In this unmissable episode of Still Spoken, Elaine Kasket talks with Catherine Mayer, who was married to Andy Gill - of the English post-punk band Gang of Four - until his death. She was close friends with the late Michael Hutchence (INXS) and Paula Yates.Catherine and the author of All the Ghosts in the Machine discuss the complexity of the digital legacy Andy left behind, as well as the perils of digital legacy when a public figure dies - issues we rarely consider but that are increas...
Usually, Still Spoken is about how your data lives on through technology after you die. But how do you live in technology before you're able to form your own digital footprint, perhaps before you're even born? When I was writing one of the final chapters All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, I ended up in an unexpected place: thinking about how I'd created a digital reflection for my own child that would eventually form part of her digital legacy. These d...
Jeffrey Sconce is Professor in the Screen Cultures program and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2020-2021. Back in 2000, he published Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, which looked at how electronic media and the occult have always been intertwined, right back to the telegraph. He's the guest on this episode of Still Spoken, a wide-ranging chat about horror films, Freud, Spiritualists and seances, immortalists of Silicon Valley, posthumous electronic revenge, and whethe...
As Halloween approaches, Forbes Magazine posts its roster of that year's top-earning dead celebrities. That's the jumping-off point for this discussion, which will probably teach you a few new phrases; cultural reincarnation, parasocial relationships, and grief policing. Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, speaks with sociologist Professor Carla Sofka, of Siena College, New York. Carla has studied death and the digital almost s...
In February 2021, a post on Twitter by a Concordia University student in Canada went viral. Aaron Ansuini had emailed his lecturer a question. He didn't get an answer, for a very good reason. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, every lecturer I know is pre-recording lectures, or capturing them live. What happens to those recordings? Could a university actually keep on using those lectures after the lecturer leaves - or really leaves? And if so, who benefits? Elaine Kasket, author of All the ...
Do the dead live forever on social media? If so, how might the social media companies exploit their memories - AND the data of the living? The citizens of the modern age have handed over responsibility for the dead - and culture, and history - to the powers of social media and the market. Why does that matter?Still Spoken explores how the dead live on: through us, through our stories, and through technology. In this episode, Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital ...
In They Both Die at the End, Adam Silvera writes that 'stories can make someone immortal as long as someone else is willing to listen.' Annie died in 2019, but to London audiences of The Moth, she feels as alive as ever thanks to her grandson, the storyteller Scott Young. His tale about Annie and an ill-advised engagement party took him to London's July 2019 GrandSLAM, a competition for some of the best storytellers around. In this episode of Still Spoken - a podcast exploring the way the dea...
Just in time for Halloween, the news hit that Kanye West gifted his wife a hologram of her late father as a 40th birthday surprise. Is this the best or worst present ever? And should we be treating this as a weird headline about those crazy celebrities, or as a wakeup call for us all?Elaine Kasket, psychologist and author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data (2020) talks to Patrick Stokes, philosopher based at Deakin University in Australia and author ...