In Javier Marías’s novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, when Victor finds himself in the bedroom of his recently deceased lover, Marta, who, moments earlier, died in his arms, one of the first thoughts that crosses his mind is that her death seems less definitive because he was also present in the same room when she was alive, just a few seconds earlier. Up until the moment of her death, they had been having a passionate exchange in that same bedroom and were in the verge of making love. The sudden death of one of the two people placed the other in a somewhat surreal situation. The woman’s crumpled skirt next to the bed still has an explanation, a history, a reason, because Victor is a witness to the fact that she was wearing it. He saw the way she took off the shoes that are now lying docilely on the floor. His presence, watching as his lover passed from life to death, in some way seems to prolong the life that has ended, because Victor is an eyewitness to the defining moment. She was so alive just moments earlier. And yet, on the other hand, he seems to have a better understanding of the meaning of death, gained from the very rare occurrence of finding himself with a woman who has died in his arms, right in front of his eyes.
The reflections that Javier Marías articulates in his novel are very useful for understanding the relationship between digital culture and death, as it has been described in this book. The feeling that you get when you look at a dead friend’s Facebook page is similar to what Víctor was feeling in his lover’s bedroom. A Facebook page, where people have conversations, and exchange photographs and videos, is an objective witness to an authentic life, just as much as a bedroom is. Each detail of a deceased user’s timeline takes on the role of an explanation, a history, a reason, because each one of that person’s friends and relatives is a demonstration of the fact that individual was alive.
Everything we find on the Facebook page of an individual who has died puts us in a position that makes it difficult to believe we are looking at a life that has come to an end. In fact, social networks are the perfect place for continuous interaction with others, for the existence of interconnected identities, which live by virtue of dialogue exchanged with others and individual narratives that work together to tell our stories. On the other hand, there is currently no more direct way of experiencing death: the sudden silence, not having had the chance to say goodbye, the last post—these are many of the elements that make this interruption, which clearly defines the passage from life to death, visible. On social networking sites death is recorded, clearly and definitively.
So this is the fundamental role that digital culture has unwittingly taken on relative to our uneven relationship with death, after decades of sociocultural erasure in the West. The internet, starting with social networks, creates the opportunity for each one of us to come to terms with our own mortality. These social networks also give death education an additional tool for instructing people about how to manage their lives, helping make them aware that this existence is not meant to last forever. The internet offers us an occasion for putting the grieving process back into a protected, community context, for rationally considering the fate of our identity when we are no longer alive, and for reflecting more attentively on the fragility of life. If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, we risk misrepresenting the image of death and the dead on the screens of our computers and mobile devices. If we let that happen, the digital sphere will become yet one more place to dramatically trivialize the meaning of death and even to avoid it, pretending that it has not happened. Effectively, this is the result of all those projects (chatbots, Counterparts, and holograms) that aim to extend the identity of the individual, who “embodied” it during their lifetime, beyond their actual death.
Thus, the development of interdisciplinary studies on the topic of digital death is key from many points of view, precisely because the significance of death’s role (and how valuable it is) in the context of digital platforms is not yet clearly understood. In my view, what matters most is understanding that there is no radical contrast between the online and off-line dimensions; therefore, all our behavior on the internet responds to requirements and needs that are also part of our external world. Every innovation, which at first glance seems exaggeratedly high-tech, actually represents an attempt to use what the modern world of information and communication has to offer in order to address our fears and concerns about the end of life.
Ultimately, with this book I wanted to explore a new dimension of our current lives, one that will become increasingly intrusive over time. One that requires the conscious and reasoned ability of human beings to build their own defensive barriers, so that they can avoid the disorientation that—all too often—is generated by the death of a loved one and by the thought that eternity belongs to the realm of science fiction rather than to our everyday lives.