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 digit…

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 un…

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, …

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 …

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 univer…

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 liv…

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…

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 …