Cytoarchitecture: Digital Dismembering and Remembering in Cyberspace

Abstract

Between 2012 and 2017, a contributor to Mumsnet, a popular parenting forum online, began recording a third-person account under the pseudonym IamtheZombie, covering first her divorce and then her experience of cancer. In January 2017, IamtheZombie died. Preserved by MumsnetHQ, the threads form a tissue of posts: a text-culture that explores para-sociality between the living and the dead. Building on existing scholarship on digital life writing, on the afterlives of digital footprints and on recent work in the fields of memory studies, computing and neurobiology, this essay offers a new interdisciplinary framework for describing relationality in life writing on illness, dying and death: cytoarchitecture.