Abstract
At the crossroads between the aesthetic and the social, camera phone practices can provide insight into contemporary digital media. This phenomenon is magnified in the context of selfies as a barometer for changing relationships between media, memory and death. This relationship between emotion, grief and affect is most apparent in the South Korean MV Sewol boat disaster on 16 April 2014 (known as ‘Sewol disaster’) whereby selfies operated as self-designated eulogies for the 246 high-school children who were tragically killed. Through this tragic disaster, this chapter recalibrates the role of selfies as lenses into understanding affect as a texture with both deep emotional and political rhythms.
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This chapter is part of a broader study with Katie Cumiskey exploring the role of mobile media in processes of loss.
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Hjorth, L., Moon, J. (2017). Visual Afterlife: Posthumous Camera Phone Practices. In: Kuntsman, A. (eds) Selfie Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_13
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