Haunting Hands

Mobile Media Practices and Loss
From smartphones to tablets, mobile media is increasingly playing a central role in the representation, sharing, and experience of events public and private, formal and informal. Drawing on cross-cultural fieldwork, Haunting Hands considers the role mobile media practices and rituals provide as fundamental insights into contemporary notions of life, death, and loss.
Haunting Hands looks closely at the consequences of digital media's ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss. From Facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of the deceased, the digital is both extending earlier memorial practices and creating new ways in which death and loss manifest themselves. The ubiquity of digital specters is particularly evident in mobile media spanning smartphones, iPads, iPhones, or tablets. Mobile media entangle various forms of social, online and digital media in specific ways that are both intimate and public, and yet the use of mobile media in contexts of loss has been relatively overlooked. Haunting Hands seeks to address this growing and important area by helping us to understand the relationship between life, death, and our digital after-lives.