Dealing with Social Media
| Author | James Normington |
| Pages | 107-121 |
10 Dealing with Social
Media
Memento mori – remember death! These are important words. If we
kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be
completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half
hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or
especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half
a century before you die – what makes this different from a half
hour?
The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom, Leo Tolstoy, 1919
It was the Victorians who took the technology of the Industrial Revolution
and applied it on a mammoth scale. Their passion for technological
advances that allowed them to build wonders of the industrial world, such
as the Forth Bridge, was mirrored by their approach to the subject of
death; and, in true Victorian fashion, death was celebrated on a colossal
scale. It is not the Victorian passion for building cemeteries or the work of
the enterprising founders of the London Necropolis Railway1 that is the
subject matter of this chapter. Rather, it is the way in which social media
has built on the Victorians’ development and popularisation of a concept
that became known as ‘death photography’ or death portraiture. These
Victorian death portraits became more popular as the cost of portrait
photography fell and the methods of photography increased, leading to
the growth of a mass market. Using the latest technology of the Victorian
age, photographers would take images of deceased family members, often
posed in family groups with living members, to preserve the moment for
prosperity. Countless images exist of parents posing with their dead
babies, or children with their deceased siblings.2 Death was an ever-
present threat in the Victorian age. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid,
diphtheria, scarlet fever, rubella and measles were common, and the
results often fatal even with medical treatment. It is therefore perhaps
1‘London Necropolis Railway: Trains for the dead’, Lookup London, 6 November
2017, https://lookup.london.
2‘Taken from life: The unsettling art of death photography’, BBC News, 5 June
2016, www.bbc.co.uk/news.
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