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CHRIS HATZIS

Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

The year is 2065. You log in to your favourite social media platform, only to be confronted by the ghosts of profiles past. The number of accounts belonging to the deceased has finally surpassed those belonging to the living. It is the time of the digital zombie uprising. Who will maintain this avatar graveyard? Why can’t we just let them go? Just when you thought you've got a handle on how the digital world is disrupting our lives, now we have to worry about Auntie Pat's online avatar squeezing our cheeks well after she dies. Actually, well after we die.

Dr Martin Gibbs is from the Interaction Design Lab at the School of Computing and Information Systems. Tamara Kohn is an associate professor of anthropology and Hannah Gould is a graduate researcher, both are from the School of Social and Political Sciences. All are from the University of Melbourne. Tamara, Martin and Hannah are part of an interdisciplinary team working on death, digital media, disruption and new technologies around death and disposal. They sat down for a chat about their work with our reporter Steve Grimwade.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Tammy, your research looks into the anthropology of death and commemoration. Before we fully embrace digital disruption and death itself, are you able to say what norms actually exist around death and commemoration? Are there any?

TAMARA KOHN

That's a good question. I think what's interesting is that there's a lot of question around the border of death and life, right? So, around the world very different people have very different ways of understanding where that border lies, if it lies there at all. So, one of the things that an anthropologist wants to do is to try to understand the different ways people conceive of themselves as - in terms of life and death, and how they then think of others in their world around life and death. So, it's hard to say there's a single way of being around life and death, and it also changes over time. Our own research has sometimes looked, for example, at very different technologies through history that have captured this border, and different ways in which people have engaged with that.

STEVE GRIMWADE

I've got a feeling, in thinking about this a little bit, that death is not about the deceased. Death is about the living.

TAMARA KOHN

Death is about the living. It's…

STEVE GRIMWADE

Death is about the community that comes around the memory of that person that's passed.

TAMARA KOHN

Yeah, so it's interesting, is that the living are constantly trying to find ways of negotiating their relationship with the dead. Sometimes people just put a lid on it and then - you go through the terrible grief period, and you close the casket, and that's the end of your engagement, even if you feel sadness for a long period after. For others, there are many ways to keep that presence of the dead in people's lives, whether it's having memorabilia around or whether it's engaging in different media, and that's where our research on how, for example, social media enlivens the dead in particular ways. That's so fascinating because it's a somewhat different way to the way the dead have been enlivened in other times.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Hannah, tell me about your work in Japan. Are there any norms that you find established there around death and dying?

HANNAH GOULD

Well, I think one of the interesting things, just picking up on what Tammy was saying, is that in Japan at least, the dead are still very much active after they actually pass away. I think at least in the West we often - or in European cultures - we often have this sense, as you said, that we close the casket, and that in some ways it's about the living memorialising, thinking about the dead, remembering. In Japan, historically and today even, the dead have the ability to kind of interact with the living, remain a big presence in people's lives. I particularly work with how the dead are memorialised at the Buddhist altar in people's homes. There, the dead can be transformed into buddhas and into ancestors, and they can actually play an active part in the everyday life of the household. Young children who have done something naughty might be brought in front of the Buddhist altar and said, apologise to your ancestors for what you have done. Or, the ancestors might be made offerings of food or even your payslip if you've just got a new job. You know, here it is, great ancestors, or buddhas, or dead, this is what I've done. So, I think as Tammy mentioned, the cultural context is quite important there. In Japan at least, the dead have always been enlivened in a way that they're becoming through digital media and social media in the West. In Japan, they've kind of been alive in that way for quite a long time.

STEVE GRIMWADE

We will skip ahead to robots and AI shortly. To smooth that pathway forward, I want to bring Martin in. Martin, is it possible to get a summary, a high-level view of the ways in which the digital spheres are disrupting death? What are the starting points? What are the rocks being thrown into the lake?

MARTIN GIBBS

Well I guess if we wanted to - in the West, and say, let's say in Australia, if we wanted to go back 10 years maybe, 15 years, we see things like PowerPoint presentations coming into the funeral rites, for example, where that would not be - have happened before, where it would have been a very traditional church kind of service. There's been this shift over this, I don't know what, say the last 20 years, maybe more, towards rather than committing the soul of the dead person to God, now we celebrate the life that was lived. That first comes through if we think about the PowerPoint presentations, of a slide show of the person's life, maybe their favourite music, the eulogy celebrates their achievements. So, this is a shift that's happened over a fairly long period of time, over the space of decades. Then we also find as we move, as people become more active on social media, obviously they are leaving a huge digital presence, a huge digital footprint that gets left behind when they pass away. That digital presence can become a focal point, I think as you suggested before, for people to remember, to commemorate, to discuss with each other the deceased person in their lives.

