Haunting Hands

From natural disasters to private funerals, digital media are playing a central role in the documentation and commemoration of shared significant events and individual loss experiences. Yet few studies have fully engaged with the increasing role mobile media play in making meanings related to traumatic events across different individual and collective contexts. Haunting Hands provides the first in-depth study into understanding the role of mobile media in memorialization and bereavement as a cultural and social practice. Throughout the chapters in this book, we explore how mobile devices are both expanding upon older forms of memory-making and creating new channels for affective cultures whereby the visual, textual, oral, and haptic manifest in new ways. Encompassing everything from phones to tablets, mobile media are not only playing a key role in how we represent and remember life, but also in how we negotiate the increasingly integral role of the digital within rituals in and around death. Haunting Hands posits how, during times of distress, mobile media can assist, accompany, and at times augment the disruptive terrain of loss. The book expands upon debates in the area of online memorialization in that the mobile device itself takes prominence, not only for its communicative or social function, but also for the ways in which it can contain as well as generate an intimate space within it. In this way, the device becomes an important companion for mobile-emotive grief as the bereaved engage with emotionally charged digital content in solitary, sometimes secretive, and sometimes shared ways.