In his introduction to The Digital Departed, Timothy Recuber (2023) distinguishes between two types of ‘thanatechnology’ that preoccupy digital death researchers:
- That which is inspired by science-fiction, like mind-uploading to a computer, and
- That which is mundane and facilitates symbolic immortality today.
Under the second category, he includes technologies as diverse as blogs (the popularity of which peaked in the 2000s), social networking sites and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled ‘deathbots’ (which continue to be refined). Yet, surely, these are not equally mundane, if we take this word at its face value to mean ordinary and lacking interest. If the most recent Death Online Research Symposium is anything to go by, digital death researchers find much to be excited by in Recuber’s ‘mundane’ including: grief influencers on Instagram and TikTok, death memes and livestreaming death, and - of course - the ongoing development of AI chatbots that imitate the deceased.
Amidst all the excitement of emerging ‘mundane’ digital death practices, however, the truly everyday has largely escaped academic attention. My doctoral research aims to highlight one of the most commonplace but under-researched acts of mourning in the UK: giving to charity in remembrance of the deceased through creating or engaging with an online memorial page.
Most UK funerals now include a collection for charity, with digital tools becoming an increasingly important facilitator of this fundraising. Indeed, giving online in remembrance of the dead is now considered the norm in the UK, with revenue from online tribute funds (peer-to-peer fundraising pages like those used to raise money for running a marathon) increasing by 7% from 2022 to 2023 (goDonate inMem, 2024). This practice is so widespread that, as demonstrated in my paper presented at the 2024 Death x Design x Culture conference in Falmouth, UK, two-thirds of the 50 best-known UK charities have invested in digital memorial platforms to facilitate ‘in memoriam’ fundraising (Brickel, 2024).
Supporting a charity through a digital memorial platform as an act of mourning is entrenched in contemporary death rituals in the UK. This prevalence is indicated by how people respond to an explanation of my research; usually, I hear, “We did that when so-and-so died…” or, just as frequently, “That reminds me, I really must give to my friend’s page.” And yet perhaps it is this very everyday-ness – or true mundanity - that has resulted in a dearth of critical academic research investigating this as a death practice enacted by the bereaved, as a social norm or as an income-generating fundraising initiative.
Whilst some literature (Bailey & Walter, 2016; Walter, 2015) cursorily mentions choosing a charity as one decision a bereaved family must make in designing a funeral, and others suggest hypotheses as to how donating in remembrance of the deceased might help the bereaved (Routley, et al., 2013), there remains little empirical work that seeks to understand how this practice is understood by the actors involved (the bereaved, the charities, the mediators of these in-memoriam donations). Penner & Main (2021) is a notable exception to this, since they demonstrated via survey that giving as an act of remembrance, particularly when accompanied by the creation of a physical memorial such as a bench, increased feelings of continued connectedness to the deceased. There remains no research into the creation of charitable digital memorials.
That a practice has not been investigated thus far does not mean there are not questions to provoke considerable academic interest. For example, researchers might ask:
- Which deaths are socially constructed as warranting fundraising?
- How does this practice fit with wider trends in contemporary funerals, such as for personalisation?
- Might this practice problematically commodify bereavement?
- What safeguards do charities need to put in place to protect memorial pages from cyber-attacks including trolling and hacking, or deletion?
- How do bereaved users understand the permanence of digital spaces, and the possibility for symbolic immortality through digital memorials?
- What role do funeral directors play in mediating in-memoriam donations through digital memorials?
- How does the design of charitable digital memorials make use of death symbols?
- How do bereaved users understand the ‘public’ nature of these digital memorials, and how might they differ to memorials on social networking sites?
By engaging with these sorts of sociological and policy-related questions, my PhD project seeks to highlight in-memoriam giving through digital memorial platforms as a contemporary death ritual. In doing so, it centres a truly mundane – ordinary, everyday, commonplace – digital death practice, that nevertheless ought to attract critical academic investigation.
Bailey, T. & Walter, T., 2016. Funerals against death. Mortality, 21(2), pp. 149-166.
Brickel, C., 2024. “Identifying design patterns of charitable digital memorial sites”, Death x Design x Culture: Radical Re-imaginings For The End of Life. Falmouth, UK, 4-6 September
goDonate inMem, 2024. Online in-memory giving insights: report 2024, London: goDonate.
Penner, S. & Main, K., 2021. In memoriam fundraising: an empirical exploration of donor motivations. Social business.
Recuber, T., The digital departed: how we face death, commemorate life and chase virtual immortality [Online]. 2023. New York: New York University Press. Available from: https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479814985.001.0001.
Routley, C., Hudson, J. & Sargeant, A., 2013. Developing relationships with in memoriam charitable donors: Insights from the bereavement literature. Social business, 3(2).
Walter, T., 2015. New mourners, old mourners: online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 1-2(10-24), pp. 10-24.