We saw this - we did some research very early on looking at MySpace, a girl who passed away tragically, and the way in which her friends and people who didn't even know her began to gather around her MySpace page and discuss her life, and try and celebrate her life and the kind of person she was. A lot of the features and a lot of the discussion that occurs on these spaces are - gives the person - or imputes a sort of agency on the person. So, there's a lot of discussion in these kinds of forums of, “now you're an angel up there looking down on us.” You're going to this, that and the other, around this being that's gone to Heaven, or somewhere up there, and exists as some sort of angel or some sort of spiritual body that still engages with the living in some ways.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Have we just come full cycle from committing people to God, to celebrating life, and now going back to committing to God?

MARTIN GIBBS

A sociologist of death, Tony Walter in the UK, looked at Jade Goody, who was a UK celebrity, much maligned and much hated by the public for many years, but who then went through a harrowing death, I suppose, through cancer, which she blogged about and sort of redeemed herself in the public eye through this process. Anyway, he analysed comments to The Sun about her death. I guess it was on her - what's the word for it? Her - on her obituary, right, so comments on her obituary. He found that people talked about her as an angel. As an angel in heaven who would look after her children and could actively engage with the world. What Tony, who is a historian, sociologist of religion and death, then pointed out is that this is a very markedly different understanding of the dead in Heaven to what exists in Christian theology, which is the dead aren't angels. Angels are not dead people, angels are different beings that intermediate between God and the living. So, people don't die and become angels in the tradition. Rather, they go and bask in the glory of God. So, he's shown that there's this sort of shift where the dead become - a bit like in Japan, they become agents that can now actively engage with people.

TAMARA KOHN

The way I got into this initially is quite relevant here, I think. Because I think what's interesting is that you have a very different way of relating to the dead through these different technologies that we've been studying, and things like MySpace or any of these kinds of platforms allow for different publics to participate in those spaces. Very different to what you might have with the more intimate relations around death. So, what happened in my case was a Facebook - a day checking out Facebook and coming across a friend's birthday announcement. I sent a message about my friend's - to my friend to say happy birthday, hope you're doing well. Then I saw the other messages from everybody, from mothers and partners to people I didn't know, saying things like, I can't believe it's been six months. I found out of course that he had died.

What's fascinating is that while a person's alive, you can have a platform which has a very limited clientele that are just friends and extended friends, and friends of friends. But in some contexts, you have huge publics. They can participate in a way that was never possible before. Even around tragic deaths, we just had one here in Melbourne and of course we've had others we've studied, for example Jill Meagher's death and others, where you have huge outpourings of grief from total strangers, but you also have trolls and people who can do horrible things in those digital spaces. Suddenly, what you said before about it being less about the dead and more about the living, really is fascinating because it shows how the relationship has changed, because the publics that are engaged have changed, around these things.

STEVE GRIMWADE

I think you've started on a path I want to go down a little bit. You've written, Tamara, that the ambition of social media giants is no less than to offer individuals social immortality after biological death. What are the - just to illustrate more, what are the current opportunities for social media immortality?

TAMARA KOHN

Well, there are so many sci-fi experiences we all know and love, where we see a show in which an avatar that represents the dead has some action in life. Or, what's that… Black Mirror, yeah. There's a great episode on Black Mirror where there's a toy basically that comes alive that is the dead person, but only can - it is programmed by everything that that person did in life. What's fascinating is that the possibility for this is here, and it's coming. Yet, there is a shortcoming. That's what interests me as an anthropologist, is that shortcoming. It's illustrated beautifully in Black Mirror, because you get to a point where that character can't do the unexpected. It can't be nasty, can't react in a new way. So, we come up to a dead-end in terms of what that potential is.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Social media, we memorialise ourselves daily. The stuff I'm putting on Facebook is not my life, it's the stuff that I want to publish about my life. Therefore, if we're using that as a way of feeding AI or memorials to us, it's a very one-sided view of it. Is this affecting the messages we're creating after death, or the messages that are being created in our honour?

