1. An introduction to research In this research, which is based on the idea that the relationship with death is the result of an anthropological necessity and that it occupies a decisive place in the social imaginary, the end is observed in its indissoluble and dichotomous relationship with life and its manifestations. Art, the meaning of community itself, ritual, all the practices that can be recognised as the signs of the spectacle of life and human beauty, have originated, first and foremost, from this common condition. It is the beauty and spectacularity of the collective journey, therefore, that one intends to observe. One observes death, in order to have a look at life. And that is why the reader is asked to abandon, just as the writer has done, the feeling that links the image of death to personal sorrows and memories, and to look at it, instead, as a source, even if harrowing, of beauty. 2. Summary 2.1 Introduction The object of study around which this research moves is how the relationship with death can be considered an anthropological human condition i.e. as a relationship with permanent, archetypal characteristics, which manifests itself in cultural forms. Such forms flow in the spirit and direction of the dominant imaginary and, as such, tell us about it. But that is not all. The quality of the relationship that collectivity entertains with death is considered determinant with respect to the shaping of the imaginary nature of social existence. Fully espousing the thought of one of the authoritative founding fathers of sociology, the German Georg Simmel, it is assumed that since 'death is placed with its very nature' (Simmel, 1918), man receives from death the form of his life. Social life and the relationship with death are considered the two decisive sides of the same collective coin and each tells of the other, in a relationship of absolute complementarity. It is believed, for all that, that as long as we have a body that dies, the relationship with death cannot be resolved and will always need frames of narration that give meaning to existence. Starting here, this research seeks, first of all, to reflect on how modernity has not, in fact, destroyed the necessity of the relationship with death. Referring to the illustrious vision of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1976), one of the characteristics of modernity consists, in fact, in having excluded death from the symbolic circulation of the group. At the macro-social dimension, it becomes a taboo, something not to be talked about, an accident that interrupts the progress of existence. Compared to the ancient world (De Martino, 1958), in modernity, the value that the subject, both individual and collective, assigns to death and the space it occupies in its representations changes. Death, on a macro-social dimension, disappears. At least from the physical and symbolic places that were consecrated to it. Collective rituals themselves are banned from social life. In this way, one plunges into that disenchantment of the world, amply observed by Max Weber (1919), which deprives the community of a cosmological narrative that gives meaning, in a convincing manner, to death and thus provides the enchantment necessary to face all of existence. What is intended to be reflected upon is how such disenchantment does not, however, mean the end of the necessity of the social relationship with death, of the need, that is, for the comfort of a collectively shared representation that touches the visceral senses. Modern social life has not ceased to be conditioned by the dilemmatic presence of the end. The point is that, resorting to the illustrious thought of Martin Heidegger (1927), a great reference of this investigation, fear has represented the emotional tonality that has permeated modernity. Consequently, symbolic estrangement and ritual isolation represent the forms that the relationship with death has taken in modernity, but not its resolution. On the basis of these considerations, the phenomenon that will be analysed in detail, empirically, is how today, in the electric age (McLuhan, 1964), the relationship with death finds both its place in the group's symbolic exchange and its ritual space. All this in the macro territories of the Net. That is, a new religious form seems to be reconfiguring itself that binds global society in the meanders of the Net, a global imaginary re-enchantment, which is defined by this study as electric reenchantment, precisely because it refers to the era that has built its identity on the immaterial force of electricity. It should be noted, in this regard, that the meaning of the word "religion", taken as structural in this investigation, is independent of the great traditional, monotheistic religious systems. It refers, instead, to the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1912), to the Latin derivation of religo-religere (lat. legare, to bind, to hold together) and, therefore, to the contagiousness of a spontaneous human force, of a common feeling made up of energy, that binds human beings. It is a force that stems from effervescence, from an "over-activity [that] has the effect of a general stimulation of individual consciences... It is thus in these effervescent social environments and from this very effervescence that the religious idea seems to have been born" (Durkheim, 1912). The observation of this global religious phenomenon, considered crucial for the very understanding of the contemporary imaginary and whose analysis finds support in the studies of Digital Death and contemporary philosophy, represents the object of study of the empirical part of the research. In order to elaborate this analysis, the theoretical framework of the entire investigation is constructed in advance. 2.2 Objectives and research questions Given the object of study introduced, the specific objective of this research is to observe the collective funeral rituals practised on the Net and aimed to celebrate and commemorate certain illustrious dead of the infosphere (Floridi, 2017), i.e. of the global environment generated by the continuous, and by now inevitable, contamination between the dimensions of digital devices and the dimensions of physical reality. Indeed, it is believed that such practices represent the tangible expression of the resurgent global religious form. From here, one will attempt to understand the new imaginary of death, the quality of the imaginary re-enchantment (Durand, 1996). One will try to understand around what it is generated, what animates it, what are its structuring principles, in order to better understand, in general, our world, our social imaginary. For this purpose, after the construction of the theoretical framework, the third part will identify some of those illustrious dead whose deaths have aroused global interest, constant over time and still relevant today. This means that an attempt will be made to understand whether the new saints of the electric age exist, the moral references of the global religious form that being constructed in the territories of the Net. Identifying the existence of illustrious dead in the infosphere, and understanding the collective forms of their celebration, is considered crucial. The funerary artefacts that have enabled the study of past imaginaries of death, and hence the understanding of civilisations themselves, are, in fact, mainly those linked to illustrious ancestors, religious leaders, saints and so on. In other words, the understanding of past civilisations has been made possible, above all, thanks to the existence of personages to whom, on a macro-social level, special care and collective attention has been devoted, during funerals and during moments of commemoration. They are the fulcrum of the religious bond, without them one could not even speak of religion. Likewise, such should be the illustrious dead of our era: the fulcrum of the global religious bond. An analysis of the collective ritual forms intended for the death of these globally famous figures, who still remain a moral reference point today, can reveal, in general, the characteristic elements of the quality of the global imaginary of death in the electric age, as well as the type of civilisation now existent. And so: does global society have its illustrious dead? And if so, what is the new ceremonial space? What is the new imaginary of death? And how does the reenchantment of the infosphere reconfigure, what enables an extended society such as the global one to hold itself in a religious bond? And what does all this tell us about the very nature of global society? These are the questions that drive the research. Going into the specifics, the investigation is thus divided into three parts. In the first part, intended for the construction of the theoretical framework, we first define the perspective of the investigation, which is that of the sociology of the imaginary. In order to better understand the main definitions of the imaginary that sociology has inherited from the minds of the French anthropologist Gilbert Durand (1960) and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2003), one starts, in advance, with the results achieved by the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler (1928), Arnold Gehlen (1940) and Helmuth Plessner (1928). Briefly summarising the thought of the three authors, it can be argued that, in general, from the viewpoint of philosophical anthropology, man is distinguished from other living beings by his ability to transcend himself, to emancipate himself from the natural world and to create the artificial environment most suited to him. He does it through reason and creative intelligence, with which he continually produces the techniques he needs, and he does it without ever finding peace, without ever being able to achieve ultimate satisfaction, the utopian place completely suited to him. He does this, fundamentally, through a crucial human endowment: imagination. It represents that peculiar and foundational human capacity, which affords everything that has been observed by philosophical anthropology. Which means that, interpreting the findings of philosophical anthropology, to speak of reason or intelligence is, in essence, to speak of imagination. Etymologically, in Latin, imago is figure, but also shadow, ghost, spectre, representation, idea, as well defined by the Italian sociologist Pier Luca Marzo (2022). One has to look at imagination as a human peculiarity and as the engine of action, of creation. Much of what we are and do is the result of the image, the representation we construct in our minds previously. It is, therefore, in grasping man's peculiar ability to create, over and over again, a nature suited to him, that philosophical anthropology has furnished the conceptual basis useful to the perspective of the sociology of the imaginary: since man possesses this endowment, there inevitably also exists a collective imagination that feeds a common worldview and which, from here, determines the construction of an artificial social environment and the related actions and practices. Without the vision of society as a collectively constructed artificial environment, thanks to imagination and through technology, one could not speak of the Imaginary. On the basis of these solid assumptions from philosophical anthropology, there are basically two general lines of thought regarding the definition of the imaginary. The first can be traced back to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2003), who defines the social imaginary as the set of ideologies, knowledge and shared images that give shape to social practices. In other words, the social imaginary is a form of tacit, implicit knowledge that is collectively shared and concerns mutual competences and intentions. It makes it possible to situate oneself in society and to foresee and know what to expect from the other. The second line of thought develops, on the other hand, from the complex socioanthropological analysis of the french Gilbert Durand (1960), for whom shared beliefs, ideologies and forms of knowledge, as they change, always rest on deep, unconscious and archaic substrates that remain fixed: the archetypes. These are the structuring principles of reality that change in their historical guise, but not in their essence. It is they that inspire the 'fundamental images of mythology, rituals and visions', writes essayist and historian of religions Joseph Campbell (1949). With Durand, we enter the sphere of the primordial images and vital forces present in the collective unconscious, we move into mythodology, thus defined by him, i.e. into that particular perspective, which this research fully espouses, that aims to penetrate the social imaginary in order to trace its structuring principles. Mythodology aims to recognise, that is, the archetypal matrix of the social imaginary in order to better understand its changes. Durand defines myth, in fact, as the deep structure (cf. Durand, 1996). The Imaginary is, therefore, a constellation of images, as Durand (1960) defines it, which as a coherent and dynamic whole constitute the substratum of mental life, of the inner life. Durand is also responsible for the distinction between the diurnal regime, the river in which flow all the symbols that have to do with selfassertion and the clear and rational understanding of the world, and the nocturnal regime where, instead, flow all the symbols that concern interiority, those symbols, in particular, with which 'men respond to the anguish of the decomposition of death, induced by the unpredictability of the changing faces of time, in a holistic and cyclical vision of the world' (Marzo, 2022). It is in the nocturnal regime, then, that the symbols relating to the relationship with death flow. Taking into account, thanks to Durand, the profound link that ties the question of death to the nocturnal currents of the social imaginary, the relationship with death is thus defined, by this research, as a total social fact (Mauss, 1925). The relationship with death is, that is, a fact dense with "rules of action recognisable on the basis of certain distinctive characteristics" (Durkheim, 1934), which has a binding and nonutilitarian function, which involves everyone and which permeates several dimensions and social institutions. A fact that, for all that, represents not only a tangible, but a particularly dense manifestation of the social imaginary. It belongs to man, in an indissoluble manner, since the moment he migrated from the condition of human animal to that of human being, a being, that is, imaginary, symbolic, technical and social. Which means, necessarily, that the relationship with death becomes increasingly complicated as social evolution becomes more complex. In this regard, this research identifies the main evolutions of the imaginary of death in connection, above all, with the macro changes that have occurred at the level of the occupation of social space and with regard to the collective perception of time. Space and time are, after all, two variables that have always affected the relationship with death and the meaning of existence more significantly than anything else. As we have expanded from the small community of tribes to the city-states and so on, not only has the space we occupy expanded and densified, but the temporal dimension, in parallel, has also changed its shape. Circular time gradually transfigured into a linearity made up of unique and unrepeatable moments, producing quite a few upheavals in the sense attributed to the relationship with death. This has required continuous updates, the incessant succession of new, socially shared frames, narratives and collective practices. The idea that the relationship with death is a total social fact becomes even more valid when one considers that the grave traces found in the course of time are those that have provided archaeology with useful elements for reconstructing the history of civilisations. The earliest human traces and evidence that have been found, and continue to be uncovered, are the images of funerary depositions and related rituals, just as the earliest constructions that have re-emerged are the burial sites. Which means that life has been, and continues to be, narrated by tombs. Then follows a recognition of the changes in the practices of the relationship with death (tombs and rituals) over the course of the evolution of social imaginaries, in order to verify how this relationship can actually be considered anthropological, albeit cultural in its evolutions and manifestations. The recognition thus highlights how, on the one hand, there is a reciprocal and continuous exchange link between social evolution and changes in the relationship with death and, on the other, there are certain recursive, permanent elements that are independent of cultural manifestations. With the important support of the work of the philosopher Jacques Choron (1971), the survey on the evolution of tombs and rituals starts from the primitive stages and ends with the advent of Christianity, gradually focusing on the Western dimension. In order to define the steps of the reconnaissance on the imaginaries of death, in addition to the anchors provided by the evolutions of the concepts of space and time, it was deemed useful to borrow the three-act structure of the hero's journey, proposed by the american screenwriter Christopher Vogler (1992). This structure, for use in creative writing, particularly film scripts, defines the arc of transformation of the protagonist of a story, who is referred to as the hero, and is based on the myth framework investigated by Joseph Campbell (1949). Taking the structure proposed by Vogler, one chooses to approach the reconnaissance of tombs and rituals and to observe the human history of the relationship with death as the development of a creative plot, which has as its protagonist an ideal hero who is the emblem of all humanity and who lives from prehistory to the present day. According to Vogler's model, the most significant steps in the history of the relationship between man and death are: ordinary world, triggering incident and call to adventure, rejection of the call, crossing the first threshold and entering the extraordinary world, approaching the cave, central trial, reward or state of grace, way back or fall, resurrection or inner change, resolution. In this sense, the story of the hero of the story we are about to write can be summarised as follows: the hero lives in an ordinary world in which, as he begins to move in a group, for purposes of defence and survival, he discovers the death of the other person. In this way, he comes into contact with a problem to be solved. To reach the resolution, the hero should embark on a journey, but, initially, he prefers to reject the call to adventure and look upon death as an accident. He considers death, that is, as an uncertain fact, which does not concern him. That is, until conditions around him change. As the tribes become larger and man becomes individualised, seeking shelter in small family groups, the hero begins to discover, in fact, the death of the prochain, of the loved one (Landsberg, 1933) and thus senses the certainty of the end. At this point he can no longer escape: he must face the problem and embark on his journey. He crosses the threshold and enters an extraordinary world in which, as the space around him widens and densifies and time takes on a linear form, he must confront, again and again, his serious problem. He must face various trials, waiting to find a solution that appears valid and resolving. This is how the hero arrives at the central test and finds the solution in the Abrahamic/monotheistic religions, in Christianity, in particular, as far as the West is concerned. This central trial brings him such a high reward that the hero, at this moment, is convinced that he has solved the problem and experiences a long state of grace. This is the midpoint, the moment of enlightenment. Once the state of grace has passed, however, the hero plummets vortically downwards. This is because, in fact, with the midpoint, the hero has not solved his real problem. He has not, in fact, faced an inner change, which is the real purpose of his journey. On the contrary, having unravelled the illusion of the state of grace, his problem and his condition get worse and worse (exasperations of religious dogma). The hero approaches the cave, comes into contact with the deepest areas of his shortcomings. The fall continues until the second turning point, or death experience, as Vogler defines it, i.e. the lowest point in his story, the moment, that is, when everything seems to be over, when it seems impossible to solve the problem (modernity). It is precisely this moment, however, that represents the only possible condition for true inner change. The hero, having let go of all resistance and having come into contact with the real problem, which is within himself, can experience a profound renewal, a transformation, which will lead him to true resolution (the electric age). In the first part, the hero's journey is interrupted, only to be resumed in the second part, with the advent of Christianity, because it is considered, in the history of the West, the breaking point of the system of funeral rituals practised, on a macro-social level, until its advent, as will be seen in the second part. Christianity is considered the beginning of the end of the enchantment, the beginning of that disenchantment of the world, treated by Max Weber (1919), which, in modernity, caused us to lose the order and comfort generated by the cosmology of the great collective narratives, of the total representations of the world in the face of death. Until the advent of Christianity, one can speak of that ancient world investigated, in depth, by the anthropologist and ethnologist Ernesto De Martino (1958), a world in which enchantment is based on the idea that superior and irrational forces and powers determine human existence, including death, restoring to man the meaning of his entire existence. It is a world in which collective rituality, the tangible expression of such narratives, shelters the group from that crisis of presence that undermines the social order and the survival of collective life. According to De Martino's investigations, the crisis of presence is, in fact, a crisis due to the psychic state of fascination, 'a psychic condition of impediment and inhibition, and at the same time a sense of domination, a being acted upon by a force as powerful as it is occult, which leaves the autonomy of the person, his capacity for decision and choice, with no margin' (De Martino, 1959). Fascination arises from a lack, which is not so much material as, above all, psychological and is to be avoided because it negatively affects active participation in group life. The group is the absolutely fundamental asset, to be safeguarded and protected. The rituality of the ancient world is, therefore, practised, collectively, for the rebirth of the individual within a group that must regain its order. It is with reference to the conditions of lability of presence that the protective function of magical ritual practices emerges. They are "socialised and traditionalised techniques" (De Martino, 1959) necessary to protect and reintegrate individual presence into the group. They are techniques made up of ceremonial gestures and words, as well as melodic themes, which together constitute a ritual. Gestures, words and melodic themes are, indeed, the fundamental elements of ritual in the ancient world. In De Martino's studies, funeral rites arise, therefore, like other practices, from the relationship that is established between the crisis of presence, generated by contact with the corpse, and the magical forms, precisely, typical of that cultural universe. What death does, fundamentally, is to wrest the presence of the deceased, both from his closest, the prochain, and from the community, profoundly modifying the shared space of collective experience and common life. With death, this collective space enters deeply into crisis. At this point, the community huddles together and stages, through actresses, prefects, a funeral lament in which both the individual mourning of the prochain and the collective mourning find convention and form. Still following the hero's journey of transformation and thanks to the scientific literature, the second section deals with the core from which the questions of this research were generated. By examining what has happened in modernity, in the West, starting with the exasperations of Catholicism, the intention is to dispel a certain illusion, consolidated by the modern perspective, that, with the achievements of science and medicine, it is possible to resolve the original dilemma of death. The chaos and devastation wrought by the exasperations of the Catholic Church's dominance, in particular by the Catholic Crusades first and the Wars of Religion later, greatly facilitated the process of secularisation that led us to the modern era. It is within Catholicism itself, that is, that there arises that rejection of a higher order dominating the human one and, with it, of collective rituals that will later be exasperated in modernity. After centuries of terror and wars, after centuries of the dominance of dogma and religious hierarchies, the modern subject ends up, in fact, by enclosing the concepts of Church and ritual in a single semantic weave, and then rejecting both. All the more so since, at the same time, the enlightened progress of science induces him to hope, at last, in the concrete possibility of finally freeing himself from the game that has always been open with death. The emblem of this turning point is represented by Napoleon's Edict of 12 June 1804, the Edict of Saunt Cloud, which sanctions and defines the process of moving cemeteries away from the centre of population and, with them, the symbolic presence of the dead in social life. However, within this general panorama, modern man, relegated to the individual sphere, does not in fact receive, from science, convincing answers about death, let alone practical indications of how to relate to it. Once the initial enthusiasm has passed, what modernity simply does with regard to death is to remove it from the symbolic exchange of the group, as widely observed by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1979), and to reject collective rituals. Confined within his individualism and deprived of the space of collective ritual, but unable, in fact, to rid himself of the dilemmatic relationship with death, modern man thus ends up falling into a dramatic void of narrative and meaning. He finds himself orphaned of the sources of every possible narrative: religion, science and magic. Deprived of the enchantment, he finds himself thrown into the dilemma of death in a far more dramatic way than any other moment in human history, because he finds himself alone. Bureaucratising the moment of the end and depriving the community of its rituals, modernity has not only failed to solve the dilemma of the end, it has exasperated it. It has led the hero to the fall, to the most dramatic moment in the character's transformation arc structured by Christopher Vogler (1992). If at the macro-social level we see this drift, at the micro-social level, however, we can observe how the relationship with death finds respite in that typology of topical common spaces, described by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, organised around 'intense shared emotion' (Taylor, 2003). The micro social spaces intended for the relationship with death, which are defined by the writer as ritual islands, represent a true form of modern resistance. An example of this is the doctrine of Spiritism, as well as the great famous funerals of modernity, those funerals that have remained in history for their great mass participation. One thinks, to name but one, of Abraham Lincoln, for whom, in 1865, a funeral tour was held that lasted two weeks. This is also reflected in all the spiritual movements that spread in the West after the end of the 19th century. Testifying to the impossibility of evading the collective relationship with death, there is, again, and certainly not in last place, Martin Heidegger, who right at the height of modernity, writes 'Sein und Zeit', a monumental work in which the philosopher links social existence to the emotional tonality with which the collective relates to death, arriving at defining man as being for death (Heidegger, 1927). Starting from the observation of such terrains of resistance, the fertile humus to begin to imagine how the symbolic exchange with death and the funeral rituality once again become protagonists of our electric age, thanks to the Web. It is the mass media first and the new media later, in fact, that offer the possibility of a new turning point, the most important one for the hero drawn by Vogler (1992), the one that leads him to the resolution of the problem. On the other hand, at this point in the investigation, having reached the height of modernity, one cannot fail to consider the influence that the advent of mass media has on modern collective life. All the more so when one considers the profound connections of mediology with the perspective of the sociology of the imaginary. One can grasp how the mass media, in general, and the Cinema, in particular, offer a useful opportunity for the rebirth of the symbolic exchange with death, on a macro-social level, far from the logics of religious dogma and those of science. In this sense, we choose to frame the evolution of media from the perspective of the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan, that is, understanding them as metaphors (McLuhan, 1964), as systems that act on perceptual structures. Metaphor comes, in fact, from the Greek metaphérein, and means to transport, where transport is a process of active translation that transforms everything it involves. Which is to say that mass media are metaphors that, by transporting the message, modify the experience of everything involved in the communication flow: the sender, the receiver and the message itself. In other words, mass media are not merely neutral means of passing on information, as is often the tendency in common sense, but have "sociological and psychological implications" (McLuhan, 1964). Communication is an active process of transformation, which does not depend so much on the content that is conveyed, but on the structural criteria with which the mass media organise it, acting on our perceptual and representational system, modifying it and being modified by it, in a continuous exchange. The media can be hot or cool. Hot are the media that give us a complete, fundamentally closed message, where there is a sender who acts and a receiver who reacts, i.e. media that envisage a one-way, high-definition participation (McLuhan, 1964); cool, on the other hand, refers to the freshness of those media that give us open messages, to that communication in which, instead of the high-definition relationship between sender and receiver, there is a reciprocal and continuous exchange of reactions, where an active participation of the subjects involved is necessary, which together complete the message. Since there are hot media and cool media, there are, accordingly, hot epochs and cool epochs, depending on the prevailing medium. According to this argument, the Internet becomes the emblem of a profound cooling of the world, a world in which the exchange of reciprocal and continuous relationships, of connections devoid of space and time boundaries and, above all, of manual rules, resurfaces. In the Internet, participation returns to give meaning to communication, as it was in ancient tribal villages dominated by orality. What changes between the two cool media, that of the Internet and that of the orality of tribal villages, lies in the physical nature of experience which, on the Net, dematerialises. And it is precisely on this knot of dematerialisation that McLuhan's discourse refers us to the analysis of the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin (1956), who observes the change in imagery produced by the new media precisely from the point of view of the dematerialisation of relationships and life. In his view, which is fully accepted here, the media evolution we have witnessed in the transition from modernity to the contemporary electric age lies precisely in the dematerialisation of space-time boundaries. And the watershed that made this process possible is represented, for Morin, by the advent of Cinema. Now, connecting this discourse to the objectives of the research, the Cinema becomes, from its inception, the new seat of the collective narrative of death, thus continuing the path begun in the first ceremonial chambers. Cinema boasts films that are undeniable and tangible evidence of the force with which the question of the relationship with limen, at the beginning of the 20th century, re-emerges in search of a new narrative and new collective practices. It is from Cinema, above all, that we have begun to witness, on a perceptual level, a rupture of the very, traditional sense of the real, a rupture that will help the evolution of the new relationship with death. It is here that the great epochal passage of the imaginary, from the modern to the contemporary, begins. In Morin's thought, the cinema is the medium that first generated an image projected on the screen that was completely impalpable and fleeting. The cinematic experience, moreover, resides in the collective spectacle, in the sharing of the experience in the theatre. But, above all, according to Morin, the hand of the film director generates, like a magical practice, a metamorphosis of reality, both in terms of time and in terms of space, the two variables that, once again, in their evolutions, contribute to the great changes of the imaginary. With Cinema, experience breaks free from the biological condition, from the bodily and spatial limit. And time, in turn, dilates, compresses, accelerates, all in the montage of shots. In this way, the spectator finds himself catapulted, affectively transferred, into a borderland where everything is possible, life and death, what is no longer and what is not yet. In line with McLuhan's thought, Morin observes how it is precisely the narrative techniques of Cinema and its conditions of fruition that induce in the spectator phenomena of projection and identification that bring him back into the dimension of myth, dream, magic, acting in this sense on his perceptive system. The spectator participates in the cinematic experience, in a process of magical, luminous, supernatural projection, beyond bodily limits. Continuing Morin's thought, if the advent of cinema breaks the clear division between reality and representation, making possible an interweaving and contamination of the two experiences, with Television the limit of the screen is definitively overcome. There is no longer an eye watching, rather the viewer finds himself immersed in the communicative environment, starting from his own individual, private space, as we would banally say, 'from home'. From here, the next step will be, with the reality show, to cross the boundary even physically. In this environment of membranes and transparent screens, the new media find fertile ground to take root and raise the stakes. In addition to the empathy that can be activated in front of the cinema screen, in addition to the immersion of the body in the communicative environment of reality television, the new media offer one more possibility: man no longer even needs his body to enter the screen. Man himself becomes immaterial, creates his own virtual simulacra and becomes the absolute protagonist of an ecosystem (Marzo, 2019) made up of experiences and relationships apparently separate from those of the corporeal dimension, but with which he actually has an intimate bond. It, the screen, becomes "the milieu that puts us in contact with the real, that makes experience visible in all its forms" (La Rocca, 2018). Life is completely contained in the medium. The Internet, digital platforms, and the new media thus become, in the words of the Italian sociologist and writer, Alberto Abruzzese, the life that we are (Abruzzese, 2009). It is no longer a problem of representing reality, as we have traditionally understood it up to this point, just as it is by no means enough to switch off the power to leave this new environment. Our perceptual system is modified by the mode of operation of the new media and it is with this connective type of perceptual system that we face our entire onlife (Floridi, 2017), a life that moves transversally and inevitably between digital and corporeal dimensions, without distinction, in a continuous flux. It is precisely in this framework that contemporary philosophy and Digital Death are moving. Experts in these fields have long been exploring the new forms of the relationship between humans and death on the Net. The studies of philosophers such as the Italian Davide Sisto (2018), who specialises in thanatology, digital culture and posthumanity, have in recent years highlighted how the territories of the Net, representing an existential dimension, offer themselves, almost spontaneously, also as the new site for the practice of mourning. Compared to modernity, death no longer appears as a private matter, mourning is no longer relegated to the intimacy of the individual and the small social group. Death becomes social: social networks are used to project individual sensitivities in the socialisation of mourning and to address discussions concerning death. Hence, as is the aim of this research, in the third part it will be attempted to understand whether this phenomenon takes on macro-social dimensions, whether it concerns, that is, global society and whether it is the sign of the reconfiguration of a global religious form, which has its own narratives and practices, as well as its new saints, its special ancestors. To this end, at the conclusion of the second part, by bringing together the constants of the relationship with death observed with the reconnaissance of death imaginaries and the evidence that emerged with modernity, drawing on the work of Max Weber and Ernesto De Martino's in-depth investigations, it is considered possible to construct an idealtype (Weber, 1922) of the collective ritual relationship with death. It will represent the conceptual beacon, the ideal model, with which to orient the observation of the empirical part, with which to move, that is, in the complex meanderings of our electric age. The idealtype of collective ritual relationship with death is defined as a set of collective practices intended for the rebirth of the deceased in the group and staged within a ceremonial space. The ultimate goal is the survival of the group itself. These practices involve a ritual script, socially instituted and traditionalised, comprising the verbal expression of collective emotions, certain codified gestures, which are nothing more than the mimic expression of the same emotions, words of praise that have the deceased as their object, and melodic elements. These idealtype funeral practices unfold in two main ritual moments, which are extremely interconnected. In the first ritual moment, the passage of the deceased, who migrates to his new condition, is accompanied collectively and emotionally. Once the rituality of passage is over, one proceeds with the construction of a horizon of crisis, through rituals of commemoration, which are nothing but the re-actualisation of the same rituals of the phase of passage, and which take place, usually, on the anniversary of the death or birth of the deceased. The rites of commemoration restore cyclicity to time, manage the horizon of crisis and re-establish, by renewing it, that bond between the living created at the moment of passage. It is for this reason that particular attention will be devoted, in the third part, to commemoration. Within these ritual moments, one can also observe the presence of certain recurring symbolic elements: the natural element (water, earth, fire), which symbolises regeneration and purification, in a pagan form; the death mask, which stops the sacred image of the deceased; the funeral trousseau, with which to allow the deceased to face his new existence and which is symptomatic of the idea of life continuing beyond death; the funeral banquet, a convivial moment during which the living celebrate the reintegration of the deceased into the group. If it is true that we are witnessing, today, a reconfiguration of the ritual relationship with death and of the symbolic exchange with it, such elements, mostly put into hibernation during modernity, should re-emerge with strength and macro-social scope within the global territories of the Net. At this point, the investigation shifts to the terrain of empirical observation. The third part is devoted to the experimental analysis of the reconfiguration of the funeral rites of global society, the leading subject of the electric age. The observation is conducted within the territories of the Net, the imaginary ecosystem that hosts our mediated lives (Bovalino, 2018) and focuses, in particular, on the celebration destined for the death of certain illustrious dead of the infosphere. Such dead, in fact, are comparable to those special ancestors who represented the cornerstone of every religious bond in the ancient world. This analysis takes place in the knowledge that the forms of celebration dedicated to them are reflected in the daily forms of celebration dedicated to the 'common' dead. The aim is to investigate how this celebration takes place, what forms it takes, and then, subsequently, to try to understand the nocturnal, unconscious motive that causes certain globally famous personalities to impose themselves as the illustrious dead in spite of other equally well-known and important celebrities. That is, we will try to understand what are the structuring principles of the new enchantment, of the new religion of the electric age, and, from there, understand something more about our global society. The empirical investigation is developed with a mixed approach, i.e. with two types of survey, one quantitative and one qualitative (details of the methodology are in the section dedicated to it). On the results of these surveys, an in-depth analysis will be based with which to answer the questions of this research. The quantitative analysis, made possible by the tools provided by the Net itself, Google and Google Trends in particular, identifies a number of celebrities whose death, as happened with the illustrious ancestors of antiquity and the saints of religions, shook the global community so deeply that it was compelled to gather en masse around them. They are personalities who have become the protagonists of cinema works and documentaries, and whose death, although it occurred before the appearance of the Internet, still occupies the first places of web searches, as well as collective spaces, including funeral videos and tribute videos (YouTube), dedicated sites and commemorative pages on social networks, especially Facebook, chosen for its versatility and particular binding factor. These are characters, in short, whose memory has transcended the temporal boundaries of mourning and transfigured itself into commemoration, characters who are not just fashions of the times, but are moral references. They are the new saints of our electric age. The illustrious deceased identified through the methodology and tools of this survey are: Marilyn Monroe (1962), Martin Luther King (1968), Bruce Lee (1973), Elvis Presley (1977), John Lennon (1980), Bob Marley (1981), Ayrton Senna (1994), Princess Diana (1997). And one cannot fail to notice immediately that these are celebrities who are known to have died at a young age and in a tragic and violent manner, in a total period between 1962 and 1997. Starting from this first, evident and tragic awareness, which already provides a reading perspective with which to go into the rest of the research, the qualitative survey phase focuses on a content analysis. The conceptual light that guides this observation is, as anticipated, the instrument of the idealtype. This analysis is developed among the comments to some of the funeral or tribute videos on YouTube, those with the most views and comments to be precise. The comments are considered, in fact, the most direct expression of the celebration of the illustrious dead by Net users. The content analysis was performed by creating, with the Comment Picker software, documents containing all the comments, one document for each video chosen. These documents were then analysed with the NVivo software. An overall Word Frequency, on all the documents of all the deceased, an individual Word Frequency, one for each deceased, and an analysis by Codes have been carried out. The Codes are obtained by identifying, among all the comments, the recurrent thematic nodes constructed through the categories of the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death: funeral mourning, made up of ritual words and gestures expressing emotions and feelings as well as words of praise addressed to the deceased, presence of at least one natural element indicative of regeneration/rebirth and circularity of time (water/fire/flowers), death mask, funeral outfit, funeral banquet (or convivial moment). Overall, it can be observed that both the outcomes of the Word Frequencies and the analysis for Codes confirm a close similarity between the collective ritual relationship with death on the Net and the categories of the idealtype. What emerges, undoubtedly, is the fact that there is a script, a funeral lament made up of the verbal expression of emotions, words of praise and ritual gestures represented according to the typical language of the Web (emoticons). A circular vision of time certainly dominates, a pagan vision, expressed as much in words as in visual signs, a vision that makes the illustrious dead into immortal heroes. What emerges, above all, is a religious bond that gives the group the feeling of sharing a common destiny and, in some way, of continuous rebirth. The group relocates the dead and reconstitutes its order, its balance, continuously. Given the necessary differences, the substantial closeness that has emerged between the results of the surveys carried out in the Network and the categories of the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death makes it possible to confirm, once again and in spite of modernity, that the essence and the purposes of the collective relationship with death conserve, in the course of the succession of imaginaries, a constant structural nucleus. That is to say, the objective of the collective relationship with death always remains the order and survival of the group, its cohesion. Even entering the meanderings of modern ritual islands, the structural core remains the same. And again, the very fact that, even in the territories of the Net, a ceremonial space intended for mourning is evidently being reconfigured, a place, that is, in which to share emotions, memories, references to an us, is evidence of the universal need to be part of a group that survives. Even today, we need to bring order to the tragic event of death, to the crisis of collective presence generated by it. There is a need to feel part of a common destiny, to unite through codified ritual funeral practices that, as fixed points, restore the feeling of making a highly thorny issue peaceful. The structural core of the relationship with death remains, therefore, the emotional sharing of the group, the participation in a collective mourning expressed through ritual practices. What clearly emerges from the empirical analysis is, therefore, how coparticipation, cum-being (Bovalino, 2018) and the collective practice of the relationship with death are the necessary apriori to the construction of any possible collective narrative. Herein lies, in fact, the defect of modernity. No collective representation can touch the viscera if it remains in conceptual isolation and lacks the emotional effervescence of a ritual form that expresses it. The modern individual, orphaned of the collective ritual, of the common space destined for mourning, has in fact seen his condition of fragility exacerbated before the darkest event of his nature and existence. He was deprived, that is, of the cultural death, of the second death, he remained a living corpse, without a defined destination (De Martino, 1958). No scientific explanation could take root in him, touch his innards and solve his dilemma. That is, until the possibility of a new ceremonial place for mourning appeared before his eyes, which happened the day the Internet entered our homes. From this moment onwards, modern man gradually approaches the practices of the relationship with death, but instead of a cave or a church, he has the Net. Thanks to the comparison with the idealtype, to the theoretical framework constructed in the first two parts and thanks to the biographies of the characters and everything that emerges from the documents dedicated to them, such as films and documentaries, going to observe, all of this, in depth, we can, therefore, outline the results of this investigation. In the next pages, in the section dedicated to the results, the answers to the questions of this research can thus be addressed. 2.3 Limitations of existing literature Before proceeding with the research, it was decided to verify the existence, in the field of the sociology of the imaginary and mediology, of a literature focused on the empirical analysis of the new forms of collective funeral rituals practised within the territories of the Net and seen as the expression of a new global religious form. Through the Dimensions database and the bibliometric maps obtained thanks to the VOSviewer software, it was found that, to date, no sufficiently in-depth literature has emerged in this regard. That is to say, according to the parameters of this research, no substantial literature has emerged that has focused empirically on the observation of collective, global funeral rituals practised on the Net, in order to interpret them as tangible expressions of a new global religious bond. Nor is there any literature in this sense that has focused, again empirically, on tracing the new saints of our era. If, in the construction of the theoretical framework, reference could be made to an extraordinary sociological literature on the relationship between man and death, in particular that of Georg Simmel, as well as to contemporary philosophical studies on the socialisation of mourning, there has not been an equally substantial sociological production, on the other hand, that deals in detail, on an empirical level, with the collective ritual relationship with death on the Net. Certainly there are important reflections on the relationship between man, death and the digital. Just as one cannot overlook those reflections, such as those of Michel Maffesoli (1988), on the rebirth of social structures and forms of rituality that bring us closer to those of the tribes of the past, of the ancient world, to use the parameters of this research. There is also an important and in-depth literature that addresses the issue of emotions in global society. Consider, for instance, the work of the Korean Byung-Chul Han (2021a/b) or that of the Italian Vincenzo Susca, in particular his Gioia tragica (2010). All of these reflections have been very useful for the conduct of the research and the understanding of its results, but no literature has been found that specifically takes the same empirical approach as this work and has the same objectives. The few studies that have emerged as most resonant with the object of this research, in the field of sociology, are those of the Italian Gianpiero Vincenzo, to whom is owed the work L'ordine rituale e la società digitale. Saggio sulla natura umana (2021), and those linked to the name of Bjørn Nansen, of the University of Melbourne, to whom are owed several publications in this direction. 2.4 Methododolgy In the first two parts of the research, the theoretical frame of reference was constructed using the existing literature. The third and last part, on the other hand, was devoted to the empirical investigation, developed with a mixed approach, within the territories of the Net. In more detail, two types of survey were carried out, a quantitative and a qualitative one. Finally, in order to answer the research questions, a depth analysis was carried out focusing on the results of the qualitative observation. The quantitative analysis, conducted with the tools provided by the Net itself, in particular Google and Google Trends, made it possible to identify some of the illustrious dead celebrated by the global infosphere community. The first names of the illustrious dead were identified by means of four variables: a) a famous funeral; b) global presence of the deceased's death in Net searches; c) continuous interest, until today, in his death, ever in Net searches; d) a consistent and continuous production of documents dedicated to him, including social pages, official sites, cinematographic works, documentaries and scientific articles. Other names were obtained, however, by retaining variables b, c, d and substituting, instead, the first, variable a. That is to say, it was also searched among the personalities who, although considered, from documents available on the Net, as the most influential of the 20th century, had not been celebrated with a majestic funeral, for reasons that tended to be related to their personal histories. Identified the illustrious deceased in the infosphere, the next step was the qualitative observation, developed into a content analysis. The funeral or tribute videos with the most views and comments were selected. With the Comment Picker software, documents were created containing all the comments of the selected videos. The documents were then analysed with the NVivo software. An overall Word Frequency, on all the documents of all the illustrious deceased, a single Word Frequency, one for each illustrious deceased, and an analysis by Codes were carried out. The latter was developed by identifying, among all the comments, recurrent thematic nodes, nodes that were defined through the categories of the idealtype constructed in the second part. The results of the comparison with the idealtype were interpreted and returned with the subsequent depth analysis, based on the mythodology of Gilbert Durand (1996). 2.5 Results Going into the details of the questions in this research, one can say that the answer is yes, the infosphere has its illustrious dead. There are deaths, as in the case of the eight personalities surveyed, that bind the global population of the Net around them, with a constant and still current interest over time. So much so that their celebration has extended to the present day. A veritable form of commemoration, a cult, has been generated. Like the sorcerers, the mythological characters of the ancient world, the saints of religious institutions (especially those from the dawn of time, such as Christ), the illustrious deceased of the infosphere are extraordinary and magical figures, characters who, in life, stood out for the enchantment they exercised over the community and who, precisely because of this enchantment, remain a reference even after their death. They are references so powerful that they survive even the ritual crisis of modernity. Which means that the death of these characters, as soon as the occasion (the Internet) arrived, broke through the barrier of symbolic and ritual silence of modernity, propagating itself to the infosphere. In this sense, one can raise the stakes and see, in the deaths of the illustrious dead, precisely one of the circumstances that favoured the ritual turning point under investigation. The sudden and tragic deaths of such popular figures can be included, that is, in that sphere of traumatic events, including the attack on the Twin Towers, which shook global collectivity precisely at the apex of that silence in the symbolic and ritual exchange with death found in the modern era. Where by apex is meant the moment that comes a moment before crisis and, therefore, change. They are deaths, theirs, that have contributed, emotionally, to pull the community out of its modern sense of slumber. They triggered the need to reconstruct a common space in which to practice collective mourning. These traumatic events can thus be considered a crucial part of the climax of the hero's journey, of that moment of transformation of the protagonist's relationship with death, which has been discussed throughout this research. Which could mean, consequently, that it was precisely because this emotional need was ripe, that the advent of the Internet provided the technical, mediological, perceptive opportunity for the reconstruction of collective grief. As if to say that the tragic and sudden death of these characters, like Charon, made us embark on an ark moored on the shore of late modernity, an ark that then, propelled by the currents of the new media, transported us to the shore of the electric age. The second, fundamental answer emerges from all this, which highlights a crucial crux for this investigation: in the electric age, a new ceremonial space is being reconfigured in which it is possible to celebrate, collectively, the death of the illustrious deceased. This space is not hierarchically constructed and is not based on institutional dogmas. The religious collective-connective space is not reconfiguring itself as a tangible expression of a grand and structured narrative that follows a superior order and imposes rules drawn from above, as has been the case with recent religious institutions. Nor is it basing itself, in the same way, on scientific explanations, on the logics of rationality, which, as we have seen, are ill-suited to the ritual necessities linked to the most unconscious issue of the social imaginary: death. The global collectivity of the infosphere would seem to need neither empirical evidence nor scientific explanations, nor even great transcendental gods to govern us from high above and show us the way. It needs, rather, emotionally catalysing characters. It needs emotional experiences, those emotions, as described by Heidegger (1927), which are the only ones that can restore our perception of the world and existence. The collective-connective space thus takes on the shape of a profoundly human, uncertain, fragile environment, a space of research, which resembles more the tombs of prehistory, the first pagan ceremonial places where our ancestors left marks on the cave walls, marks that have become, little by little, more and more sophisticated. It is the emerging fruit of emotional sharing and collective participation, the fruit of an effervescence, of an electricity that circulates globally. It is a space of solidarity, of group, of closeness. The Net thus becomes the new pagan cavern in which to lay our dead, but not to get rid of them, not to keep them out of sight, not so that they can, again, undertake a distant journey, but, rather, so that they remain circulating in the group and so that we can continue to communicate with them, on a daily basis. In this sense, the reconfiguring imagery of death brings us closer to the moment when the hero was called to adventure and, instinctively, we saw in death only a change in communication. It would seem that we, inhabitants of the infosphere, are also looking at death as a change in communication, perceiving ourselves within a connective system with no spatio-temporal boundaries or bodily limits, an environment in which the dead and the living are mixed and the former exert an influence over the latter. All this in the knowledge, however, that if all this is true, it is also true that, compared to the origins of the relationship with death, we have completely changed. We have been changed by our entire, unforgettable, history, by our awareness of all the distance we have come since we discovered the death of the prochain. But, above all, we have been metamorphosed by the techniques we have today, as per McLuhan's lesson (1964). We are not our ancestors, our technical and perceptive possibilities are different, but what emerges is that, like them, we are getting back in touch with the emotional tonality of anguish, as described by Heidegger (1927), abandoning that of fear, typical of the modern era. We are slowly trying to stop escaping our relationship with death and, in order to do so, we are not aspiring to an explanation and a solution to it, but are recovering, first and foremost, the emotional reassurance of the group, the collective bond with which we relate to death and, from there, to life. These are the knots that bring us closer to our ancestors in the ancient world. After the hero's journey, according to the structure proposed by Vogler (1992), we return to the starting point, to the ordinary world, to that moment when we discovered the death of the prochain. We do so, however, armed with different, perhaps more sophisticated tools. Certainly, we have changed inwardly. Now, given these results, it is possible to move gradually towards the heart of the current reflection: what is it that makes us cling, globally, to one another? Around what is the religious enchantment of the electric age recreated? What are the mechanisms that are triggered and allow the group to unite around the source of its deepest anxieties? All the more so when one considers that one is dealing, in the case of the electric age, with a community of global dimensions. To bond such a large group, the desire to share is not enough, the decision to adhere to a narrative and set up a common ceremonial space is not enough. A cold decision is not enough, it is not enough to provide a collective explanation for death and consequently establish ritual practices that tangibly represent it. So why are there binding factors and others that are not? Why are there factors that generate, in the face of death, a collective effervescence and others that do not? Why is it that only the death of certain characters becomes a source of religious bonding? What has become evident from the interweaving of depth between the results of the comparison with the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death and the biographies of the illustrious dead, is that the mechanism that seems to be triggered in the global collectivity is the one that underlies the structure of the myth investigated by Joseph Campbell (1949) and that is expressed in the arc of transformation of the character drawn by Christopher Vogler (1992). What has become evident from the interweaving of the depths between the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death, the content analysis and the biographies of the illustrious dead, is that the mechanism that seems to be triggered in the global collectivity is the one that underlies the construction of myth and fairy tales, that is, precisely the one that is expressed in the arc of transformation of the character drawn by Christopher Vogler (1992). Evidently, to bind the collectivity around a myth, there must be a hero who begins his story with a fatal flow, a lack, an incompleteness, more or less explicit and more or less serious, of which he is not even aware and which he only faces when he receives the call to adventure, when he is confronted with the need to change. When he accepts the call, the hero begins his journey into an extraordinary world, different from the one he started out in, a world studded with trials, which leads him to the peak of his possibilities, to a true moment of grace, only to plunge from there towards the breaking point. The hero must, in fact, know his symbolic death, in the sense that he must know and practise self-sacrifice in favour of an inner change. Because it is this inner change from the conditions of departure that becomes a model for all those who will know this story, that becomes the element thanks to which the spectators will empathise with the hero. The stories of the illustrious deceased seem to respect precisely this mechanism: that which touches the bowels of the community, to the point of giving rise to a deep religious bond, has to do with the structure of myth. The stories of characters who have become illustrious deceased respond to the structure of the myth and the character's arc of transformation, the hero's journey. Even without the hand of a scriptwriter, their stories are already myth. We are in the sphere of the archetypes of the nocturnal regime of the imaginary, we are in front of those fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm that shape the archetypes and the most unconscious currents of the social imaginary. There is no rational explanation, there is an extraordinary, legendary story, which, at the same time, is profoundly human, tragically bleeding and exemplary. The illustrious deceased is a martyred body that transcends its limits and makes the man a hero, a reference and a model for the community. The illustrious deceased is the elixir of global society, an 'elixir of some kind that can restore society' (Campbell, 1949). There can be no deity, today, who is not, as in the ancient world, a special ancestor, i.e. who does not, first and foremost, have a human body, a body of flesh and blood, and who, through his sacrifice, has not fostered social and cultural change. The eight illustrious deceased, with the personal vicissitudes that made them tragic heroes, had the power, in the midst of modernity, to regenerate society by touching it in its dormant, disintegrated bowels. They represent the marginalised roles, of which Gilbert Durand speaks, that become factors of upheaval (...), ferments of contestation, the embodiment of mythological resurgences (Durand, 1996) that stand out in the institutionalised order. Their regenerative force has combined with the technical occasion (Internet) and the mixture has become explosive. These celebrities have become the elixir that has refreshed and continues to refresh global society in an immense connective embrace. The illustrious deceased were accelerators of the social, imaginary change that led us from the modern era and its ritual silence to the electric age and the renewed possibility of enchantment. A possibility that sees its realisation in the ceremonial space of the Net. The death of the eight characters, more than anything else, has epidermically resurfaced the shared macro-social and global need for a return to myth, as imprinted in Gilbert Durand's (1996) thought. These tragic heroes have allowed the global collectivity to huddle again in a religion of enchantment, in a ritual system that believes in emotions as much as in immortality, in the cyclical nature of time, in the sharing. And, like a restorative teaching, they have allowed the collective to transfer all this into its everyday life, to find solace in the face of the loss of loved ones and to give meaning to its entire existence. Finally, another particularly interesting result that emerged from the content analysis and on which it is worth dwelling, because it presents itself as indicative of the quality of our electric age's relationship with death, is the role that music would seem to play in the rituality of the Net, a role that goes beyond the presence of melodic elements in the rituals described by Ernesto De Martino (1959). Compared to the idealtype that was constructed, a difference was noted in the role of music. As in the ancient world analysed by De Martino, music, seen as a melodic element, remains a key element of the funeral rite, due to its transcendental force and its ability to insinuate itself into the nocturnal of the human soul. It retains its place. But with one more feature than in the past. Today, the digitisation of music allows a further possibility: the personalisation of the funeral song. Which means that instead of a collective repertoire, limited to a few official songs to be used at funeral rituals, e.g. the liturgical songs of the Catholic Church, we are now witnessing a process in which each deceased person has his or her own song, which becomes the prayer intended for him or her. In the infosphere, the immense, as well as extremely varied, wealth of music available allows for a kind of musical memorialisation. Not only are the illustrious deceased remembered for what they sang or for a song that was publicly dedicated to them, but each of us, thanks to digitisation, reiteration and the massive dissemination of music, has his or her own song, the one that, when heard, will make people think of us, the one that will be played or sung to pray for us, to commemorate us, to celebrate us. It is thus that, in the era that we know from the flood of images in excess, which now flow indiscriminately in front of us, the death mask, understood as a visual image, somehow loses strength and, where necessary, where, that is, one wants to leave a mark, it is supplanted, instead, by melodies. More than the images that are innumerable, one may therefore come to note that the true icon of the infosphere, the imago of the dead of our era, our death mask, would seem to be encapsulated in the piece of music. The sacred image dematerialises. Which means, that as images flow by losing, somehow, their representativeness, as we experience an invasion (...), an inflation of the image (Durand, 1996), the death mask seems to be shaped, today, by music. 2.6 Contributions to existing literature It is believed that the value of this work, in addition to its results, lies in its ability to have elaborated a methodology useful for the observation of an extremely complex theme such as that of the relationship with death within an environment as complex as that of the Net. Not to mention the important difficulty of understanding an epochal passage that is contemporary to the writer. Which means that this study is fully in line with the suggestions and reflections taking place in the sociological sphere with respect to the digital, its human and social implications, but, what we have tried to do in addition, in order to contribute to the advancement of knowledge, has been to make use of empirical tools modelled on the basis of the research questions. This methodology does not claim to be exhaustive, but it is believed that thanks to it, it has been possible to give an empirical foundation to the suggestions and reflections that permeate the contemporary scientific debate. 2.7 Conclusions Granting a final reflection on our era and our life, it is believed that, reversing our gaze for a moment and interpreting the thought of Émile Durkheim (1912), the presence of a resurgent religious connective form, of an electric re-enchantment, represents, first and foremost, a confirmation of the very existence of the infosphere. Religious connection, in Durkheim's thought, is the basis of social existence. Which means that if there is an infosphere, if it may be understood as an ecosystem, as a global social environment, it is also because, in addition to lifestyles, we share the same deaths. The presence of illustrious deceased celebrated globally on the Net, in short, confirms that it is now necessary to think in global terms of onlife, of infosphere, of connective imaginary. The Net is, as Alberto Abruzzese thought, to which reference has already been made, the life that we are, it is a dimension of existence in continuous contamination and exchange with the physical one. Given this assumption, what emerged clearly from the analysis devoted to the illustrious deceased of the infosphere, is that global society once again claims the need for myth, the need to elevate itself and give cosmological meaning to existence through empathy generated by symbolic figures, human archetypes, heroes, immortal models of extraordinariness. It is around them that the global collectivity clings profoundly. Yet the Net often ends up in the eye of the crosshairs, so much so that it has prompted illustrious authors, such as the Korean philosopher Byung-chul Han, to speak of a society without pain and the end of rituals. The question then arises: what lies hidden in the nocturnal river of that leisure and pleasure? We know that any epochal change of imagery always takes place in a way that is not entirely linear and peaceful. In this sense, global society actually seems to be experiencing a phase of dramatic transition. We are back to claiming the emotional relationship with death in the territories of the Net. Of this there seems to be no doubt. But this need for relationship and religion must clash, again, with the indelible traces of modernity. The emotion, the anguish, to use Heidegger (1927) again, for which global society is ready and which it already experiences in the territories of the Net, clashes with a strongly modern social system, with a science, for example, which still tries to shift its attention to artificial intelligences, as if this were man's existential problem. If emotion is ready, dying, falling ill, growing old, touching a corpse, bureaucratically and legally, are still a shame. Emotion and body find themselves separated, to the point that the much violence taking place seems to bring the one committing it back into unexpected contact with wounds and a dying body, almost as if he had not foreseen it. Because, in fact, death has been forgotten in him since time immemorial. It should be possible to return the body to its original dimension, to light a beacon on this dilemma, because one can see a great bewilderment: the body had almost been freed from its limits, thanks to the new media, but it is these that bring death back to dominate the social imaginary. The confusion is enormous. We find ourselves in a phase, certainly, in which our second nature, the artificial one, has evolved so much that it hardly needs the body any more. But this only emphasises more strongly the ambiguity: we still have a body. And it dies. This is an undeniable fact. As we have long seen. While our electric age lets us navigate, free, completely, while it makes us believe that we do not need the body, while it, in a certain sense, loses mass, in fact, although metamorphosed, it weighs, incredibly. The dilemma is enormous. And it bleeds. The ambiguity is profound, so much so that while on the one hand we comment with likes and smiley faces, on the other we go so far as to sucide online, almost unaware of the physical implication of such an act. What seems to be missing is balance, a deep understanding of what treatment we owe, in the age of the simulacrum, to this martyred body. The narrative is, at present, confused, as in any epochal transition. One should better reflect on this, in order to grasp in which direction the progress of the human spirit and social, global evolution is going. As the artificial human world advances, it will always drag with it, without being able to get rid of it, the dilemma of a dying body. The point is to try to understand how all this fits in with the electric age, the age of dematerialisation par excellence. 2.8 Limitations and directions for future research Dealing with an anthropological question that underlies the very essence of mankind, the relationship with death, and moving in an ecosystem, that of the Net, which lacks boundaries and is difficult to tame, it is believed that this investigation has, with its own tools, penetrated only some of the possible meanderings. There are countless potential implications and reflections. In spite of this, it is believed that significant results have been achieved that are faithful to the electric age, results that open the scenario to a possible new research that would represent the development of this one: what will become of the bodies of the deceased? What has been noticed is that collective commemoration has now lost, almost completely, its ties with physical presence. On the Net there are plenty of videos of visits to the graves of the illustrious deceased, shot, for the most part, by lonely souls wandering around in semi-empty spaces. It seems that the initiatives of occasional reporters sharing tributes, trips to the graves, etc. are now sufficient. And here we come to a crucial question: what about the funeral? Will the funeral also be the same one day? So far, it still seems to maintain a connection with physical space, as the need for the body to be laid to rest remains firm. One thinks of the hours-long queues the faithful have endured for a final farewell to the body of Queen Elizabeth. It seems legitimate to ask, however, whether it is not possible that the evolution of infosphere funerary practices will lead us to the loss of this last connection with physical space as well. One wonders, that is, what will happen if, along with the growth in the numbers of web-based memorials, the practices of cremation and scattering of ashes or those burial goals on which science is working, such as the Capsule Mundi, continue to grow. Should cemeteries and physical spaces of deposition lose the reason for their very existence, while the Internet continues to take space in global everyday existence, is it possible that the funeral will also lose its connection to the body and its deposition? Will cemeteries still exist? Will funerals still exist? Or will there simply be someone who will be instructed and paid to take care, in complete solitude, of our bodies, putting them back into the circle of nature, while, in the meantime, the community of loved ones, oblivious of our bodies, will be celebrating us on the Net? Maybe a single reporter filming the event will suffice, while the ceremony takes place online or who knows where? Or will we even get to the point that the end of the body will no longer interest us, because man will no longer be his body, but the whole map of himself that he will have built on the Internet? Is this the direction he is going? To answer we will need to update again in a few years.
1. Introduzione In questa indagine, che si fonda sull’idea che la relazione con la morte sia il frutto di una necessità antropologica e che occupi un posto determinante nell’immaginario sociale, la fine è osservata nel suo rapporto indissolubile e dicotomico con la vita e le sue manifestazioni. L’arte, il senso stesso della comunità, il rito, tutte le pratiche che possono essere riconosciute come i segni dello spettacolo della vita e della bellezza umana, nonché come le tracce grazie alle quali ricostruire il racconto delle evoluzioni della civiltà, hanno tratto origine, innanzitutto, da questa condizione comune. Sono la bellezza e la spettacolarità del viaggio collettivo, dunque, che si vuole osservare. Si osserva la morte, per osservare la vita. È per questo che si prega il lettore di abbandonare, così come ha fatto la scrivente, il sentimento che lega l’immagine della morte a dolori e memorie personali e di guardare ad essa, invece, come fonte, se pur straziante, di bellezza. 2. Summary 2.1 Introduzione L’oggetto di studio intorno a cui si muove questa ricerca è come il rapporto con la morte possa essere considerato un requisito umano antropologico, ossia con caratteristiche permanenti, archetipiche, che si manifesta in forme culturali. Tali forme viaggiano, cioè, nello spirito e nella direzione dell’immaginario dominante e, in quanto tali, ci raccontano di esso. Ma non solo. La qualità del rapporto che la collettività intrattiene con la morte è ritenuta determinante rispetto alla configurazione stessa della natura immaginaria dell’esistenza sociale. Sposando a pieno il pensiero di uno degli autorevoli padri fondatori della sociologia, il tedesco Georg Simmel, si assume che, poiché “il morire è posto con la sua natura stessa” (Simmel, 1918), l’uomo riceve dalla morte la forma della sua vita. Vita sociale e rapporto con la morte sono considerate le due facce decisive della stessa medaglia collettiva e ognuna racconta dell’altra, in un rapporto di assoluta complementarietà. Si ritiene, per tutto questo, che, finché avremo un corpo che muore, il rapporto con la morte non potrà essere risolto e necessiterà sempre di cornici di narrazione che diano senso all’esistenza. A partire da qui, questa ricerca vuole riflettere, innanzitutto, su come la modernità non abbia, di fatto, distrutto la necessità del rapporto con la morte. Prendendo in prestito la visione illustre del sociologo francese Jean Baudrillard (1976), una delle caratteristiche della modernità consiste, infatti, nell’aver bandito la morte dalla circolazione simbolica del gruppo. A livello macro sociale, essa diventa un tabù, qualcosa di cui non si deve parlare, un incidente che interrompe il progresso dell’esistenza. Rispetto al mondo antico (De Martino, 1958), nella modernità, cambia il valore che il soggetto, tanto individuale quanto collettivo, assegna alla morte e lo spazio che essa occupa nelle sue rappresentazioni. La morte, a livello macro sociale, scompare. Almeno dai luoghi fisici e simbolici che ad essa erano consacrati. Le ritualità collettive stesse vengono bandite dalla vita sociale. Si precipita, così, in quel disincantamento del mondo, ampiamente osservato da Max Weber (1919), che priva la collettività di una narrazione cosmologica che dia senso, in maniera convincente, alla morte e fornisca, così, quell’incanto necessario ad affrontare tutta l’esistenza. Ciò su cui si vuole riflettere è come tale disincantamento non significhi, però, la fine della necessità del rapporto sociale con la morte, del bisogno, cioè, del conforto di una rappresentazione condivisa a livello collettivo e che tocchi le viscere. La vita sociale moderna non ha smesso di essere condizionata dalla presenza dilemmatica della fine. Il punto è che, ricorrendo al pensiero illustre di Martin Heidegger (1927), grande riferimento di questa indagine, la paura ha rappresentato la tonalità emotiva che ha permeato la modernità. Di conseguenza, l’allontanamento simbolico e l’isolamento rituale rappresentano le forme che il rapporto con la morte ha assunto nella modernità, ma non la sua risoluzione. A partire da queste considerazioni, il fenomeno che si intende analizzare nel dettaglio, empiricamente, è come oggi, nell’era elettrica (McLuhan, 1964), il rapporto con la morte titrovi tanto il suo posto nello scambio simbolico del gruppo quanto il suo spazio rituale. Il tutto nei macro territori della Rete. Sembra che si stia riconfigurando, cioè, una nuova forma religiosa che lega la società globale nei meandri della Rete, un re-incanto immaginario globale, che viene definito da questa indagine re-incanto elettrico, proprio perché riferito all’era che sulla forza immateriale dell’elettricità ha costruito la sua identità. Si precisa, a tal proposito, che il significato della parola religione, assunto come strutturale in questa indagine, è indipendente dai grandi sistemi religiosi tradizionali, monoteistici. Si riferisce, invece, alla sociologia di Émile Durkheim (1912), alla derivazione latina di religo-religere (lat. legare, tenere insieme) e, dunque, alla contagiosità di una forza umana spontanea, di un sentimento comune fatto di energia, che lega gli esseri umani. Si tratta di una forza che nasce dall’effervescenza, da una “sovra-attività [che] ha per effetto una stimolazione generale delle coscienze individuali… È dunque in questi ambienti sociali effervescenti e da questa stessa effervescenza che sembra essere nata l’idea religiosa” (Durkheim, 1912). L’osservazione di questo fenomeno religioso globale, ritenuto cruciale rispetto alla comprensione stessa dell’immaginario contemporaneo e la cui analisi trova sostegno negli studi della Digital Death e della filosofia contemporanea, rappresenta l’oggetto di studio della parte empirica della ricerca. Al fine dell’elaborazione di questa analisi, è, preventivamente, costruito il quadro teorico di tutta l’indagine. 2.2 Obiettivi e domande di ricerca Dato l’oggetto di studio introdotto, l’obiettivo specifico di questa indagine è quello di osservare le ritualità funerarie collettive praticate in Rete e destinate alla celebrazione e commemorazione di alcuni defunti illustri dell’infosfera (Floridi, 2017), ossia dell’ambiente globale generato dalla contaminazione continua, e ormai inevitabile, tra la dimensione dei dispositivi digitali e la dimensioni della realtà fisica. Si ritiene che tali pratiche rappresentino l’espressione tangibile della rinascente forma religiosa globale. Da qui, si cercherà di comprendere il nuovo immaginario della morte, la qualità del re-incanto immaginario (Durand, 1996). Si cercherà di capire intorno a cosa esso si genera, cosa lo anima, quali sono i suoi principi strutturanti, al fine di meglio comprendere, in generale, il nostro mondo, il nostro immaginario sociale. A tal fine, dopo la costruzione del quadro teorico, nella terza parte verranno individuati alcuni di quei defunti illustri la cui morte ha destato un interesse di livello globale, costante nel tempo e ancora attuale. Si cercherà di capire, cioè, se esistono i nuovi santi dell’era elettrica, i riferimenti morali della forma religiosa globale che va costruendosi nei territori della Rete. Individuare l’esistenza di defunti illustri dell’infosfera e comprendere le forme collettive della loro celebrazione, è ritenuto cruciale se si considera che i reperti funebri che hanno consentito lo studio degli immaginari della morte del passato, e, da qui, la comprensione delle civiltà stesse, sono soprattutto quelli legati agli antenati illustri, ai capi religiosi, ai santi e via dicendo. La comprensione delle civiltà del passato è stata resa possibile, cioè, soprattutto grazie all’esistenza di personaggi a cui, a livello macro sociale, è stata destinata una particolare cura e un’attenzione collettiva, durante i funerali e durante i momenti di commemorazione. Sono loro i punti cardine del legame religioso, senza di loro non si potrebbe neanche parlare di religione. Allo stesso modo, tali dovrebbero essere i defunti illustri della nostra era: i cardini del legame religioso globale. L’analisi delle forme rituali collettive destinate alla morte di questi personaggi di fama globale, che restano ancora oggi un riferimento morale, può far emergere, in generale, gli elementi caratteristici della qualità dell’immaginario globale della morte dell’era elettrica, nonché del tipo di civiltà ora in vita. E quindi: la società globale ha i suoi defunti illustri? E se sì, qual è il nuovo spazio cerimoniale? Qual è il nuovo immaginario della morte? E come si riconfigura il reincanto dell’infosfera? Cosa consente ad una società estesa come quella globale di stringersi in un legame religioso? E cosa ci racconta tutto questo della natura stessa della società globale? Queste le domande che muovono la ricerca. Entrando nello specifico, l’indagine si divide in tre parti. Nella prima parte, destinata alla costruzione del quadro teorico, viene innanzitutto definita la prospettiva dell’indagine, ossia quella della sociologia dell’immaginario. Per meglio comprendere le principali definizioni di immaginario che la sociologia ha ereditato dalle menti dell’antropologo francese Gilbert Durand (1960) e del filosofo canadese Charles Taylor (2003), si parte, preventivamente, dai risultati raggiunti dall’antropologia filosofica di Max Scheler (1928), Arnold Gehlen (1940) ed Helmuth Plessner (1928). Sintetizzando il pensiero dei tre studiosi, si può affermare che, in generale, nell’ottica dell’antropologia filosofica, l’uomo si distingue dagli altri esseri viventi per la sua capacità di trascendere sé stesso, di emanciparsi dal mondo naturale e di creare l’ambiente artificiale più adatto a lui. Lo fa attraverso la ragione e l’intelligenza creatrice, con cui produce continuamente le tecniche che gli sono necessarie, e lo fa senza mai trovare pace, senza mai poter raggiungere la soddisfazione definitiva, il luogo utopico completamente adatto a lui. Lo fa, fondamentalmente, grazie ad una dote umana cruciale: l’immaginazione. Essa rappresenta quella capacità peculiare e fondante dell’uomo, che permette tutto ciò che è stato osservato dall’antropologia filosofica. Il che significa che, interpretando i risultati dell’antropologia filosofica, parlare di ragione o di intelligenze significa, sostanzialmente, parlare di immaginazione. Etimologicamente, in latino, imago è figura, ma anche ombra, fantasma, spettro, rappresentazione, idea, come ben definito dal sociologo italiano Pier Luca Marzo (2022). In sostanza, bisogna guardare all’immaginazione come peculiarità umana e come motore dell’azione, della creazione. Gran parte di quello che noi siamo e facciamo è frutto dell’immagine, della rappresentazione che costruiamo preventivamente nella nostra mente. È, dunque, proprio qui, nell’aver colto la capacità peculiare dell’uomo di creare, continuamente, una natura a lui adatta, che l’antropologia filosofica ha fornito le basi concettuali utili alla prospettiva della sociologia dell’immaginario: poiché l’uomo possiede questa dote, inevitabilmente esiste anche un’immaginazione collettiva che alimenta una comune visione del mondo e che, da qui, determina la costruzione di un ambiente artificiale sociale e delle relative azioni e pratiche. Senza la visione della società come ambiente artificiale costruito collettivamente, grazie all’immaginazione e attraverso la tecnica, non si potrebbe parlare di immaginario. Partendo da questi solidi presupposti forniti dall’antropologia filosofica, in merito alla definizione di immaginario esistono fondamentalmente due linee generali di pensiero. La prima si può far risalire al filosofo canadese Charles Taylor (2003), che definisce l’immaginario sociale come l’insieme di ideologie, conoscenze e sapere, di immagini condivise che danno vita alle pratiche sociali. L’immaginario sociale è, cioè, una forma di sapere tacito, implicito, condiviso collettivamente e che riguarda competenze e intenzioni reciproche. Esso rende possibile collocarsi nella società e prevedere e sapere cosa aspettarsi dall’altro. La seconda linea di pensiero si dipana, invece, a partire dalla complessa analisi socio antropologica del francese Gilbert Durand (1960), per il quale le credenze condivise, le ideologie e le forme di sapere, nel loro mutare, si reggono sempre e comunque su substrati profondi, inconsci ed arcaici, che restano fissi: gli archetipi. Questi sono i principi strutturanti del reale che mutano nelle loro vesti storiche, ma non nella loro essenza. Sono essi ad ispirare le “immagini fondamentali della mitologia, dei riti e delle visioni”, scrive il saggista e storico delle religioni Joseph Campbell (1949). Con Durand, entriamo nella sfera delle immagini primordiali e delle forze vitali presenti nell’inconscio collettivo, entriamo nella mitodologia, da lui stesso così definita, ossia in quella prospettiva particolare, che questa indagine sposa a pieno, che intende penetrare l’immaginario sociale al fine di rintracciarne i principi strutturanti. La mitodologia punta a riconoscere, cioè, la matrice archetipica dell’immaginario sociale per meglio comprenderne i mutamenti. Durand definisce il mito, infatti, come la struttura profonda (cfr. Durand, 1996). L’immaginario è, dunque, una costellazione d’immagini, così lo definisce ancora Durand (1960), che nel loro insieme coerente e dinamico costituiscono il substrato della vita mentale, della vita interiore. A Durand si deve, inoltre, la distinzione tra il regime diurno, il fiume in cui scorrono tutti i simboli che hanno a che fare con l’autoaffermazione e la comprensione chiara e razionale del mondo, e il regime notturno dove, invece, scorrono tutti i simboli che riguardano l’interiorità, quei simboli, in particolare, con cui “gli uomini rispondono all’angoscia della decomposizione della morte, indotta dall’imprevedibilità dei volti cangianti del tempo, in una visione olistica e ciclica del mondo” (Marzo, 2022). È nel regime notturno, dunque, che scorrono i simboli relativi al rapporto con la morte. Inteso, grazie a Durand, il legame profondo che annoda la questione della morte alle correnti notturne dell’immaginario sociale, il rapporto con la morte viene quindi definito, da questa indagine, come un fatto sociale totale (Mauss, 1925). Il rapporto con la morte è, cioè, un fatto denso di “regole di azione riconoscibili in base a certi caratteri distintivi” (Durkheim, 1934), che ha una funzione legante e non utilitaristica, che coinvolge tutti e che permea più dimensioni e istituzioni sociali. Un fatto che, per tutto questo, rappresenta una espressione non solo tangibile, ma particolarmente densa, dell’immaginario sociale. Esso appartiene all’uomo, in maniera indissolubile, da sempre, dal momento in cui egli è migrato dalla condizione di animale umano a quella di essere umano, un essere, cioè, immaginario, simbolico, tecnico e sociale. Il che significa, necessariamente, che il rapporto con la morte si complica sempre più, man mano che l’evoluzione sociale si complessifica. A tal proposito, questa ricerca riconosce le principali evoluzioni dell’immaginario della morte in connessione, soprattutto, ai macro mutamenti che si sono verificati a livello di occupazione dello spazio sociale e in merito alla percezione collettiva del tempo. Spazio e tempo sono, d’altronde, due variabili che da sempre incidono sul rapporto con la morte e sul senso dell’esistenza più significativamente di altro. Mentre ci siamo estesi dalla piccola comunità delle tribù fino alle città-stato e via a seguire, non solo lo spazio occupato si è allargato e densificato, ma anche la dimensione temporale, parallelamente, ha mutato la sua forma. Il tempo circolare si è trasfigurato gradualmente in una linearità fatta di attimi unici e irripetibili, producendo non pochi stravolgimenti nel senso attribuito al rapporto con la morte. Questo ha richiesto continui aggiornamenti, il susseguirsi incessante di nuove cornici, socialmente condivise, di narrazioni e di pratiche collettive. L’idea che il rapporto con la morte sia un fatto sociale totale assume ancora più validità se si pensa che le tracce funebri rinvenute nel corso del tempo sono quelle che hanno fornito all’archeologia gli elementi utili per la ricostruzione della storia delle civiltà. È ben noto che i primi reperti della vita umana sono giunti a noi dalle tombe. Ed è altrettanto noto come oggi sia ancora così, come l’archeologia continui, cioè, a rinvenire siti funerari che alimentano le ricostruzioni in merito all’evoluzione della vita umana. Le prime tracce ed evidenze umane che sono state ritrovate, e continuano ad essere scoperte, sono le immagini delle deposizioni funerarie e dei relativi riti, così come le prime edificazioni riemerse sono quelle sepolcrali. Il che significa che la vita è stata, e continua ad essere, raccontata dalle tombe. Segue, quindi, una ricognizione sui mutamenti delle pratiche del rapporto con la morte (tombe e riti) nel corso dell’avvicendarsi degli immaginari sociali, al fine di verificare come tale rapporto possa essere effettivamente considerato antropologico, se pur culturale nelle sue evoluzioni e manifestazioni. La ricognizione evidenzia, così, come da un lato ci sia un legame di scambio reciproco e continuo tra l’evoluzione sociale e i cambiamenti nel rapporto con la morte e dall’altro esistano certi elementi ricorsivi, permanenti, che prescindono dalle manifestazioni culturali. Grazie all’importante sostegno dell’opera del filosofo Jacques Choron (1971), la ricognizione sulle evoluzioni di tombe e riti parte dagli stadi primitivi e si conclude con l’avvento del Cristianesimo, andandosi a concentrare, man mano, sulla dimensione occidentale. Per definire le tappe della ricognizione sugli immaginari della morte, oltre alle ancore fornite dalle evoluzioni dei concetti di spazio e tempo, si è ritenuto utile prendere in prestito la struttura in tre atti del viaggio dell’eroe, proposta dallo sceneggiatore statunitense Christopher Vogler (1992). Tale struttura, ad uso della scrittura creativa, in particolare delle sceneggiature dei film, definisce l’arco di trasformazione del protagonista di una storia, indicato come eroe, e si fonda sull’ossatura del mito indagata da Joseph Campbell (1949). Prendendo in prestito la struttura proposta da Vogler, si sceglie di affrontare la ricognizione su tombe e riti e di osservare la storia umana del rapporto con la morte come lo sviluppo di una trama creativa, che ha come protagonista un eroe ideale che è l’emblema dell’umanità tutta e che vive dalla preistoria fino ad oggi. Come da modello di Vogler, le tappe più significative della storia del rapporto tra l’uomo e la morte sono: mondo ordinario, incidente scatenante e chiamata all’avventura, rifiuto della chiamata, superamento della prima soglia e ingresso nel mondo straordinario, avvicinamento alla caverna, prova centrale, ricompensa o stato di grazia, via del ritorno o caduta, risurrezione o cambiamento interiore, risoluzione. In tal senso, la vicenda dell’eroe di questa storia che ci accingiamo a scrivere, si può sinteticamente riassumere così: l’eroe vive in un mondo ordinario in cui, iniziando a muoversi in gruppo, per scopi di difesa e sopravvivenza, scopre la morte dell’altro. In questo modo, entra in contatto con un problema da risolvere. Per giungere alla risoluzione, l’eroe dovrebbe intraprendere un viaggio, ma, inizialmente, preferisce rifiutare la chiamata all’avventura e guardare alla morte come ad un incidente. Considera la morte, cioè, come un fatto non certo, che non lo riguarda. Questo, fin quando le condizioni intorno a lui non cambiano. Man mano che le tribù si allargano e l’uomo si individualizza, cercando riparo in piccoli gruppi familiari, l’eroe inizia a scoprire la morte del prochain, della persona amata (Landsberg, 1933) e intuisce, così, la certezza della fine. A questo punto non può più sottrarsi: deve affrontare il problema e intraprendere il suo viaggio. Varca la soglia ed entra in un mondo straordinario in cui, mentre lo spazio intorno si allarga e si densifica e il tempo assume una forma lineare, egli deve confrontarsi, continuamente, con il suo grave problema. Deve affrontare diverse prove, in attesa di trovare una soluzione che appaia valida e risolutiva. È così che l’eroe giunge alla prova centrale e trova la soluzione nelle religioni abramitiche/monoteiste, nel Cristianesimo, in particolare, per quanto riguarda l’Occidente. Tale prova centrale gli produce una ricompensa talmente alta, che l’eroe, in questo momento, è convinto di aver risolto il problema e vive un lungo stato di grazia. Questo è il midpoint o momento di illuminazione. Passato lo stato di grazia, però, l’eroe precipita vorticosamente verso il basso. Ciò perché, di fatto, con la prova centrale, l’eroe non ha risolto il suo vero problema. Egli, in effetti, non ha affrontato un cambiamento interiore, che è il vero scopo del suo viaggio. Anzi, svelata l’illusione dello stato di grazia, il suo problema e la sua condizione peggiorano sempre più (esasperazioni del dogma religioso). L’eroe si avvicina alla caverna, entra in contatto con le zone più profonde delle sue mancanze. La caduta continua fino al secondo punto di svolta, o esperienza di morte, come lo definisce Vogler, ossia il punto più basso della sua storia, il momento, cioè, in cui sembra tutto finito, in cui sembra impossibile risolvere il problema (modernità). È proprio tale momento, però, a rappresentare l’unica condizione possibile per il vero cambiamento interiore. L’eroe, mollate tutte le resistenze ed entrato in contatto con il vero problema, che è dentro di sé, può esperire un profondo rinnovamento, una trasformazione, che lo condurrà alla vera risoluzione (era elettrica). Nella prima parte, il viaggio dell’eroe viene interrotto, per poi essere ripreso nella seconda parte, con l’avvento del Cristianesimo, perché esso è considerato, nella storia dell’Occidente, il punto di rottura del sistema di ritualità funebri praticate, a livello macro sociale, fino al suo avvento, come si vedrà nella seconda parte. Il Cristianesimo è considerato l’inizio della fine dell’incanto, il principio di quel disincantamento del mondo, trattato da Max Weber (1919), che, nella modernità, ci ha fatto perdere l’ordine e il conforto generati dalla cosmologia delle grandi narrazioni collettive, delle rappresentazioni totali del mondo di fronte alla morte. Fino all’avvento del Cristianesimo, si può parlare di quel mondo antico indagato, in profondità, dall’antropologo ed etnologo Ernesto De Martino (1958), un mondo in cui l’incanto si fonda sull’idea che forze e potenze superiori e irrazionali determinino l’esistenza umana, compresa la morte, restituendo all’uomo il senso di tutta la sua esistenza. È un mondo in cui la ritualità collettiva, espressione tangibile di tali narrazioni, mette il gruppo al riparo da quella crisi della presenza che mina l’ordine sociale e la sopravvivenza della vita collettiva. Come da indagini di De Martino, la crisi della presenza è una crisi dovuta allo stato psichico di fascinazione, “una condizione psichica di impedimento e di inibizione, e al tempo stesso un senso di dominazione, un essere agito da una forza altrettanto potente quanto occulta, che lascia senza margine l’autonomia della persona, la sua capacità di decisione e di scelta” (De Martino, 1959). La fascinazione nasce da una mancanza, che non è tanto materiale, quanto, soprattutto, psicologica ed è da evitare perché incide negativamente sulla partecipazione attiva alla vita del gruppo. Il gruppo è il bene assolutamente fondamentale, da tutelare e proteggere. La ritualità del mondo antico è, dunque, praticata, collettivamente, per la rinascita dell’individuo all’interno di un gruppo che deve ritrovare il suo ordine. È nei confronti delle condizioni di labilità della presenza che emerge la funzione protettiva delle pratiche rituali magiche. Esse sono “tecniche socializzate e tradizionalizzate” (De Martino, 1959) necessarie per proteggere e reintegrare nel gruppo la presenza individuale. Sono tecniche fatte di gesti e parole cerimoniali, nonché di temi melodici, che, insieme, costituiscono un rito. Gesti, parole e temi melodici sono, anzi, gli elementi fondamentali del rito del mondo antico. Negli studi di De Martino, i riti funebri nascono, dunque, come le altre pratiche, dal rapporto che s’instaura tra la crisi della presenza, generata dal contatto con il cadavere, e le forme magiche, appunto, tipiche di quell’universo culturale. Quello che la morte fa, fondamentalmente, è strappare la presenza del defunto, tanto al suo più prossimo, il prochain, quanto alla comunità, modificando profondamente lo spazio condiviso dell’esperienza collettiva e della vita comune. Con la morte, tale spazio collettivo entra profondamente in crisi. A questo punto, la comunità si stringe e mette in scena, attraverso delle attrici, delle prefiche, un lamento funebre in cui trova convenzione e forma tanto il cordoglio individuale del prochain quanto quello collettivo. Sempre seguendo il viaggio di trasformazione dell’eroe e grazie alla letteratura scientifica, si giunge, nella seconda parte, ad affrontare il nodo da cui sono state generate le domande di questa ricerca. Sviscerando quanto accaduto nella modernità, in Occidente, a partire dalle esasperazioni del cattolicesimo, si vuole, cioè, sfatare una certa illusione, consolidata dalla prospettiva moderna, che, con le conquiste della scienza e della medicina, sia possibile risolvere il dilemma originario della morte. Il caos e le devastazioni generati dalle esasperazioni del dominio della Chiesa cattolica, in particolare dalle Crociate prima e dalle guerre di religione poi, hanno favorito, di molto, il processo di secolarizzazione che ci ha condotti all’era moderna. È in seno al cattolicesimo stesso, cioè, che sorge quel rifiuto di un ordine superiore che domina quello umano e, con esso, dei rituali collettivi che si esaspererà, poi, nella modernità. Dopo secoli di terrore e di guerre, dopo secoli di dominio del dogma e delle gerarchie religiose, l’individuo moderno finisce per racchiudere in un unico intreccio semantico i concetti di Chiesa e rito, per poi rifiutarli entrambi. Tanto più che, di pari passo, i progressi illuminati della scienza lo inducono a sperare, finalmente, nella possibilità concreta di liberarsi definitivamente della partita da sempre aperta con la morte. L’emblema di questa svolta è rappresentato dall’Editto di Napoleone del 12 giugno 1804, l’Editto di Saunt Cloud, che sancisce e definisce il processo di allontanamento dei cimiteri dal centro abitato e, con essi, della presenza simbolica dei morti nella vita sociale. Senonché, all’interno di questo panorama generale, l’uomo moderno, relegato alla sfera individuale, di fatto non riceve, dalla scienza, risposte convincenti in merito alla morte, né tanto meno delle indicazioni pratiche di relazione con essa. Passati gli entusiasmi iniziali, ciò che la modernità si limita a fare nei confronti della morte è allontanarla dallo scambio simbolico del gruppo, come ampiamente osservato dal sociologo francese Jean Baudrillard (1976), e rifiutare i rituali collettivi. Confinato nel suo individualismo e privato dello spazio del rituale collettivo, ma non potendosi, di fatto, liberare del dilemmatico rapporto con la morte, l’uomo moderno finisce per precipitare, così, in un drammatico vuoto di narrazione e di senso. Si ritrova orfano delle fonti di ogni narrazione possibile: religione, scienza e magia. Privato dell’incanto, si ritrova gettato nel dilemma della morte in maniera molto più drammatica di ogni altro momento della storia umana, perché si ritrova solo. Burocratizzando il momento della fine e privando la collettività dei suoi rituali, la modernità non solo non ha risolto il dilemma della fine, ma lo ha esasperato. Ha condotto l’eroe alla caduta, al momento più drammatico nell’arco di trasformazione del personaggio strutturato da Christopher Vogler (1992). Se a livello macro sociale si assiste a questa deriva, a livello micro sociale, però, si può osservare come il rapporto con la morte trovi respiro in quella tipologia di spazi comuni topici, descritti dal filosofo canadese Charles Taylor, organizzati intorno ad “un’intensa emozione condivisa” (Taylor, 2003). I micro spazi sociali destinati al rapporto con la morte, che sono definiti dalla scrivente isole rituali, rappresentano una vera e propria forma di resistenza moderna. Ne sono esempio la dottrina dello Spiritismo, nonché i grandi funerali celebri della modernità, quei funerali rimasti nella storia per la grande partecipazione di massa. Si pensi, per citarne uno, ad Abraham Lincoln, per il quale, nel 1865, è stato realizzato un tour funebre che è durato due settimane. Ne sono testimonianza anche tutti i movimenti spirituali che si diffondono in Occidente dopo la fine dell’800. A testimonianza dell’impossibilità di eludere il rapporto collettivo con la morte, c’è, ancora, e non certo all’ultimo posto, Martin Heidegger, che proprio nel pieno della modernità, scrive “Essere e tempo”, opera mastodontica in cui il filosofo lega l’esistenza sociale alla tonalità emotiva con cui la collettività si relaziona alla morte, giungendo a definire l’uomo come essere per la morte (Heidegger, 1927). A partire dall’osservazione di tali terreni di resistenza, si manifesta, quindi, l’humus fertile per iniziare a immaginare come lo scambio simbolico con la morte e la ritualità funebre tornino ad essere protagonisti della nostra era elettrica, grazie alla Rete. Sono i mass media prima, e i new media poi, ad offrire la possibilità di una nuova svolta, quella più importante per l’eroe disegnato da Vogler (1992), quella che lo conduce alla risoluzione del problema. D’altronde, a questo punto dell’indagine, giunti ormai nel pieno della modernità, non si può non considerare l’influenza che l’avvento dei mass media produce nella vita collettiva moderna. Tanto più se si considerano le profonde connessioni della mediologia con la prospettiva della sociologia dell’immaginario. Si può cogliere come i mass media, in generale, e il Cinema, in particolare, offrano l’occasione utile alla rinascita dello scambio simbolico con la morte, a livello macro sociale, lontano dalle logiche del dogma religioso e da quelle della scienza. In tal senso, si sceglie di inquadrare l’evoluzione dei media nella prospettiva del sociologo canadese Marshall McLuhan, ossia intendendoli come metafore (McLuhan, 1964), come sistemi che agiscono sulle strutture percettive. Metafora proviene dal greco metaphérein, e significa trasportare, laddove trasportare è un processo di traduzione attiva che trasforma tutto ciò che coinvolge. Il che vale a dire che i mass media sono metafore che, trasportando il messaggio, modificano l’esperienza di tutto ciò che è interessato nel flusso comunicativo: il mittente, il ricevente e il messaggio stesso. I mass media non sono, cioè, dei meri mezzi di passaggio neutro dell’informazione, come spesso si tende a considerarli nel senso comune, ma hanno “implicazioni sociologiche e psicologiche” (McLuhan, 1964). La comunicazione è un processo attivo di trasformazione, che non dipende tanto dai contenuti che vengono veicolati, quanto dai criteri strutturali con cui i mass media la organizzano, agendo sul nostro sistema percettivo e rappresentativo, modificandolo e venendone modificati, in uno scambio continuo. I media possono dunque essere hot e cool. Hot sono i media che ci consegnano un messaggio completo, fondamentalmente chiuso, dove c’è un emittente che agisce e un destinatario che reagisce, i media, cioè, che prevedono una partecipazione a senso unico, ad alta definizione (McLuhan, 1964); cool si riferisce, invece, alla freschezza di quei media che ci consegnano dei messaggi aperti, a quella comunicazione in cui, al posto del rapporto ad alta definizione tra emittente e ricevente, prevale uno scambio di reazioni reciproche e continue, dove è necessaria una partecipazione attiva dei soggetti coinvolti, che insieme completano il messaggio. Esistendo media caldi e media freschi, esistono, di conseguenza, epoche calde ed epoche fresche, ciò a seconda del medium prevalente. In linea con questo ragionamento, Internet diventa l’emblema di un profondo raffrescamento del mondo, un mondo in cui risorge lo scambio di relazioni reciproche e continue, di connessioni prive di confini di spazio e tempo e, soprattutto, di regole manualistiche. In Internet la partecipazione torna a dare senso alla comunicazione, come era negli antichi villaggi delle tribù dominati dall’oralità. Ciò che cambia tra i due media cool, quello di Internet e quello dell’oralità dei villaggi delle tribù, sta nella natura fisica dell’esperienza che, in Rete, si smaterializza. Ed è proprio su questo nodo della smaterializzazione che il discorso di McLuhan ci rimanda all’analisi del filosofo e sociologo francese Edgar Morin (1956), che osserva il cambiamento di immaginario prodotto dai new media proprio dal punto di vista della smaterializzazione delle relazioni e della vita. Nella sua visione, qui pienamente accolta, l’evoluzione mediatica a cui abbiamo assistito nel passaggio dalla modernità all’era elettrica contemporanea risiede proprio nella smaterializzazione dei confini spazio temporali. E lo spartiacque che ha reso possibile tale processo è rappresentato, per Morin, dall’avvento del Cinema. Ora, connettendo questo discorso agli obiettivi dell’indagine, il Cinema diventa, sin dal suo esordio, la nuova sede della narrazione collettiva della morte, proseguendo, così, il cammino iniziato nelle prime camere cerimoniali. Il Cinema vanta film che sono prove innegabili e tangibili della forza con cui la questione del rapporto con il limen, agli inizi del ‘900, riemerga alla ricerca di una nuova narrazione e di nuove pratiche collettive. È a partire dal Cinema, soprattutto, che abbiamo iniziato ad assistere, a livello percettivo, ad una rottura del senso stesso, tradizionale, di reale, rottura che aiuterà l’evoluzione del nuovo rapporto con la morte. È qui che prende avvio il grande passaggio epocale dell’immaginario, da quello moderno a quello contemporaneo. Nel pensiero di Morin, il Cinema è il medium che, per primo, ha generato un’immagine proiettata sullo schermo del tutto impalpabile e fugace. L’esperienza cinematografica, inoltre, risiede nello spettacolo collettivo, nella condivisione dell’esperienza in sala. Ma, soprattutto, secondo Morin, la mano del regista cinematografico genera, come una pratica magica, una metamorfosi della realtà, tanto in termini di tempo, quanto in termini di spazio, le due variabili che, ancora una volta, nelle loro evoluzioni, tornano a contribuire ai grandi cambiamenti dell’immaginario. Con il Cinema, l’esperienza si smarca dalla condizione biologica, dal limite corporeo e spaziale. E il tempo, a sua volta, si dilata, si comprime, si accelera, tutto nel montaggio delle inquadrature. In questo modo, lo spettatore si ritrova catapultato, trasferito affettivamente, in un territorio di confine dove tutto è possibile, vita e morte, quello che non è più e ciò che non è ancora. In linea con il pensiero di McLuhan, Morin osserva come siano proprio le tecniche narrative del Cinema e le sue condizioni di fruizione a indurre nello spettatore fenomeni di proiezione e identificazione che lo riportano nella dimensione del mito, del sogno, della magia, agendo in tal senso sul suo sistema percettivo. Lo spettatore partecipa all’esperienza cinematografica, in un processo di proiezione magica, luminosa, sovrannaturale, oltre i limiti corporali. Proseguendo nel pensiero di Morin, se l’avvento del Cinema rompe la divisione netta tra realtà e rappresentazione, rendendo possibile un intreccio e una contaminazione delle due esperienze, con gli sviluppi del medium televisivo, il limite dello schermo viene definitivamente superato. Non c’è più un occhio che guarda, piuttosto lo spettatore si ritrova immerso nell’ambiente comunicativo, a partire dal proprio spazio individuale, privato, come diremmo banalmente, “da casa”. Da qui, il passaggio successivo, sarà quello, con il reality show, di valicare il limite anche fisicamente. La televisione, nel pensiero di Morin, diventa l’emblema di un immaginario fatto di cristalli e di vetri, un immaginario che si traduce, infatti, anche in un nuovo ambiente urbano diviso e articolato da elementi traslucidi, trasparenti. Tutto si fa schermo, i limiti diventano membrane invisibili che non impediscono la vista e la partecipazione, a partire dalle porte vetrate degli appartamenti, al plexiglass dei pullman, ai finestrini degli aerei. In questo ambiente di membrane e schermi trasparenti, i new media trovano il terreno fertile per attecchire e alzare la posta in gioco. Oltre all’empatia che si può attivare davanti allo schermo cinematografico, oltre all’immersione del corpo nell’ambiente comunicativo del reality televisivo, i new media offrono una possibilità in più: l’uomo, per entrare nello schermo, non ha neanche più bisogno del suo corpo. L’uomo stesso si fa immateriale, crea i suoi simulacri virtuali e diventa il protagonista assoluto di un ecosistema (Marzo, 2019) fatto di esperienze e relazioni apparentemente separate da quelle della dimensione corporea, ma con le quali intrattengono, in realtà, un legame intimo. Esso, lo schermo, diventa “il milieu che ci mette in contatto con il reale, che rende visibile il vissuto in tutte le sue forme” (La Rocca, 2018). La vita viene completamente contenuta nel medium. Internet, le piattaforme digitali, i new media diventano, così, come da pensiero del sociologo e scrittore italiano, Alberto Abruzzese, la vita che siamo (Abruzzese, 2009). Non si tratta più di rappresentare la realtà, per come tradizionalmente la si è intesa fino a questo momento, così come non basta assolutamente staccare la corrente per uscire da questo nuovo ambiente. Il nostro sistema percettivo viene modificato dalla modalità di funzionamento dei new media ed è con questo sistema percettivo di tipo connettivo che noi affrontiamo tutta la nostra vita onlife (Floridi, 2017), una vita che si muove trasversalmente e inevitabilmente tra dimensioni digitali e corporee, senza distinzioni, in un flusso continuo. È proprio in questo panorama che si muovono la filosofia contemporanea e la Digital Death, che, già da tempo, esplorano le nuove forme del rapporto tra l’uomo e la morte in Rete. Gli studi di filosofi come l’italiano Davide Sisto (2018), specializzato in tanatologia, cultura digitale e post umano, negli ultimi anni hanno evidenziato come i territori della Rete, rappresentando una dimensione esistenziale, si offrano, quasi spontaneamente, anche come la nuova sede di pratica del lutto. Rispetto alla modernità, la morte non appare più come una questione privata, il lutto non è più relegato all’intimità dell’individuo e del piccolo gruppo sociale. La morte diventa social: i social network sono usati per proiettare le sensibilità individuali nella socializzazione del lutto e affrontare discussioni che riguardano la morte. Da qui, come da obiettivi di questa indagine, nella terza parte si cercherà di capire se questo fenomeno assuma dimensioni macro sociali, se riguardi, cioè, la società globale e se sia l’avvisaglia della riconfigurazione di una forma religiosa globale, che ha le sue narrazioni e le sue pratiche, nonché i suoi nuovi santi, i suoi antenati speciali. A tale fine, in conclusione della seconda parte, mettendo insieme le costanti del rapporto con la morte osservate con la ricognizione sugli immaginari della morte e le evidenze emerse con la modernità, attingendo dall’opera di Max Weber e dalle indagini di profondità di Ernesto De Martino, si ritine possibile costruire un idealtipo (Weber, 1922) del rapporto rituale collettivo con la morte. Esso rappresenterà il faro concettuale, il modello ideale, con cui orientare l’osservazione della parte empirica, con cui muoversi, cioè, nei complessi meandri della nostra era elettrica. Si definisce l’idealtipo del rapporto rituale collettivo con la morte come un insieme di pratiche collettive destinate alla rinascita del defunto nel gruppo e messe in scena all’interno di uno spazio cerimoniale. Il fine ultimo è la sopravvivenza stessa del gruppo. Tali pratiche prevedono un copione rituale, socialmente istituito e tradizionalizzato, che comprende l’espressione verbale delle emozioni collettive, alcuni gesti codificati, che altro non sono che l’espressione mimica delle stesse emozioni, parole di encomio che hanno come oggetto il defunto ed elementi melodici. Tali pratiche funebri dell’idealtipo si dipanano in due momenti di ritualità principali, estremamente connessi tra di loro. Nel primo momento rituale, si accompagna collettivamente ed emotivamente il passaggio del defunto, che migra alla sua nuova condizione. Conclusa la ritualità di passaggio, si procede, quindi, con la costruzione di un orizzonte della crisi, attraverso rituali di commemorazione, che altro non sono che la ri-attualizzazione degli stessi rituali della fase di passaggio, e che avvengono, di solito, in occasione dell’anniversario della morte o della nascita del defunto. I riti di commemorazione restituiscono ciclicità al tempo, gestiscono l’orizzonte della crisi e ristabiliscono, rinnovandolo, quel legame tra i vivi creato nel momento del passaggio. È per questo che particolare attenzione sarà destinata, nella terza parte, proprio alla commemorazione. All’interno di questi momenti rituali si può osservare, inoltre, la presenza di alcuni elementi simbolici ricorsivi: l’elemento naturale (acqua, terra, fuoco), che simboleggia la rigenerazione e purificazione, in forma pagana; la maschera mortuaria, che ferma l’immagine sacra del defunto; il corredo funebre, con cui concedere al defunto di affrontare la sua nuova esistenza e che è sintomatico dell’idea della vita che continui oltre la morte; il banchetto funebre, un momento conviviale durante il quale i vivi celebrano la reintegrazione del defunto nel gruppo. Se è vero che stiamo assistendo, oggi, ad una riconfigurazione del rapporto rituale con la morte e dello scambio simbolico con essa, tali elementi, messi per lo più in letargo durante la modernità, dovrebbero riemergere con forza e portata macro sociale all’interno dei territori globali della Rete. A questo punto, l’indagine si sposta sul terreno dell’osservazione empirica. La terza parte è destinata all’analisi sperimentale della riconfigurazione dei riti funebri della società globale, soggetto protagonista dell’era elettrica. L’osservazione è condotta all’interno dei territori della Rete, l’ecosistema immaginario che ospita le nostre vite mediate (Bovalino, 2018) e si concentra, in particolare, sulla celebrazione destinata alla morte di alcuni defunti illustri dell’infosfera. Tali defunti, infatti, sono paragonabili a quegli antenati speciali che hanno rappresentato il cardine di ogni legame religioso del mondo antico. Tale analisi avviene nella consapevolezza che le forme di celebrazione a loro dedicate si riflettono in quelle quotidianamente destinate ai defunti “comuni”. Si vuole indagare il come avviene questa celebrazione, quali forme assuma, per poi, successivamente, cercare di comprendere il motivo notturno, inconscio, che fa sì che alcuni personaggi di fama globale si impongano come defunti illustri a dispetto di altre celebrità altrettanto note e importanti. Si cercherà di capire, cioè, quali sono i principi strutturanti del nuovo incanto, della nuova religione dell’era elettrica, e, da qui, comprendere qualcosa in più della nostra società globale. L’indagine empirica si sviluppa con un approccio misto, ossia con due tipi di rilevazione, una quantitativa ed una qualitativa (il dettaglio della metodologia è nel paragrafo ad essa dedicato). Sui risultati di queste rilevazioni, si fonderà un’analisi di profondità con cui rispondere alle domande di questa ricerca. Con la rilevazione quantitativa, resa possibile dagli strumenti forniti dalla Rete stessa, Google e Google Trends in particolare, vengono individuati alcuni personaggi celebri la cui morte, come accaduto con gli antenati illustri dell’antichità e con i santi delle religioni, ha scosso la collettività globale così nel profondo, da spingerla a riunirsi in massa intorno a loro. Sono personaggi diventati protagonisti di opere cinematografiche e di documentari e la cui morte, se pur avvenuta prima della comparsa di Internet, occupa ancora oggi i primi posti delle ricerche del web, nonché degli spazi collettivi, tra video dei funerali e video tributo (YouTube), dei siti dedicati e delle pagine commemorative dei social, soprattutto Facebook, scelto per la sua versatilità e il particolare fattore legante. Si tratta di personaggi, insomma, la cui memoria ha superato i confini temporali del lutto e si è trasfigurata in commemorazione, personaggi che non sono solo moda del tempo, ma sono riferimenti morali. Sono i nuovi santi della nostra era elettrica. I defunti illustri individuati grazie alla metodologia e gli strumenti di questa indagine sono: Marilyn Monroe (1962), Martin Luther King (1968), Bruce Lee (1973), Elvis Presley (1977), John Lennon (1980), Bob Marley (1981), Ayrton Senna (1994), Princess Diana (1997). E non si può non notare subito che si tratta di celebrità notoriamente morte in giovane età e in maniera tragica e violenta, in un periodo complessivo compreso tra il 1962 e il 1997. A partire da questa prima, evidente e tragica, consapevolezza, che fornisce già una prospettiva di lettura con cui addentrarsi nel resto della ricerca, la fase di rilevazione qualitativa dell’indagine si concentra, in particolare, su di un’analisi dei contenuti. Il faro concettuale che guida tale osservazione è, come anticipato, lo strumento dell’idealtipo. Tale analisi è sviluppata tra i commenti ad alcuni dei video dei funerali o di tributo presenti in YouTube, a quelli con più visualizzazioni e commenti per la precisione. I commenti sono considerati, infatti, l’espressione più diretta della celebrazione dei defunti illustri da parte degli utenti della Rete. L’analisi dei contenuti è stata eseguita creando, grazie al software Comment Picker, dei documenti contenenti tutti i commenti, un documento per ogni video scelto. Questi documenti sono stati analizzati con il software NVivo. Sono state eseguite, in particolare, una Word Frequency complessiva, su tutti i documenti di tutti i defunti, una Word Frequency singola, una per ogni defunto, e un’analisi per Codes, ottenuta individuando, tra tutti i commenti, i nodi tematici ricorrenti costruiti attraverso le categorie dell’idealtipo del rapporto rituale collettivo con morte: lamento funebre, fatto di parole e gesti rituali che esprimano emozioni e sentimenti nonché parole di encomio rivolte al defunto, presenza di almeno un elemento naturale indicativo di rigenerazione/rinascita e circolarità del tempo (acqua/fuoco/fiori), maschera mortuaria, corredo funebre, banchetto funebre (o momento conviviale). Complessivamente si può osservare che sia gli esiti delle Word Frequencies che quelli dell’analisi per Codes confermino una stretta somiglianza tra il rapporto rituale collettivo con la morte in Rete e le categorie dell’idealtipo. Emerge, indubbiamente, il fatto che esiste un copione, un lamento funebre fatto di espressione verbale di emozioni, di parole di encomio e di gesti rituali rappresentati secondo il linguaggio tipico della Rete (emoticons). Domina certamente una visione circolare del tempo, una visione pagana, espressa tanto nelle parole quanto nei segni visivi, una visione che fa dei defunti illustri degli eroi immortali. Emerge, soprattutto, un legame religioso che restituisce al gruppo la sensazione di condividere un destino comune e, in qualche modo, di rinascita continua. Il gruppo ricolloca i defunti e ricostituisce il suo ordine, il suo equilibrio, continuamente. Date le dovute differenze, la vicinanza sostanziale emersa tra i risultati delle rilevazioni effettuate nella Rete e le categorie dell’idealtipo del rapporto rituale collettivo con la morte consente di poter confermare, ancora una volta e nonostante la modernità, che l’essenza e gli obiettivi del rapporto collettivo con la morte conservano, nel corso dell’avvicendarsi degli immaginari, un nucleo strutturale costante. Si rileva, cioè, come l’obiettivo del rapporto collettivo con la morte resti sempre e comunque l’ordine e la sopravvivenza del gruppo, la sua coesione. Anche entrando nei meandri delle isole rituali moderne, il nucleo strutturale resta lo stesso. E ancora, il fatto stesso che, anche nei territori della Rete, si stia evidentemente riconfigurando uno spazio cerimoniale destinato al cordoglio, un luogo, cioè, in cui condividere emozioni, ricordi, riferimenti ad un noi, è testimonianza della necessità universale di far parte di un gruppo che sopravviva. Anche oggi bisogna porre ordine all’evento tragico della morte, alla crisi della presenza collettiva da essa generata. È necessario sentirsi parte di un destino comune, stringersi attraverso pratiche funebri rituali codificate che, come punti fissi, restituiscano la sensazione di rendere pacifica una questione altamente spinosa. Il nucleo strutturale del rapporto con la morte resta, dunque, la condivisione emotiva del gruppo, la partecipazione ad un cordoglio collettivo espresso tramite pratiche rituali. Dall’analisi empirica ciò che emerge chiaramente è, dunque, come la compartecipazione, il cum-essere (Bovalino, 2018) e la pratica collettiva del rapporto con la morte siano l’apriori necessario alla costruzione di ogni narrazione collettiva possibile. Proprio qui sta il difetto della modernità. Nessuna rappresentazione collettiva può toccare le viscere se resta nell’isolamento concettuale e priva dell’effervescenza emotiva di una forma rituale che la esprima. L’individuo moderno, orfano del rituale collettivo, dello spazio comune destinato al cordoglio, di fatto ha visto esasperarsi la sua condizione di fragilità davanti all’evento più oscuro della sua natura e della sua esistenza. È stato privato, cioè, della morte culturale, della seconda morte, è rimasto un cadavere vivente, senza meta definita (De Martino, 1958). Nessuna spiegazione scientifica ha potuto radicarsi in lui, toccare le viscere e risolvere il suo dilemma. Ciò fin quando la possibilità di un nuovo luogo cerimoniale destinato al cordoglio si è palesata davanti ai suoi occhi, il che è accaduto il giorno in cui Internet è entrato nelle nostre case. A partire da questo momento, l’uomo moderno si riavvicina, gradualmente, alle pratiche del rapporto con la morte, ma, invece di una caverna o di una chiesa, ha la Rete. Mettendo insieme questi risultati ottenuti grazie al confronto con l’idealtipo, integrandoli con il quadro teorico costruito nelle prime due parti, interpretandoli, ancora, grazie alle biografie dei personaggi e a tutto quello che emerge dai documenti a loro dedicati, come i film e documentari, andando ad osservare, tutto questo, in profondità, si possono, dunque, delineare i risultati di questa indagine. Nelle prossime pagine, nel paragrafo dedicato ai risultati, si potranno così affrontare le risposte alle domande di questa ricerca. 2.3 Limitazioni della letteratura esistente Prima di procedere con l’indagine, si è voluta verificare l’esistenza, nell’ambito della sociologia dell’immaginario e della mediologia, di una letteratura concentrata sull’analisi empirica delle nuove forme di ritualità collettive funebri praticate all’interno dei territori della Rete, intese come espressione di una nuova forma religiosa globale. Attraverso il database Dimensions e le mappe bibliometriche ottenute grazie al software VOSviewer, si è potuto così rilevare che, ad oggi, non emerge una letteratura abbastanza approfondita in tal senso. Stando ai parametri di questa ricerca, non è emersa, cioè, una letteratura sostanziosa che si sia concentrata, empiricamente, sull’osservazione delle ritualità funebri collettive, globali, praticate in Rete, al fine di interpretarle come espressione tangibile di un nuovo legame religioso globale. Non esiste neanche, in tal senso, una letteratura che si occupi di rintracciare, sempre empiricamente, i nuovi santi della nostra era. Se, nella costruzione del quadro teorico, si è potuto fare riferimento ad una straordinaria letteratura sociologica sul rapporto tra l’uomo e la morte, in particolare quella di Georg Simmel, nonché agli studi della filosofia contemporanea sulla socializzazione del lutto, non è stata individuata, invece, una altrettanto consistente produzione sociologica che si occupi dettagliatamente, a livello empirico, del rapporto rituale collettivo con la morte in Rete. Certamente ci sono importanti riflessioni sul rapporto tra l’uomo, la morte e il digitale. Così come non si possono tralasciare quelle riflessioni, quali quelle di Michel Maffesoli (1988), sulla rinascita di strutture sociali e di forme di ritualità che ci riavvicinano a quelle delle tribù del passato, del mondo antico, per usare i parametri di questa indagine. Si è rilevata, inoltre, una importante e approfondita letteratura che affronta la questione delle emozioni della società globale. Si pensi, solo per esempio, all’opera del coreano Byung-Chul Han (2021a/b) o a quella dell’italiano Vincenzo Susca, in particolare alla sua Gioia tragica (2010). Tutte queste riflessioni sono state utilissime per lo svolgimento dell’indagine e la comprensione dei suoi risultati, ma non è stata trovata una letteratura che assuma, nello specifico, lo stesso approccio empirico di questa indagine, con gli stessi obiettivi. I pochi studi che sono emersi come maggiormente risuonanti rispetto all’oggetto di studio di questa indagine, nell’ambito della sociologia, sono quelli dell’italiano Gianpiero Vincenzo, a cui si deve l’opera L’ordine rituale e la società digitale. Saggio sulla natura umana (2021), e quelli legati al nome di Bjørn Nansen, dell’University of Melbourne, a cui si devono, in tal senso, diverse pubblicazioni. 2.4 Metodologia Nelle prime due parti della ricerca, grazie alla letteratura esistente, si è costruito il quadro teorico di riferimento. La terza e ultima parte, invece, è stata destinata all’indagine empirica, sviluppata con un approccio misto, all’interno dei territori della Rete. Si è proceduto, in particolare, con due tipi di rilevazione, una quantitativa ed una qualitativa. In ultimo, al fine di rispondere alle domande della ricerca è stata eseguita un'analisi di profondità incentrata sui risultati della rilevazione qualitativa. L’analisi quantitativa, condotta con gli strumenti forniti dalla Rete stessa, in particolare Google e Google Trends, ha permesso di individuare alcuni dei defunti illustri celebrati dalla comunità globale dell’infosfera. I primi nomi dei defunti illustri sono stati individuati attraverso quattro variabili: a) un funerale celebre; b) presenza globale della morte del defunto nelle ricerche delle Rete; c) interesse continuo, fino ad oggi, per la sua morte, sempre nelle ricerche della Rete; d) una consistente e continua produzione di documenti a lui dedicati, tra pagine social, siti ufficiali, opere filmiche, documentari e articoli scientifici. Altri nomi sono stati ottenuti, invece, mantenendo le variabili b, c, d e sostituendo, invece, la prima, la variabile a. Si è cercato, cioè, anche tra i personaggi che, se pur ritenuti, dai documenti reperibili in Rete, come i più influenti del ‘900, non fossero stati celebrati con un funerale maestoso, per motivi tendenzialmente connessi alle loro storie personali. Individuati i defunti illustri dell’infosfera, si è passati alla rilevazione qualitativa, sviluppata in un’analisi dei contenuti. Sono stati selezionati i video dei funerali o di tributo con più visualizzazioni e commenti. Con il software Comment Picker si sono creati dei documenti che contenessero tutti i commenti dei video scelti. I documenti sono stati, quindi, analizzati con il software NVivo. Sono state eseguite una Word Frequency complessiva, su tutti i documenti di tutti i defunti illustri, una Word Frequency singola, una per ogni defunto illustre, ed un’analisi per Codes. Quest’ultima è stata sviluppata individuando, tra tutti i commenti, i nodi tematici ricorrenti, nodi che si sono definiti attraverso le categorie dell’idealtipo costruito nella seconda parte. I risultati del confronto con l’idealtipo sono stati interpretati e restituiti con la successiva analisi di profondità, fsondata sulla mitodologia di Gilbert Durand (1996). 2.5 Risultati Entrando nel dettaglio delle domande di questa ricerca, si può affermare che la risposta è sì, l’infosfera ha i suoi defunti illustri. Esistono delle morti, come nel caso degli otto personaggi presi in esame, che legano, intorno a sé, la popolazione globale della Rete, con un interesse nel tempo costante ed ancora attuale. Tanto che la loro celebrazione si è estesa fino all’oggi. Si è generata una vera e propria forma di commemorazione, un culto. Al pari degli stregoni, dei personaggi mitologici del mondo antico, dei santi delle istituzioni religiose (specie quelli degli albori, come Cristo), i defunti illustri dell’infosfera sono personaggi straordinari e magici, personaggi che, in vita, si sono distinti per l’incanto che hanno esercitato sulla collettività e che, proprio in virtù di questo incanto, restano un riferimento anche dopo la loro morte. Sono riferimenti così potenti da sopravvivere anche alla crisi rituale della modernità. Il che significa che la morte di questi personaggi, appena giunta l’occasione (Internet), ha sfondato la barriera del silenzio simbolico e rituale della modernità, propagandosi fino all’infosfera. In tal senso, si può alzare la posta in gioco e vedere, nei decessi dei defunti illustri, proprio una delle circostanze che hanno favorito la svolta rituale che si sta indagando. I decessi improvvisi e tragici di personaggi così popolari possono essere inclusi, cioè, in quella sfera di eventi traumatici, tra cui l’attacco alle Torri Gemelle, che hanno scosso la collettività globale proprio all’apice di quel silenzio nello scambio simbolico e rituale con la morte riscontrato nell’era moderna. Laddove per apice si intende il momento che viene un attimo prima della crisi e, quindi, del cambiamento. