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Death is ultimately nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the ‘dead’ from the ‘living’: therefore, it affects both equally.

Baudrillard, 1993, p. 127

On 20 January 2014, Mrs Hayley Cropper (played by British actress Julie Hesmondhalgh), terminally ill of pancreatic cancer, took her own life in the iconic Coronation Street, the longest-running soap opera in the history of television (Wilson, 2014). Hayley, with no chance of recovery, decided to end her suffering before the illness could cause her unbearable pain. This decision was not easily made, with the final, decisive act being the culmination of months of slow-building television. The tragic screening was heavily publicized on ITV throughout the previous weekend. British media prepared viewers for it by providing a space for a public debate about whether Hayley’s decision was morally justified. The show’s producers brought experts into the studio to discuss Hayley’s death. The death scene played out in a discreet manner. Hayley was shown sleeping away in the arms of her loving husband, Roy. After the episode, information on several humanitarian helplines appeared on the screen to offer help to any who may have been disturbed by the scene. In the days that followed, Hayley’s death was widely re-screened and discussed throughout British mainstream media. The next peak in public interest in Coronation Street centred around an episode featuring Hayley’s funeral, which was bursting with emotion. Her coffin, brightly decorated with painted flowers, was brought to a ceremony hall accompanied by the iconic Queen song ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. The camera followed the main characters as Hayley’s relatives, friends, and neighbours participated in the ceremony. Many were moved – some were in tears – while Roy struggled silently with his emotions. The feeling of ‘sharing the moment’ was palpable; it could be felt on both sides of the screen.

Many years after Hayley’s mediated death aired on TV, her death and funeral scenes still appear on YouTube and stimulate collective emotion (ReadySalted80, 2014). The comments on these YouTube clips reveal the heterogeneous reactions of ordinary people to this mediated death. At a glance, the comments indicate that many were moved by Hayley’s death. Some say that they still miss her and react positively to the funeral setting, the decorated coffin, and the music. Other commenters make an explicit connection to their personal experiences, stating that Hayley’s death and funeral remind them of points in their lives at which they lost relatives and loved ones. However, there are also commenters who express feelings of antipathy and resentment, saying, for example, that they did not like Hayley’s character in the series. Some commenters even criticize others’ mediated mourning over Hayley – as she was ‘only’ a fictional character and did not die for ‘real’.

The comments do not offer much context. We do not know who these people on social media are or have a sense of their level of involvement with the series. As such, we can say nothing concretely about their motivations for participating in this digital discussion triggered by Hayley’s mediated death. And yet these people are coming together to share this death event on social media. In leaving their mark, they create social life around this peculiar death. Thus, we may characterize this type of death as simultaneously ‘virtual’ and ‘real’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘mundane’, ‘strange’ and ‘ordinary’ – all features that I claim are characteristic of modern mediated death.

Furthermore, Hayley Cropper’s death invites us to think about the workings of death in modern, digitally saturated society. What makes Hayley’s death interesting for our purposes is its obscurity as a social and cultural phenomenon and its ubiquitous and hybrid media saturation. The character, who dies, is fictional; the public, who participate in this death event, are ‘virtual’, as they associate, connect, and identify with Hayley’s fatal story online and through mainstream media. However, as Caroline Kitch and Janice Hume (2008, p. xiv) point out, ‘death stories are less about the dead than about the living’. Additionally, Hayley’s death stirred emotions, morals, and values well beyond the soap opera’s storyline; consequently, her death became an indicator of social life and the way in which it expresses itself in modern society (cf. Metcalf & Huntington, 1997, p. 2) – the topic that I aim to understand in this book.

In this effort, I am interested in the kind of mediated death that attracts public attention in digital media, whether through online news stories by journalists or posts uploaded on social networks by ordinary people. Hannah Arendt (1990 [1958]) has famously argued that the public is the essence of the social. In her work, acting in the public space – shared by others – is essential to a fulfilled human existence. Today, not only journalists but also ordinary people using diverse digital media platforms have the means to act in public space and establish communication between life and death and, therefore, shape social reality as it pertains to the loss of life and how it impacts the living. It is fair to assert that, today, death in its public and profoundly hypermediated form (cf. Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015), a concept that points here to the complex processes that shape the public presence of death in today’s society, has also become hybridized (Chadwick, 2013; Graham et al., 2013; cf. Kraidy, 2005). Andrew Chadwick (2013, p. 9) argues that ‘hybridity alerts us to the unusual things that happen when distinct entities come together to create something new that nevertheless has continuities with the old’. In his work, Chadwick (2013) refers in particular to the interaction between journalistic news media and social media. I wish to argue in this book that the digitally immersed hybridization of death across different communication platforms alerts us to the curious phenomena that take place as death meets modern media, and the social implications embedded in these hypermediated assemblages (see also Sumiala et al., 2018).