On Media and Mortality

Carol Colatrella (bio)
Georgia Institute of Technology

A review of O’Gorman, Marcel. Necromedia. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

My engagement with information technology encompasses necessity and distraction. Times I am frustrated by my inability to stop engaging with social media alternate with periods of appreciation for technical capacities to increase my productivity and to be aware of unfolding events. Most recently, I learned from Facebook that a college classmate has a friend who inherited a Miele vacuum cleaner from Jean Stapleton; my former classmate posts amusing collages of the deceased actress, his dog, and the vacuum. His creations prompted me to think about whether my household’s Miele vacuum will last beyond my death: “will I take care of my vacuum so that it has a life beyond mine?” This question bedeviling me is a quotidian, overly personal, and rather morbid version of the one posed in the publicity release for Necromedia: “Why does technology play such an important role in our culture?” Marcel O’Gorman’s latest book falls in a genre of critical theory works that consider how technology and cultural anxiety become linked in digital and material objects and theories about them.

Examples of similar critical works include Mary Anne Moser’s and Douglas MacLeod’s Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (1996), Peter Lunenfeld’s Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (2001), Margot Lovejoy’s Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age (2004), Richard Rinehart’s and Jon Ippolito’s Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (2014), and Melissa Langdon’s The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation (2014). These texts, some anthologies and some monographs, look at the ways in which digital technologies and art are enabled and constrained by their technological and social legacies. Other recent works in media studies discuss the convergence of media technologies–computer, television, mobile phone, e-reader, printed book, video game–in identifying design conventions and opportunities such as Janet Murray’s Inventing the Medium (2012) and in distinguishing specific products within the field of media archaeology such as Augusta Rohrbach’s Thinking Outside the Book (2014) and Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces (2014). These critical texts provide systematic considerations of digital media, explaining the interrelationships of design aesthetics and cultural values and referencing humanistic debates about the evolution and immortality of technology; however, they skirt the central topic of Necromedia, which provides a distinctive account of digital technologies related to human fears of death.

O’Gorman’s book focuses on technology’s abilities to distract us from mortality and to help us withstand its blows. A volume in the Minnesota series Posthumanities, Necromedia alternates the author’s accounts of diverse digital media projects, including his own, with his careful theorizing about how technology and culture are intertwined in our own day around our interest in death. Chapters in Necromedia build on concepts from media theory, posthuman animal studies, and the philosophy of technology, including object-oriented ontology, to pay “close attention to two universal and inevitable elements of human being: death and technicity” (4). Although O’Gorman explains that technology falsely promises us “immortality,” a state “facilitated by our technologically mediated ability to vanquish time and space” (10), he also offers diverse examples of how technology enables humans, consumers, to manage the finitude of human life, at least virtually.

Since popular culture’s fascination with death and the after-life serves as the basis for many narratives, O’Gorman discusses popular television programs looking at death. He claims that “on any given night I could watch a death program on cable television” (38). He sets aside gangster shows like The Sopranos, pointing instead to shows that depict the business of death: Dead Like Me (2003), a Showtime series about “a lovable grim reaper”; Six Feet Under (2001), a HBO 2001 show about “a terminally dysfunctional group of undertakers”; Family Plots (2004), an A&E series about “a quirky and lovable family of undertakers”; and the HBO mini-series Angels in America about the AIDS crisis in New York (38). O’Gorman also notices a broader set of media and popular cultural products that “register technological anxieties”; he coins “the term necromedia as a philosophical neologism to describe the relationship between death and technology” and uses it “to describe films, literature, and other cultural artifacts” (39). Necromedia is a category including murder mysteries, procedurals, hospital drama, or shows incorporating supernatural figures such as zombies, vampires, or ghost hunters. Following Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2004), O’Gorman considers cultural anxieties about death in postmodernist theories related to spectacle (Guy Debord), surveillance apparatus (Michel Foucault), and hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard). The book’s comprehensive bibliography and useful topical index enable readers to trace references to these and other theorists.

O’Gorman describes the development and reception of some fascinating digital art projects, including his Border Disorder based on filming his border crossing from Canada to the US in the days following 9/11 (chapter 2), his research presentation Dreadmill performed while he ran on a treadmill (chapter 4), and his collaboration Myth of the Steersman, which incorporated restoring a cedar-and-canvas canoe as part of an exhibition about the disappearance of “the iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson” (chapter 8). Discussions of his own art and of media art created by others are touchstones for O’Gorman’s philosophical meditations on technology. Addressing contemporary cultural concerns about terrorism, political inequality, and sustainability, along with reminding us of historical circumstances affecting the development of media technologies, O’Gorman’s blending of art and media criticism with philosophical, historical, and cultural analyses could become tedious in its piling up of references; however, the book’s compelling personal anecdotes and its rigorous, careful analysis of art, media, and culture sustain its focus on the question of how technology staves off and reminds us of death.

