Conclusion to Difficult Death, Dying, and the Dead in Media and Culture

This chapter concludes the book Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. We reflect upon the overall themes of the book, considering the ways in which the public and private converge when we begin to look at the difficulties of death and dying. The chapter looks towards the ways in which we interact with death, dying and the dead through varied media—exploring the concepts of celebrity, online interactions with mortality, the differences and divides between real and fictional death, and audiences’ connections to death as entertainment and distraction. We identify that the recording or capturing of death and reactions to it creates a stasis, with such stasis and ongoing access and potential to revisit images of death presenting a challenge to the concept of privacy when considering loss. We find that death in media and culture is a matter of context, with a personal relationship of navigation and negotiation for each member of the audience often at the centre of experience.