Death, After-Death and the Human in the Internet Era: Remembering, Not Forgetting Professor Michael C. Kearl (1949-2015)

Today, humans have remains that are other than physical, generated within and supported by new information communications technologies (ICTs). As with human remains of the past, these are variously attended to or ignored. In this article, which serves as the introduction to this special issue, we examine the reality, meaning and use of enduring digital remains of humans. We are specifically interested in the evolving practices of remembering and forgetting associated with them. These previously posited considerations of ‘human remains’ and ‘what remains of the human’ are useful for exploring the relationship between the Internet, the body, remembering and forgetting. This article is a first step towards understanding how new technological developments are shaping and revealing our contemporary view of life, death and what it means to be human