Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

This book of short stories is thought provoking and sometimes wacky. You’ll meet aliens, digital cats, lesbian terrorists and genetically engineered bugs. The themes and genres in this anthology vary from cyberpunk to time travel, from romance to trash. With this collection Andy Siege explores the philosophical boundaries of what it means to be human in an unexplainable and vast universe. As time bends and worlds collide it becomes ever more clear that the true thesis of this book isn’t rooted in sci fi... but in reality.

Your tech knows you better than you know yourself… What is reincarnation when immortality is as easy as uploading our consciousness to permanent storage? Where does the algorithm end and our true desires begin? What does identity mean when someone else has the ability to rewrite our code? Technology can help us learn about ourselves and the people we care about… sometimes more than we want to. And it can change how we see the world… sometimes more than we’re aware of. Fans of Black Mirror will love this twisty, shivery collection of six standalone stories about how the tech we use makes us who we are. This collection contains the following stories: The New Me The Happiness Algorithm Stasis Lost in Translation Hearth Fires Exactly Like She Was

"A sociologist examines the ways we die online, and the digital texts we leave behind-including blogs of the terminally ill, suicide notes, post-mortem messages, and hashtags about police brutality. The book argues that the Internet has reenchanted our notions of selfhood, but in ways that blind us to the inequalities underpinning our digital lives"--

Pandemics, conflicts, and crises have increased suffering, death, and loss worldwide. The growing phenomenon of online interactions by the bereaved with the online presence of their deceased loved ones has recently come to the attention of caring professionals. Many questions emerge. How do we understand and respond to digital memorialization? What do we make of digital identities and continuing bonds? How can we engage with digital bereavement communities? What is the future of digital death and bereavement rituals and practices? How have forms of technospirituality and cybergnosticism emerged? How do counselors and carers respond to advances in the digital afterlife? Graham Joseph Hill and Desiree Geldenhuys examine existing therapeutic responses to death and bereavement practices and evaluate the efficacy in meeting the needs of mourners in a digital context. Geldenhuys and Hill explore the rising interest in spirituality and the phenomenon of technospirituality, including interest in the afterlife. The authors outline new death and bereavement practices in the digital public sphere. Hill and Geldenhuys offer ways that therapeutic and care practitioners can meet these needs. Finally, the authors develop new proposals for counseling, pastoral, and spiritual carers to help them address the needs of the bereaved.

An introduction to artificial intelligence explores the philosophical and scientific implications of building machines that can think and feel more deeply than humans. Reprint.

Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more—telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital.