ABSTRACT

We are born, live, and die with technologies. This book is about the role technology plays in sustaining narratives of living, dying, and coming to be. Contributing authors examine how technologies connect, disrupt, or help us reorganize ways of parenting and nurturing life. They further consider how technology sustains our ways of thinking and being, hopefully reconciling the distance between who we are and who we aspire to be. Finally, they address the role technology plays in helping us come to terms with death, looking at technologically enhanced memorials, online rituals of mourning, and patterns of grief enabled through technology. Ultimately, this volume is about using technology to reimagine the art of life.

chapter 1|10 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|24 pages

Numerical Being and Non-Being

Probing the Ethos of Quantification in Bereavement Online

chapter 4|19 pages

Imagining the Future Through the Lens of the Digital

Parents' Narratives of Generational Change

chapter 5|20 pages

Storytelling the Self into Citizenship

How Social Media Practices Facilitate Adolescent and Emerging Adult Political Life

chapter 6|15 pages

Family Life in Polymedia

chapter 7|17 pages

Every Click You Make, I'll Be Watching You

Facebook Stalking and Neoliberal Information

chapter 9|17 pages

Defying Death

Black Joy as Resistance Online

chapter 13|15 pages

From Personal to Personalized Memory

Social Media as Mnemotechnology

chapter 14|16 pages

Social Media Rituals

The Uses of Celebrity Death in Digital Culture

chapter 15|17 pages

Ghosts in the Machines

How Centuries of Technological Play with Death Has Helped Make Sense of Life