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Deconstructing Immortality? Identity Work and the Death of David Bowie in Digital Media

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Deconstructing Immortality? Identity Work and the Death of David Bowie in Digital Media Johanna Sumiala Professor PhD. Department of Social Research Media and Communication Studies P.O. Box 54 00014 University of Helsinki [email protected] Deconstructing Immortality? Identity Work and the Death of David Bowie in Digital Media Re-thinking (Im)mortality in the Digital Age Knowing of one’s mortality means at the same time knowing of the possibility of immortality … To be aware of mortality means to imagine immortality; to dream of immortality; to work towards immortality. (Bauman, 1997, p. 153, original emphasis) In this article, I elaborate on Zygmunt Bauman’s (1992a, 1992b) ideas on death and immortality in the framework of the present-day networked modes of being and identity work carried out in digital media (cf. Papacharissi, 2011). I examine the ways in which individuals perform their networked identities in practices of the digital ritualisation of death in digital media, in which immortality is produced as a liquid. Throughout history, death, as an inevitable fact of biological life, has forced individuals and communities to reflect on life’s finitude. The deaths of others and thoughts of one’s own death often awaken strong emotions, such as a fear of destruction. On the other hand, thinking about death can also inspire thoughts about the meaning of life. One manifestation of this can be found in the deaths of martyrs and heroes (see Campbell, 1968/2008). It has been said that death serves as a frame of relation for life. Death steers us to look into and reminisce about the past. In this manner, death links us—the generations that are still alive—to a chain: a continuum of past, present and future (cf. Mitchell, 2007). Today, we live in a world in which the relationship between the living and the dead is carried out in digitally saturated contexts. In this condition, digital media technology provides the stage for this interaction and it links the individual with multiple audiences (Papacharissi, 2011, p. 304). In his seminal work on death in late modern society, Zygmunt Bauman (1992a, 1992b) claims that contemporary society has become obsessed with immortality. From Bauman’s (1992a, p. 164) perspective, while modern societies are mainly concerned with ‘deconstructing death’ and putting death into the backstage of modern life, late modern, digitally saturated societies are preoccupied with ‘deconstructing immortality’. The desire to deconstruct immortality does not, however, downplay its societal significance. Instead, Bauman (1992b) sees immortality as being always shaped by the fantasies and aspirations of a given society and its individual members. Hence, immortality can be conceptualised as a kind of utopia that motivates societies and provides them with meaning for life in the shadow of death (see also Jacobsen & Kearl, 2014, pp. 303–304). In Bauman’s (1992a) vocabulary, deconstructing immortality takes place in a ‘liquid’ condition. This means that the present perception of immortality is fluid, highly individualised, media-saturated and embedded in the current pleasure-oriented consumerist attitude towards life in advanced capitalism. Following Bauman’s insights into the idea of ‘liquid immortality’, sociologists Jacobsen and Kearl (2014) explain: Whereas previously, belonging to the select group of chosen ones – the great men of history, nobilities and writers – would guarantee symbolic immortality in the shape of collective recollection in posterity, today, bidding for immorality has become public property and been thoroughly democratized – from Hollywood celebrities, sports start and reality TV participants to ordinary people with their thousands of posted ‘selfies’ on Instagram of Facebook, everybody is now laying claiming to their 15 minutes of fame and to being ‘noticed’. (p. 304) In line with Bauman (1992a, 1992b), Jacobsen and Kearl (2014) provide a critical interpretation of the current condition. As immortalisation becomes ‘public property’, overpopulation occurs. In other words, ‘When everybody suddenly aspires to become immortal, nobody will achieve it since our limited collective attention cannot cater for the endless amount of aspiration for fame, remembrance or notoriety’ (Jacobsen & Kearl, 2014, p. 304). This social and cultural immortality overload may transform the very idea of immortality from something that belongs to the category of ‘eternity’ into ‘this-worldliness’: that is, a part of the time-consuming life work of everyday life in late modern society. Immortality is a movement from the ‘great beyond’ toward something that happens here and now and demands immediate satisfaction (Jacobsen & Kearl, 2014, p. 304). In this article, I am particularly interested in examining the practices of performing networked identities in the digital ritualisation of death in digital media, in which immortality, I argue, is produced as a liquid. In my empirical analysis, I focus on the death and related immortalisation of the iconic cultural figure, singer-songwriter and artist David Bowie (1947–2016). Although the deaths of many popular