HANNAH GOULD

I definitely think so. I think a lot of the recent really good work that's been done on social media and presentations of self, actually demonstrates that people have - young people in particular have quite sophisticated strategies for self-presentation. They will have different personas on different platforms. Your Instagram's not going to be the same you that's presented on your Facebook, which is not going to be the same you that's presented on your LinkedIn or your professional media. In a way, we kind of have a distributed or a dividual self. We have lots of different people that we all present. Then, after death, if we choose to memorialise or keep alive one of those people, it's only going to ever be a tiny portion of your whole self.

So, if you can imagine if only your Twitter feed was memorialised and that's how people knew you, which is a quite terrifying thing I think for a lot of people. Or, only your Instagram, which is quite a beautiful, very idealistic presentation of people's selves, in a lot of ways. So, very much the kind of - the affordances of what those platforms let us do and how we choose to present ourselves on each different platform, can have huge implications for then how we're memorialised, how we're remembered and understood.

MARTIN GIBBS

Those different presentations of ourselves across these different social media, also raise particular issues about who gets to control what happens to those materials after one passes away. Some of the earliest work we did was looking at this real issue of a digital legacy. What is the digital legacy? What should be done with it? How do we bequeath it to someone? How do we ask someone to be the curator, the executor, of the digital will if you like? These issues still remain. Some social media platforms have addressed these issues reasonably well, but others haven't really considered them at all. These - I think these - this is something that really needs to be thought carefully about going into the future. How do we - who gets to control these legacies, these remnants, these remains, these digital remains.

TAMARA KOHN

There are also - there a lot of businesses out there and start-ups that are trying to manage this big problem. They all are offering some different version of how to manage that. What they have to dig down to, which is what Martin began to explain, is all this - the entirely different regulations on each of these platforms and entirely different legal implications and ethical implications. To what extent are things divisible, for example, is a really interesting problem. Hannah's work is actually quite relevant here, because in olden days I guess you would say, they - the butsudan, the Japanese ancestral shrine was a single thing in a household and all the family would gather around and interact with it. Now, there - it needs to manage mobility, with lots of kids going to different places and living in very different kinds of spaces.

MARTIN GIBBS

The other thing that - to go back to an earlier point, is also does the dead have a right to privacy? So, should my email accounts, my private email accounts, should they then just be passed over to my partner? Maybe I don't want that to happen. Maybe there's stuff - there's not, but maybe there's stuff in my…

STEVE GRIMWADE

Hold on a second, let's open this up.

TAMARA KOHN

Oh, wait, wait, let's…

STEVE GRIMWADE

Just as my estate will left to my kids or whoever it is, that includes everything in my house. My letters, if I still had letters, and my pictures. So, why should it be different?

HANNAH GOULD

Well, a lot of the time we think about the things that we have online as our possessions, as if we own them. You know, those pesky terms and conditions that very few people actually read when they click ‘I agree’, it actually turns out that you might not necessarily own all of the media or the emails that you post. Classic recent cases in the US, a court case about whether or not you could inherit someone's iTunes library. If someone had a collection of multiple hundreds of CDs that they'd bought through iTunes and wanting to leave that to your children in the same way that you could leave your record collection or your CD collection. But, if you actually look at those pesky terms and conditions, it's not ownership. It's - you have rented this, basically, for the time that you're alive. So, it can't be passed on. So, sometimes we assume that things can be passed on and sometimes we assume that we want to have things passed on. I think both of those are problems.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Did it surprise you at all that the New South Wales Law Reform Commission was looking into this, and that these concerns are almost mainstream now. It surprised me. You're the experts.

MARTIN GIBBS

Well, no I'd - were we surprised? I'm not sure if we were surprised.

TAMARA KOHN

I don't think we were that surprised, actually.

MARTIN GIBBS

Yeah. We certainly have been, if you like, calling for this sort of action to be taken. I think in the legal area that there is an awareness of these problems, and there are some big law firms and there are some consultants and government agencies now that are getting involved and starting to think about these issues.

STEVE GRIMWADE

The thing that surprised me is the idea that Facebook by the year 2100 will have more dead people on it than alive people. How is that possible?

TAMARA KOHN

Yeah. Well we are - actually, we have a - there's been a lot of guesswork around this. If - we all know that Facebook is dying now, right?

HANNAH GOULD

It's on the way out.

