This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta,& Muench, Felix Victor (2019) Social media rituals: The uses of celebrity death in digital culture. In Papacharissi, Z (Ed.) A networked self and birth, life, death (A Net- worked Self series):. Routledge, United States of America, pp. 224-239. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112212/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. Social media rituals: the uses of celebrity death in digital culture Chapter for A Networked Self: Birth, Life, Death, Ed. Zizi Papacharissi. New York: Routledge (forthcoming 2018). Jean Burgess, Peta Mitchell and Felix Victor Münch QUT Digital Media Research Centre | http://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc Correspondence: [email protected] Introduction In 2016, the world mourned the loss of a number of famous people who had been of cultural significance across national and generational boundaries, beginning with David Bowie, and then a little later Prince, George Michael, and Leonard Cohen; Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder and Carrie Fisher; and Muhammad Ali. Each of these deaths not only heralded intense affective and discursive activity on social media of the kind associated with public mourning, but they also enfolded ordinary users’ biographies into public expressions of memory, or provoked adjunctive conversations about other topics. To make sense of the patterns of mourning and memorialisation around these deaths, in this chapter we first establish a position on the uses of celebrity in popular culture. We revisit the literature on the cultural uses of celebrity, especially in everyday life. We trace the transformations of celebrity in digital culture, before focusing on celebrity deaths understood as media events, and proposing the idea of the social media ritual as a way to describe the communicative activity that surrounds these events. We focus particularly on the Twitter activity surrounding Bowie’s death, treating it as a paradigmatic example. 1 We show that there are considerable historical continuities between the pre-broadcast, broadcast and social media-dominated eras in the cultural uses of celebrity, both in everyday life and in public culture. However, the networked characteristics and personal–public convergences of social media have intensified the articulation between personal sense- making and public culture, as well as the sense of intimacy between celebrities and ordinary people, and among participants in the social media rituals surrounding the deaths of these celebrities. At the same time as the deaths of stars provoke personal nostalgia and grief, they prompt public memorialisation and debate about the nature and value of mediatised celebrity itself, and—very reflexively—on the role of social media in these phenomena. The ‘tight embrace of fame and death’: celebrity, death, and mourning in history The celebrity death as highly mediated public event is largely a 20th and 21st century phenomenon. From Rudolph Valentino’s death in 1926 to Princess Diana’s in 1997, and, in the social media era, from Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 (which famously tested Twitter’s capacity) to those of Robin Williams and Leonard Nimoy in 2014–2015, and to the remarkable spate of high-profile deaths in 2016, the event-like nature of the celebrity death has also drawn attention to the particular mass and public mourning practices that attend the deaths of famous people. But the cultural and affective connections between fame and death go back much further than this. As cultural historian Leo Braudy argues, celebrity and fame have, ‘from the start [...] existed at the crossroads of contradictions, in particular the line between life and death’ (2005, p. 80). In his seminal work on the history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, Braudy writes of the ‘tight embrace of fame and death’ (Braudy, 1997, p. 497), and their shifting relations across time. Braudy points to Petrarch’s 14th-century collection of allegorical 2 poems The Triumphs (Trionfi) as marking an important turning-point in conceptualising fame and its relationship to death. Written by the poet laureate, an ‘international celebrity, famous for being famous’ (Boswell & Braden 2012, p. 2), Petrarch’s Triumphs provide a celebrity commentary on the nature and function of fame and speak to its inherently mediated nature. In the Triumphs, Fame takes its place among successive triumphs—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity—each of which conquers the one that precedes it. Here Petrarch revisions fame as immortality beyond death, as a ‘deathless Fame’ (Petrarch, 1807, p. 164). Yet, fame is also a quality that only death can truly confer; although fame triumphs over death, true fame can only properly be achieved through and following death. Fame and death continue to be inextricably knotted together, and the Petrarchan conception of deathless fame can be seen to live on in contemporary culture, most evidently, perhaps, in the lyrics for Irene Cara’s hit 1980 theme song for the Fame film and TV series, which contain the following lines: [...] Fame! I'm gonna make it to heaven Light up the sky like a flame Fame! I'm gonna live forever Baby, remember my name (Remember, remember, remember, remember) [...] Nonetheless, Braudy argues, contemporary celebrity culture has in many respects reversed the notion of fame accomplished in and through death: now, he maintains, the immortality of 3 fame is instead ‘sought for almost exclusively while one is still alive’ (Braudy, 2005, p. 80). In other words, contemporary celebrity culture is driven by an aspiration in life for the sort of fame that was traditionally thought to have been achieved through death. Given the entangled nature of fame and death, the passing of a famous person necessarily brings with it particular, emotionally charged practices of mourning. Just as Petrarch’s Triumphs provide a meta-reflection on the nature of fame and death, we see a similarly complex, reflexive account of the relationships between fame, death, and mourning in The Work of Mourning, Jacques Derrida’s (2001) set of collected memorial essays, eulogies, and funeral orations written for and in memory of his philosopher-friends, including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Paul De Man, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. Derrida’s work on mourning is rarely mentioned in the research around celebrity and death, but it has much to offer an understanding of the particular uses to which celebrity death is put within digital culture, the way that celebrity death invokes and provokes particular mourning practices, and the way it generates and operates within a network of mourning. Although Derrida does not directly address the question of fame, the people—we might say the figures—he is mourning are, in many respects, celebrities who form a network of famous theorists (some of whom have also famously theorised on networks). In doing this work of mourning, Derrida intimates the possibility of studying networks of mourning, suggesting a typology of ritualised and networked mourning practices and a range of sites, genres, and platforms through which they are mediated. The first essay in The Work of Mourning is Derrida’s 1981 essay the ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, in which he explores the tensions between fame, death, and mourning. When Barthes died in 1980, Derrida was forced to confront a need to write about and memorialise 4 his close friend’s death, something he would find himself doing again on a somewhat regular basis over the next couple of decades. In this highly personal yet characteristically dense essay, Derrida at once mourns the death of his friend and muses upon the nature of mourning, its genres and uses, its relationship to identity and media, and its policing. Barthes and Derrida, while not celebrities as such, were (and are) nonetheless famous—like Bowie and Prince, their singular proper names signify (as in Foucault’s ‘author function’) a body of work, a discourse. The irony of this, of course, is not lost in the title of Derrida’s eulogy: an essay on the ‘deaths’ of the famous author who famously wrote ‘The Death of the Author’. Mourning, as Derrida explains, is at once private and public, personal and social, and is always mediated. Derrida points to the critical function of the funeral oration—as a genre of mourning—in that it ‘permitted one to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally’ (p. 51). In speaking to and using Barthes’s proper name, Derrida (2001) writes in his essay that ‘it is certainly him [Barthes] whom I name, him beyond his name’ (p. 46). And yet, he continues, this direct address to the dead is, ‘of course a supplementary fiction, for it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to’ (pp.