A number of critical theorists and philosophers inform O’Gorman’s account. He finds inspiration in the work of Ernest Becker and draws on Cary Wolfe’s discussions of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the specter applied to recording, David Wills’s recognition that such an archive enables human memory, and Bernard Stiegler’s claim “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized technologically” (12), which is a claim for immortality. A discussion of the film American Beauty becomes “an excellent backdrop for investigating the role that technology plays in the cultural pathologies laid out by Kierkegaard and Becker” (43), while acknowledging the technophobia surrounding the development of the telephone. O’Gorman describes our current “collective consciousness”: “Technological gadgets of all sorts—driven by an economy that capitalizes on human attention and abides by the law of progress—are designed to distract us from any sort of existential contemplation,” a claim that builds on Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technologies as “social extensions of the body” and Sherry Turkle’s conclusion that “individuals seek to be alone and distracted” (47). Later in the book, O’Gorman describes Nicholas Carr’s claims that the printing revolution caused cognitive changes in human consciousness and that our current preoccupation with “the Internet, which fosters sound bites, video clips, text browsing, and hyperlinking, is transforming our print-oriented brains” (144). Carr’s claims about the inability of students to read whole books match what Katherine Hayles and O’Gorman see in their classrooms.

O’Gorman has a clear political goal for his readers: to resist “the commodification of attention demanded by a capitalist technocultural system” (24). He regards Necromedia as proposing “a technical therapeutics that treats the toxicity inherent in our current technocultural hero system” (25). Applying “the cognitive habits of humanities research” could be part of the prescription, while another element involves encouraging humanities scholars to “learn to think and work more like artists,” without sacrificing traditional humanities research (143). In addition to paying “attention to language, deep reading, and history” as Alan Liu recommends, O’Gorman argues in the chapter titled “Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum” that “applied media theory takes shape through an integration of phenomenology and poesis, research and creation” (148).

The final chapter of Necromedia, “From Dust to Data” builds on the book’s preceding considerations of thinking about things and making things to take up “a discussion of the relationship between terror, horror, technoculture, and contemporary philosophies of being, including, but not limited to object-oriented ontology” (172). O’Gorman connects ethical concerns about the non-human (who speaks for the dust?) while distinguishing between terror and horror. He does so by tracing the history of the distinction from Anne Radcliffe and Edmund Burke to Adrianna Cavarero’s comparing suicide bombing and the Holocaust and to Cary Wolfe’s statement agreeing with Cora Diamond that nonhuman animals should not be thought of “as bearers of interests or rights holders but rather as something much more compelling: fellow creatures” (184).

The ethical dilemmas raised by digital technologies are shaped by and shape human understanding of one’s own identity when confronted by death, whether real or virtual, and one’s sense of social responsibility. For example, Michael Nitsche’s 2008 Video Game Spaces describes a video gamer who establishes a “growing relationship with the game world” by playing Silent Hill (Kitao and Gallo 1999), a game that “takes the player into ever-deeper pits of horror,” forcing one of Nitsche’s friends to decide whether to “kill” a “formerly friendly game-controlled character” that turned into a “zombie character” (47); the gamer found this dilemma tested his human capacities. Evoking Anastasia Salter’s What Is Your Quest? (2014), a history of quest games, Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel The Female Persuasion (2018) provides an imagined example of a compelling video game that would bring a player in contact with a deceased loved one. Wolitzer’s character Corey Pinto pitches his idea for a game to a prospective angel investor: “What if you were on a quest to find the person you love, who’s died? . . . You search and search, trying to find the person through dreams. . . . through whatever means you can find. . . But in the game version, in our version, which for the moment I’m calling SoulFinder, you might actually stand a chance of finding them” (418). The prospect of using technological mechanisms to overcome death has been the basis of fictions since Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), which represents the deadly consequences of a budding scientist’s attempt to create life within a plot that connects birth and death. If we accept Janet Murray’s persuasive claim that “All of human media can be seen as an elaboration of the baby’s gesture of pointing at something in order to draw the caregiver’s attention to it” (14), we recognize that a caregiving relationship, with its ethical obligations, is foundational for developing and appreciating the context, content, and design of media.

Such concerns about how the prospect of death affects human relationships and ethics are woven through O’Gorman’s work. In sum, Necromedia offers an elegantly argued account of how technological innovations and cultural preoccupations with mortality define humanity in the age of the posthuman. The author threads discussion of other media theorists, artists, and philosophers whose ideas help contextualize the provocative digital media projects showcased in alternating chapters. Necromedia provides a useful overview of digital humanities practice and theory that promotes the value of incorporating artistic creativity into humanistic study of where technology and culture meet. The book has helped me to better understand the needs driving many of us to use social media and teaches that being playful with media–creating, constructing, and curating it–ought to be the drivers that guide our engagement with technology.