TAMARA KOHN

People my age love it. People Hannah's age, no so much, right? The idea that if it carries on, within a relatively short time we'll have more dead people than we'll have living. It's interesting. There was a study that was done by someone called Hiscock, that says if - the fate of Facebook, when the dead will outnumber the living. In one graph it shows that if Facebook stops growing then there'll be a kind of crossover moment at about - in about 2065, when the dead users will surpass the living. If it keeps growing, then the crossover won't happen until about 2130. Nonetheless…

STEVE GRIMWADE

Digital zombies, here they come.

MARTIN GIBBS

Yeah.

TAMARA KOHN

Yep, that's right.

MARTIN GIBBS

I mean, but it speaks of an interesting shift in Facebook. It will have to eventually shift its business model from one of feeding us news and social connection to being a - like Ancestry.com, somewhere we can go to see what our grandparents were posting about 100 years ago. That would be 100 years in the future, looking back 100 years.

STEVE GRIMWADE

I understand that Twitter or - can collect - or someone, there's a program that can go to my Twitter feed and actually recreate me in an ongoing manner, going forward. So, it can recreate my voice in a way. Can you explain that to listeners?

MARTIN GIBBS

There was a company that had the slogan, when your heart stops beating, you'll keep Tweeting, which is one of the favourite - which the company's no more. This is one of the interesting things about a lot of these companies that promise services, like in perpetuity, we will preserve you forever, is that a lot of them have gone out business, right, already after a few years.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Is Walt Disney's brain still on ice, or is that [unclear]…

TAMARA KOHN

Yeah.



HANNAH GOULD

Yes, it is.

MARTIN GIBBS

Allegedly, yes. So, using machine learning and predictive text and stuff like that, there are - companies are trying to develop services that can, if you like, go through your corpus of tweets and try and work out what your voice is, how you might respond to a particular issue, and then perhaps offer up the ability to tweet beyond your death. There are also services that offer things like, what, communication services for - to communicate with your descendants. So, for example there are companies that promise to - we can - you can write emails that will be sent out in five years, 10 years. You can…

TAMARA KOHN

Or, when your grandchild is born or whatever.

MARTIN GIBBS

Yeah, that's right. Or on birthdays…

HANNAH GOULD

We will send a birthday gift to your - yeah, descendants every year, or something.

TAMARA KOHN

The thing is that these platforms die, and the promise was made, but what's going to happen? It's kind of iffy. Also, what's so fascinating, we've - a lot of our work, or some of our work, has been done with these huge funeral expos in the US, the UK and here in Australia, and in Japan, that are places where people with a good idea come to try to sell their amazing idea that has to do with commemoration, with all sorts of things around death and dying. Then you have an industry that's trying to manage people who are in a terrible state of loss, both as carers but also as business people. You have - you don't have present there the people who are - who need these things, but you have this interesting interaction between those that are trying to provide for it. One year we went and we met Karl the robot, who was kind of manoeuvring the floor of this place and going up to you, and there was a face in the head, which is basically a Skype image of someone across the world who is - who basically can go and attend a funeral without being present, for example. Karl didn't come to the last one because he stopped coming.

HANNAH GOULD

Poor Karl.

TAMARA KOHN

You have all these changes, and you get all excited about it. You go woah, think about the potential of being present but not present, but in a different way to being on a screen because you can go and look in the coffin and you can talk to the people you like, and shun the people you don't. Suddenly, the next year, it's not there. So, you have all this amazing rate of change around this space and people don't really know how to navigate it.

STEVE GRIMWADE

The other thing that really surprised me was the idea - I mean, when reading your stuff, was - and thinking about AI, because a lot of this was moving towards having Dadbot and having recreations of the deceased in some form. It made me believe in Nick Bostrom's philosophical prediction that we're actually living in a computer simulation. I'm going, hold on, if I'm thinking so intently about AI, maybe I am AI.

HANNAH GOULD

The interesting thing is about those about those thought experiments, about living in a digital simulation, is that there's no real way to find out, so you might as well live your life and live your deaths as you would usually. Yeah, AI and death is an interesting area just particularly because people are rapidly trying to create technologies where you can keep the dead alive through social media and Twitter, but as with many scientific or technological discoveries, the question around, do people actually want to have those technologies, do people want to have the dead live forever through a Twitter feed, is somewhat yet to be asked. I recently had the opportunity to present al this material to a young group of first-year undergraduates. You know, would you like to give over your information to one of these companies and have them Tweet for you after you're dead? A lot of them were very uncomfortable with it. They weren't interested in remaining alive through their social media after they died. So, I think it's always a - you know, this is why we see so many of these new technologies dying off themselves, for a number of reasons, but one of them is that we're not necessarily sure that that's what we want when people die.

TAMARA KOHN

Also what's - there's always been a tension between how the funeral industry and technological innovations will service either the person who is facing death, versus the family and friends and relations that have to handle it after death. Those are two very different, often conflicting sometimes, sets of needs, which often is dealt with in the palliative care industry, but not so much in the funeral industry because they aren't usually talking to the person who is dying. They're talking to the people who are handling death. So, it gets even more complex and one considers those potential tensions.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Internet friendships bely geography, our best friend doesn't need to live next door anymore. I guess, how is that impacting the way that death is commemorated, and it is by way of having Skype funerals, but it's also in games. Maybe you'd like to talk us through that, Martin.

MARTIN GIBBS

One area that we've looked at is what happens when people who play games, online games, regularly together, when someone passes away. If we think about the situation, in many games people will join a guild or some sort of group and regularly play with each other. So, for example…

STEVE GRIMWADE

These are thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands of people playing massive online games?

MARTIN GIBBS

Okay, so it could be - one game we looked at, EVE Online, that is - can have 100 - several hundred thousand concurrent players, all in the same virtual world. In other games, such as World of Warcraft, which was - we've also looked at, you'll have a guild structure which is an organisation of say 25 to 30 players who will regularly - in groups of 25 or in groups of 10, will regularly play with each other, several nights a week for example, to achieve certain goals within the game. If you think about it - and these will be people drawn from all around the world or at least all through the same time zone. So, these are people - maybe people who have never met in person, but they meet regularly online. Then the question is, what happens when someone in that space passes away? How do you - how does - how do people who have only ever met online, how do they commemorate each other? Is it a legitimate sense of grief that they feel, or is it as legitimate as, if you like, their real-life or in the physical world friends, and the grief they might face. These are issues that have to be negotiated.

Then players will often hold memorial services within the game world, for someone who has passed away, or indeed for a celebrity that might have passed away. So, in the game EVE Online as well, which is - basically it's a spaceships game, right, so it's a game of people flying spaceships around a fictional galaxy. When Stephen Hawking passed away recently, a bunch of people go together and did a whole lot of commemorative activities that related both to the game world, so drew elements from the game world, but also drew elements from Stephen Hawking's life and his discoveries. So basically they hosted or staged a series of commemorative activities that resonated with his scientific discoveries around black holes and things like that, in the spaceship game. So, we find these sorts of activities happening in games.

STEVE GRIMWADE

It's really intriguing. We've been talking about the way that digital disrupts death, but in a way we're now flipping that and talking about how death disrupts digital. I remember - I heard you talking earlier about how a - is a space for play just meant for fun? Is a game just meant for fun, or should it take on real-world concerns? There is that great story that I've learnt from your team, that the Serenity Now guild dropping in - this is about five years ago or maybe more - which was a guild, and they jumped into an online funeral I think in World of Warcraft and actually killed all the avatars that were present at that funeral. Again, now it goes to the sense of respect, where does - how is respect changing around death and digital? There's one instance. There's also the instance of selfies on your way to a funeral. Would anyone like to talk to that?

TAMARA KOHN

Well, we recently actually published a paper in a book on death and leisure, which is about the social life of the dead and the leisured life of the living online. One part of it, we were looking at selfies at funerals, which is interesting because this was a sudden event online, where people had collected these images and displayed them together. There was a huge outpouring of anger and amazement that people would have the chutzpah to actually take photos of themselves in a selfie position, grinning or looking sad, whatever, with a perhaps granny in a casket behind them. This idea of that image just horrified people. Yet, we were interested in it because when we actually dug deeper and looked at the ways in which people presented themselves and the kinds of things that people said around how they presented themselves, we found that actually in a social world where you are constantly present with your social media world, to be at a funeral without that world is anathema to being social, to being a person. People are, in a sense, bringing that social world into their grief, into that event, in a way that they would anything else. So, we chose to analyse this in a rather different way.

