ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular type of online communication, illness blogging and how the involved online platforms challenge, or even transform, existing notions of what a deceased human being can do. Inspired by recent developments in death studies, actor network and affect theories the chapter focuses on illness blogging and how it transforms existing notions of what a deceased human being can do. Three blogs by American Jessica Joy Rees, English Rosie Kilburn and Canadian Eva Markvoort are analysed as cases. The chapter uses Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalytical approach to analyse the way the illness bloggers describe their disease as undesired biological rhythms or rhythmic disruptions in various ways, to analyse the way the act of blogging and following blogs creates a new social rhythm of daily interaction and structure, and to analyse the way the blog allows for the continuation and re-actualisation of the bloggers' life rhythms, which make the bloggers into socially present subjects post-mortem.
