extraordinary to the utterly mundane and rooted in the everyday life of the parents.
Over the last decades death, dying and bereavement culture in the Western world have constituted a growing field of attention and research. Much of the research has been nationally based and focused on monographic studies of specific fields, such as practices related to burial traditions, grave traditions and so on, however, in recent years the field has developed into becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary and forming networks across countries.
The research tradition has evolved out of clinical practices (Rando 1986, R. Davies 2004, 2005) and therapeutic traditions (Brotherson & Soderqvist 2002, Stroebe et.al. 2005) and underway meeting the demand for a greater societal understanding of the needs and practices in medical and social institutions and among practitioners. The field has therefore mainly been researched and documented by social workers, palliative care (health services) and sociologists. Much of the work aims at bridging research and practice and creating synergies between the two, for instance, the British Center for Death and Society (see Walter 1999) reflects this complexity, as does The Nordic Network of Thanatology (see Jacobsen 2013).
At the same time, anthropologists have studied death as an inherent social phenomenon and the social technologies surrounding it in classical death studies such as Hertz 1907 and more recent studies like Bloch & Parry 1982. These studies are most often focused on dealing with death outside of the Western world and are based on ethnographic field studies. However, in recent years also the anthropological study of death has become more cross-disciplinary and focusing on practices of death in present day Western countries (Harper 2012). The ongoing research project Death, Materiality and the Origins of Time headed by anthropologist Rane Willerslev (Aarhus University and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo) and published in Christensen & Willerslev 2013 and Christensen & Sandvik 2014 is an example of how this field is developing.
Existing research includes studies of institutionalized practices concerning death, burial, mourning and so on, but also research focusing on the practices of e.g. bereavement as performed in more mundane settings (Davies 2002, Venbrux 2008). As such, these studies relates to the concept of everyday life as such (Featherstone 1992, Elias 1998) and in relation to death practices (Gibson 2008).
In recent years, media research has contributed to the field of death studies. Mediatization studies have focused on how various societal practices are influenced by media logics (Livingstone 2009, Lundby 2009) including religious practices (Hjarvard 2011, Hepp & Krönert 2010) and practices surrounding death and dying (Sumiala & Hakola 2013). This tradition corresponds with research into the domestication of media (Silverstone & Hirsch 1992, Haddon 2004) and its role in everyday life where digital media are playing an increasingly important role (Helles 2012). The study of media in everyday life has a long tradition, however, empirical studies specifically focusing on uses of media in relation to grieving as everyday life practices are limited (Sumiala 2013 being a prominent exception).
However, studies in online death and memorial culture constitute a rapidly maturing field of research focusing on how death and grief are dealt with on various online platforms and social media, asking how digital media and especially the internet and social media may be changing our ways of grieving and mourning (Walter et.al. 2012, Caroll & Landry 2010) and our concepts of death and bereavement (Mitchell et.al. 2012). These studies are often platform specific (Brubaker et.al. 2013, Haavarinen 2014, Pennington 2014, Klastrup 2013), for instance, dealing with practices of grief and commemoration in online worlds and games, uses of Facebook-pages for commemoration etc. (see deathonlineresearch.net).
Taking a point of departure in previous work as pointed out above; this paper presents insights into the uses of media in everyday practices of grief and commemoration primarily related to stillborns and the death of newly born and young people. The main purpose here is not just to observe said practices in order to understand how parents establish and maintain relation (with the dead, with each other, with the outside world) through ways of communicating about loss, pain, bereavement and so on, but to develop, theorize and operationalize the methodology and the concepts and analytical apparatus needed to study the practices at play and their media uses. The complexity of everyday practices of grief and commemoration vouches for developing a corresponding complex media concept in which media characteristics and affordances (the functionalities that are specifically fit for a certain use) may be understood as a matter of dimensions, as complex systems of communication whether we see this in the use of objects on children’s graves embedded with media affordances (Christensen & Sandvik 2014) or social media used as communicational tools for creating online memorial profiles (Christensen & Sandvik 2013). Inspired by multidimensional concepts of media and communication (Meyrowitz 1973, Bordewijk & van Kaam 1986, Jensen 2010, Hepp 2013) concepts are developed that can include media as physical objects, as analogue and digital offline or online media functioning in a variety of ways as e.g. transportation or transmission vehicles mediating between people – both dead and living – and between worlds, as specific sets of semantics defining the practice of grief and commemoration, and as specific contexts framing and signifying said practices; concepts that can describe the way in which media and media uses are entwined in the everyday practices but not solely in a one-way cause-and-effect way implying that media produce new practices. The paper argues that at the same time we can observe how people turn objects into media or create new ways of using existing media employing them as new tools for communicating with or about the dead, the realm of the dead or in order to communicate something to the world about relations to the dead (see Jensen 2010, Christensen & Sandvik 2014). What is tentatively suggested in the concluding part of this paper is a method and an analytical apparatus for studying how ubiquitous existing or created media enable, facilitate and shape practices related to death and loss and at the same time how existing media are appropriated and modified to fit the need of these practices.
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| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Publikationsdato | 2015 |
| Status | Udgivet - 2015 |
| Begivenhed | NORDMEDIA 2015: Media Presence - Mobile Modernities - University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Danmark Varighed: 13 aug. 2015 → 15 aug. 2015 |
Konference
| Konference | NORDMEDIA 2015 |
|---|---|
| Lokation | University of Copenhagen |
| Land/Område | Danmark |
| By | Copenhagen |
| Periode | 13/08/2015 → 15/08/2015 |