Digital Immortality: The Sixth (And Final?) Mode of Symbolic Immortality

This dissertation, using research-creation as a primary methodology, is at its core a philosophical exploration of what it looks like to live, die, and seek immortality in the digital age. I borrow language and theory from Amanda Lagerkvist’s existential media studies, which extends Karl Jaspers’ existentialist philosophy, paying particular attention to his outlining of limit situations. Considering, as Lagerkvist does, digital media as themselves digital limit situations, I argue for reconsidering and adding to Robert Jay Lifton’s five modes of symbolic immortality. That is, adding a sixth mode which more narrowly focuses on immortality-seeking actions taken through digital media. In this dissertation, I offer new terminology for facilitating more comprehensive conversations about the practicality and desirability of digital immortality. These terms are shallow digital immortality and deep digital immortality. I examine six web-based, what I call DI platforms, three shallow and three deep, that offer, or market to, their users a way of preserving and continuing being beyond physical death. Throughout this dissertation, I suggest a focus on the process of seeking, maintaining, and sharing digital immortality rather than the actuality of becoming digitally immortal. Framing digital immortality as a mode of symbolic immortality allows for a centering on the actions taken by an individual in the digital arena and not on any concrete promises of eternal existence. The more tangibly creative component of this research is found in the making of and interacting with a seventh DI platform called RyNow. RyNow is a website that experiments with and borrows material language and strategies from other currently marketed DI platforms, such as the six examples explored in this dissertation. I use photography, video, audio, and more to investigate the actions and processes of seeking digital immortality.