Streaming Death: Terrorist Violence, Post-death Data and the Digital Afterlife of Difficult Death

Abstract

This chapter explores the digital afterlife of difficult, violent death and is empirically informed by the 2019 Christchurch massacre. The live stream of the mosque attack not only documented real and violent death, but it also showed death and dying through the vantage point of the killer: this contributed to a particular digital afterlife of the victims where the perpetrator's gaze contributes to and remains in the digital artefact's affective layers. Adopting a data-centric perspective, we conceptualise digital afterlife (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021) as having two co-constitutive dimensions, data afterlife (the socio-technical dimension) and data as afterlife (the affective dimension). With focus on post-death data, we examine the ways in which materiality of data allows affective relatedness while also having a fragile, volatile element to it, and how this shapes the memory and remembering of the dead. Mediated, violent death represents difficult death from multiple perspectives: the role of data in the construction of digital afterlife and difficult memory; the socio-political dimension and hierarchies of grievability of public death; mediated remembering, affective relatedness but also affect alienation in digital spaces where violent death resonates with diverse audiences, some standing with the victims, some with the perpetrators.