Facebook as a Wormhole between Life and Death

Based on an interview with 'Camilla', who has used social media to mourn the loss of her sister, this chapter takes its point of departure in Camilla's sense of being able to communicate and be present with her sister on Facebook. The chapter explores what this feeling of—or psycho-emotional investments in—Facebook as a telepathic or metaphysical dimensionality entails. What might Camilla teach us media scholars about current experiences of being online, about mourning, and contemporary understandings of communication across the threshold of the living and the dead, bodies and machines? These questions are pursued through the metaphors offered by Annette Markham in her early work Life Online. Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space (1998).