cultural icons, musicians, actors, artists and celebrities, such as Michael Jackson, Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and Robin Williams, have raised considerable ritual public interest in digital media in recent years, I argue that the death of David Bowie has special relevance in the attempt to understand the production of immortality in the present digital age. Bowie was an icon and an artist who attempted to escape categorisation of any kind (cf. Sumiala, 2018). When he died from liver cancer on 10 January 2016 in his New York City apartment, the news immediately broke worldwide and caused massive ritual public mourning and commemoration in both mainstream and social media. Bowie had lived his life in the public limelight and had given the global audience an ‘endless amount of aspiration for fame, remembrance’ and ‘notoriety’ (cf. Jacobsen & Kearl, 2014, p. 304). For many, Bowie seemed immortal even before he died. On Mashable, a media outlet that calls itself ‘a leading media company for the Connected Generation and the voice of digital culture’ (Wikipedia, 2017), addressed Bowie’s immortality explicitly, as follows: David Bowie seemed immortal; that's one of the most common reactions to his passing. People are surprised to find that they just hadn't considered the possibility that this man, this icon, the ultimate changeling, might one day no longer be with us. That feature of his personality has been with us from the beginning. To a child growing up in England in the 1970s, Bowie was already immortal. Had I been told back then his fame was only as old as the decade, I would have laughed a withering laugh. Bowie was our Mount Rushmore, except with more faces, and all of them painted in technicolor. Even then, Bowie was impossibly distant, a strange thin god of pain and poetry. He was a prophet from the future, a modern-day Pan that the grown-ups had no hope of controlling. He could show up anywhere at any time — on any child's bedroom wall, on any radio, on a BBC documentary (Cracked Actor, a classic of the genre) (Taylor, 11 January 2016). In the case of David Bowie, the sound of these lines is not exceptional; rather, it reflects the tone of many of the comments circulating in digital media after Bowie’s death. Based on my close reading of the digital media materials, I wish to identify two special features of identity negotiation in the ritual practice of Bowie’s immortalisation: i) the practices through which Bowie’s identity was performed as highly extraordinary (and, hence, worthy of immortalisation) and ii) the practices that re-invented new identities in the post-mortem social relationship between Bowie and his global audience. These two features go hand-in-hand and are difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish in the ritual practices of mourning and commemoration that followed Bowie’s death. The empirical material for this analysis was collected as part of an ongoing digital ethnographic work conducted across a variety of digital media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, as well as online mainstream media outlets, such as BBC and CNN. The most intense period of digital fieldwork occurred between June and August 2016. In the empirical analysis, I place special emphasis on the representations of those repetitive online symbolic practices of mourning and commemorating Bowie and provide an ethnographic description of the symbols, visuals and discourses applied in these practices. In conclusion, I reflect on my empirical observations through the lens of Bauman’s idea of immortality and suggest how Bowie’s death contributes to deconstructing immortality as a new identity in the present digital age. Social Life and Death on the Web Death sociologist Glennys Howarth (2007) reminds us that ‘relationships between the living and the dead and how the dead are remembered depend upon cultural representations of mortality in each society’ (p. 19). In line with many scholars working in the field of death online (see e.g. Gotvid & Refslund Christensen, 2015; Lagerkvist, 2017), I argue that the web or digital media (including, in this analysis, both online mainstream media and social networking sites) is profoundly shaping the ways in which death and related immortalisation are constructed in today’s society and how individuals negotiate and perform their identities in relation to death in these frameworks. Jacobsen and Kearl (2014, p. 304) have already pointed to a tendency to make immortality ‘public property’, as today’s digital media invites ‘Hollywood celebrities’ and ordinary people posting ‘selfies’ alike to make themselves immortal. Furthermore, many scholars of digital culture (e.g. Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; van Dijck, 2013; Meikle, 2016; Papacharissi, 2011; Turkle 2012) maintain that these types of social activities need to be understood within their underlying larger framework of cultural, economic and technological dynamics. Zizi Papacharissi’s (2011) work on digital social activities underlines what she calls networked sociality. In her thinking, in digital media, a networked self is communicated across multiplied audiences seeking, first and foremost, social opportunities for expression and connection.
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