Vital Ties: Digitally Mediated Intimacies with the Dead

By Molly Hales

Vital Ties depicts an emergent form of intimacy with the dead mediated by digital technologies. In southern Australia, a game developer crafts a virtual reality experience, reuniting his best friend with an avatar of his late father. In Northern California, a woman creates a smartphone app to log moments in which her deceased mother appears. In Chicago, a high school teacher visits her late brother's Facebook page, hypnotized by the shifting content that animates and reanimates him. As digital media offer ways to bring the dead to presence, the living and the dead are haunted in new ways, affecting relationships to both media and death. Lyrical and moving, Vital Ties offers a powerful rethinking of death, memory, and mediation in the digital age.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1501786652
• ISBN13: 9781501786655
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"