How our mourning rituals on mobile media reflect our social, cultural and emotional lives.
From Instagram eulogies of human and animal kin to witnessing mass human destruction on TikTok, mobile media practices play a significant role in contemporary grieving, memorializing, and mourning rituals in an age of permanent crisis. Our devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied, and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media. In Mourning on Mobile Media, Larissa Hjorth aims to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our lives.
As disasters, pandemics, and war become more commonplace in and through mobile devices as affective witnesses, how can we learn from mourning practices as a reflection of contemporary media culture? The author argues that through these micronarratives—from eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habit—we can connect, enhance kinship, and create hope in response to the overwhelming sense of crisis we face today.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Hjorth’s unique ‘more-than-human’ perspective on mourning is a vital contribution to media studies. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary media and the collective grief experienced from global pandemics, environmental crises, and natural disasters.” —Lee Humphreys, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication, Cornell University; author of The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life
“With generosity and care for the griefs of ecological crisis, Larissa Hjorth illuminates the complex affectivities of witnessing and mourning in this urgently needed and all-too-timely book.” —Michael Richardson, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales; author of Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World
Larissa Hjorth is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University.
How our mourning rituals on mobile media reflect our social, cultural and emotional lives.
From Instagram eulogies of human and animal kin to witnessing mass human destruction on TikTok, mobile media practices play a significant role in contemporary grieving, memorializing, and mourning rituals in an age of permanent crisis. Our devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied, and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media. In Mourning on Mobile Media, Larissa Hjorth aims to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our lives.
As disasters, pandemics, and war become more commonplace in and through mobile devices as affective witnesses, how can we learn from mourning practices as a reflection of contemporary media culture? The author argues that through these micronarratives—from eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habit—we can connect, enhance kinship, and create hope in response to the overwhelming sense of crisis we face today.
Reviews
ENDORSEMENTS
“Hjorth’s unique ‘more-than-human’ perspective on mourning is a vital contribution to media studies. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary media and the collective grief experienced from global pandemics, environmental crises, and natural disasters.” —Lee Humphreys, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication, Cornell University; author of The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life
“With generosity and care for the griefs of ecological crisis, Larissa Hjorth illuminates the complex affectivities of witnessing and mourning in this urgently needed and all-too-timely book.” —Michael Richardson, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales; author of Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World
Author
Larissa Hjorth is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University.
