Dead Celebrities, Trolls and Grief Police: Mourning Online

As Halloween approaches, Forbes Magazine posts its roster of that year's top-earning dead celebrities. That's the jumping-off point for this discussion, which will probably teach you a few new phrases; cultural reincarnation, parasocial relationships, and grief policing.

Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, speaks with sociologist Professor Carla Sofka, of Siena College, New York. Carla has studied death and the digital almost since the birth of the Internet, so it's an honour to have her on the episode.

Par for the course with Still Spoken, we’ll be considering questions that were unimaginable a few decades ago. Since nearly everyone is confronting dilemmas with death online these days, after listening you might want to download Carla’s ‘Netiquette’ for dealing with death, tragedy and grief online. You can find that here.  She's also written Dying, Death and Grief in an Online Universe (2012).

As with all episodes of Still Spoken, this episode addresses death, loss, and grief, to include descriptions of difficult experiences bereaved people have had online. Please look after yourself while you're listening, and reach out to professionals, friends or family for support if you need to.

Written and produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy  podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound. In order of play:
Creepy Crawly (Arthur Benson)
Gas$ Money, Instrumental Version (Xavy Rusan)
Granular (Cobby Costa)
Liquid (Cobby Costa)
Unfriendly Users (Marten Moses)

Get to know Elaine's writing on Substack and Medium.

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