We also, in looking at the relation between death and leisure, we also looked at another phenomenon which actually is ongoing, where people will use their cell phones to take selfies in really dangerous places, very often leisure spaces like cliffs, where they're trying to get the great picture, or in a car on the way to a wedding, or whatever it might be. That last photo, which is immediately public, becomes their last photo before a death. That also created quite a stir. It presents a really interesting set of questions about the way in which we understand ourselves, and the public's imagination around those photos.

STEVE GRIMWADE

It reminds me of death masks, which were acceptable at some - one point in time, but again 100 years later they were no longer acceptable again. Hannah, I'd be interested in talking about the way that Japan has broached the divide between digital and death, and I think you've spoken to me earlier about the fact that they have less of a problem bringing those two worlds together.

HANNAH GOULD

Yeah, I think the relationship between the online worlds, in particular things like robots and AI in Japan is quite different to how we might engage with them in the West, in a sense that ideas about robots, about AI, is just seen as less scary, as less uncanny or odd in many ways. So, there has been a number of companies in Japan who are interested in the ways in which either robots can support Buddhist funeral ceremonies, or normal Buddhist - or secular ceremonies, but also recently perhaps we need to have funerals for robots. So, when robots die, could they also be subject to death rites in the same way that humans are?

I had a colleague of mine who attended a funeral for the Aibo robot. Aibo is a small dog that was quite popular I think in the 1990s, early 2000s. I think there's quite a few photos of Britney Spears with a pet robot dog. It was kind of a very cool Millennial thing to have. Now they're all old and they've lost all their parts, and they can't be replaced anymore. So, what do we do with them? Well, in Japan, not only people but also things deserve funerals. The logical thing to do was to have a funeral for the Aibo dogs, which they all did. They had a Buddhist priest come in and he gave the sutras relating to death and rebirth, and that was another way of extending the funeral rites to a new realm.

STEVE GRIMWADE

There are some heartwarming stories about how the digital world has enabled us to interact with our digital selves, or other digital selves. I'm drawn to two examples. I think it was the Nintendo car rally ghost?

MARTIN GIBBS

Okay, so people attach emotional significance to objects and also to things like games. So, what we've found is that some people - for example if - there's a case of someone whose brother passed away, and for him it was a - kind of a helpful process to revisit one of the games that his brother played. The actual game he was playing, and just sit and contemplate where his brother last logged off the game and sit in that game world in that space. There was also another example of a man now, whose father passed away in his early childhood - or passed away say 10 years ago. For many - and he used to play games a lot with his father. For many years he wasn't able to re-engage with those games because it was too emotionally charged for him. Then one day was going through some of the old game files, and he found a rally-racing game that his father used to race. In this game, the fastest lap is represented by a ghostly car, so that you can know if you're going to your best time. So, you're chasing your best time all the time. So, there this was this ghost car in the game that was father's last - or fastest lap of this particular course. So, he then reported that he raced his father for many days until he could almost beat his father, but then he didn't. He just stopped short of it and let - to preserve that ghost car, that ghostly presence of his father playing a game 10 years ago that he re-found on an old Xbox.

STEVE GRIMWADE

See Dad, I'm still letting you win.

MARTIN GIBBS

That's right, still letting you win.

HANNAH GOULD

I think in a way what all these stories tell us is that we often think about death and digital, and that's kind of weird or odd, but people are already engaging in all of these practices today. People are engaging in games and memorialising, people are posting on people's Facebook who have died, or memorialising. It's not - when we first hear the subject matter we think it might be a bit strange, but this is more of a descriptive practice of what people are already doing.

MARTIN GIBBS

I think that's what's most interesting in the work we're doing, is finding that people are mixing these various conventions of tradition, commonplace ways of doing things, with new activities, new activities that are meaningful to them. This might be on the digital - and these things are getting mashed up together, and to develop new rites and new rituals, new ways of grieving, new ways of dealing with the sense of loss when people have passed away.

STEVE GRIMWADE

What have you been surprised at the most?

