{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026058631921824105, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010702652396463471, 'mean_word_length': 5.231884057971015, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The celebration of death in contemporary culture

death and dying are documented experiences. This account broadens the discourses in media and communication studies, as well as death studies. In more detail, the work presented in this book is underpinned by the intention to explore how far documentaries can show death. The author examines how the advancement of digital media has impacted the act of documenting death; it has provided avenues not only to professional filming but non-professional as well, e.g. YouTube videos. The author argues, nonetheless, that digital media are unable to depict death ‘in full detail’. Further, underpinning and complementing this argument is the author’s recommendation that culture directly shapes the audience/viewers of documentaries; this remark increases the book’s contribution as the author carefully recognises that her examples are predominantly stemming from within the US, and therefore implications may differ from one place to the next. Nevertheless, the author concludes with a much wider scope of her research; digital media may be failing to fully capture dying and death, while the various audiences make separate understandings of their viewing. In other words, the applicability of this book’s conclusions stretches much wider, beyond the context of the US. The book’s structure follows a chronological sequence. The first chapter explores attempts to document death with photography and films from the 1830s to 1970s. The second chapter focuses on video advancements and the impact on documenting death in the 1980s and 1990s. The third chapter, more exclusively, examines the influence of digital media in documenting death in the beginning of the millennium. Finally, the last chapter, four, explores more contemporary themes related to digital distribution and applicability. Aside from their chronological order, the chapters also progress thematically. The first two chapters are underpinned with the question ‘what the digital reveals about death’ (p. 20), while the third and fourth chapters reverse the question ‘to ask what death reveals about the digital’ (p. 20). MORTALITY 113