Susanna Langman's View Of Death

Death, as humans perceive it, is relative to the existing state of mankind’s constructs. With the emergence of social technology, views on the disconnection between the departed and the physical world have changed, with mortality no longer ending at the gravesite. Incorporating haunting yet innovational methods, technologies in the form of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Memorials, and online blogs and music, are now able to archive thoughts and weave it with visual and auditory images that hold captive the embodiment of the deceased. The tension between this capability and older ritualistic theories about what is considered truly ‘dead’ lead to changes in transitions surrounding liminality and the aggregation of the all figments of the human …show more content…
This passage is made difficult through the creation of memorial accounts on Facebook. These profiles anchor the embodiment and persona of the recently deceased to the confines of the ‘virtual world’. A memorialized Facebook account lacks the distinctions necessary to formally recognize that the user is no longer a part of society. In the profile of Susanna Langman, her account is established as memorialized, yet attributes that would signal her passing are almost nonexistent. The most glaring is the omission of the date of her death. This date alone is symbolic of the detachment from the ontological constraints that are tied to every social human being. Other features of the memorial account include the ability for friends to make posts to the deceased in various tenses such as “I’m a day late but happy birthday suds. I miss so much. I can’t wait to catch up with you” (Remembering Susanna Langman). The use of the present and future tense in these posts not only solidifies the …show more content…
Pictures taken using this platform operate under the control of the ‘like’ button, which encourage users at funerals to promote their association with the deceased but also inevitably leads to traces of narcissism as a product. This new trend contrasts with the “lowliness and sacredness” that is claimed to be met through the process of liminality in society (Turner 96). The term ‘lowliness’ emits connotations of humbleness and piety, yet these photos, which contain numerous hashtags like “#love…#instacute… #redlips,” that, due to the structure of Instagram, would cause funeral selfies to be placed alongside photos of similar themes, stray exceedingly far from those meanings (jpicklezg). The concept of selfies at funerals have evolved to become novel ways of expressing grief, but the values they incorporate belong to a structured, ostentatious class that no longer follows the “unstructured…communitas” in the liminal period (Turner 96). Mourning in death would now need to take into account the ‘encoding’ of social networks, which relies not on the qualities of an event, but of the user. Social