TAMARA KOHN

There have been some wonderful examples of things that are - that we've encountered when we went, for example, to these expos. Some of those, I think for me, have led us to the next project. While we did a lot of work with digital technologies around commemoration, we're now moving into looking at new technologies about death and disposal that go beyond burial and cremation, and ways in which we can understand the relationship between bodies and persons and things in that space. At one of them, I remember first encountering a company that takes the metal bits inside bodies - I know I have a few of them myself from various surgeries in the past - and the - and recycles them in particular ways. Then there are new technologies for how to actually dispose of a body in an ecologically-sound way. There are green burials, different ways in which people are - and these technologies are embraced at different times in different ways in different places. The UK is ahead of Australia in a lot of this stuff for example, and we're looking at that and trying to work with - to try to understand how Australia also might benefit from understanding more about these processes. So, I guess I wasn't surprised so much as it's - I'm excited. It's like you get excited by the next project, and that's where we're - our heads are at, at the moment.

HANNAH GOULD

I'm always surprised - not surprised but interested in the enduring importance of the body in death. We discuss the digital and Facebook and Twitter and all these things. It's not that they're not important, but they're being combined in different ways that always very frequently come back to the materiality of bones and corpses, and how do we deal with them and how do we commemorate them? That might mean digital - new forms of digital offline, online hybrids in the ways that we look at things and take care of the dead. At the same time, ash and bones and corpses, and how people still react to them are quite intrinsically respectful or not respectful ways around the actual body.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Martin, is there anything you're surprised at?

MARTIN GIBBS

Okay, not digital, but picking up on Hannah's point. At an expo in the US there was a company offering a kind of taxidermy service for the deceased where they would preserve tattoos. So, it was a service where they would cut the skin off and preserve the tattoo and frame it so that you - people could have a memento of the person after they passed away. I found that quite surprising, I must admit. Hey, I don't know, maybe that's important to some people.

HANNAH GOULD

You should see what goes on at some of those Japan funeral expos. I've been to a corpse dressing competition…

STEVE GRIMWADE

Wow.

HANNAH GOULD

…which was quite interesting. If anyone's ever…

STEVE GRIMWADE

Fancy dress, or just…

HANNAH GOULD

Well no, if anyone's ever watched the Academy Award film Departures, which is a Japanese film of this practice of Nokanshi, or Nokan, which means to dress the body of the deceased. Often this dressing actually occurs in front of the family, so it's a public dressing. Usually the body is washed, and new clothes are put onto it. It could be a suit, or it could be a traditional kimono. What's quite interesting is this really wasn't a tradition until that movie came out, and suddenly it kind of became a reclaimed tradition. Oh, this is the way that we were supposed to be doing it all along. So, at these Japanese funeral expos they now have corpse dressing competitions, to who can do the most respectful dressing of the corpse in front of the audience. They don't actually use corpses, they use volunteers from the audience. So, you can go up and you have someone completely undress you and put new clothes on you. The whole skill of it is that you can respectfully redress the corpse without showing any flesh to the audience. So, these expos are often kind of fascinating, interesting chemistry labs of new ideas and boundary-pushing ideas about what we should do with the dead and their remains.

STEVE GRIMWADE

You spoke earlier about returning to the body, the physical body, and that that will always remain for you. Do you believe that there will be anything that will be irretrievably lost to the digital - or to death, because of digital?

MARTIN GIBBS

What do you mean by, lost?

STEVE GRIMWADE

Well, I mean if we're celebrating death in a completely different manner, will we cease to celebrate death or commemorate death in the way we do now?

TAMARA KOHN

We aren't losing - I think that all of the things that we associate - this idea of being a person in the world is to have relations with others and to have feelings about - it doesn't mean that we always grieve in the same way. Anthropologists have long studied very different ways in which people understand their relations. For example, classic ethnography in Brazil in a shanty town, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, was all about death without weeping because young children would die very young, very often. So, mothers wouldn't invest that personhood into the child until a certain point, so that you don't start grieving until later. All in all, we all have relations and we all grieve, and we all have rituals that we establish around that, which may shift and change, but they're there nonetheless. So, in a way it's a fine-tuning. There's always been change. There's been change throughout history. Yet, there's a sense of tremendous speed around the digital, around new technologies now, and capturing that sense of what's going on is what we're particularly interested in doing.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Tamara, Hannah, Martin, thank you very much for joining me today.

HANNAH GOULD

Thank you for having us.

MARTIN GIBBS

Thank you.

TAMARA KOHN

Thank you.

CHRIS HATZIS

Thanks to associate professor Dr Martin Gibbs from the School of Computing and Information Systems, associate professor Dr Tamara Kohn and graduate researcher Hannah Gould, both from the School of Social and Political Sciences. All from the University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on June 20, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2018, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.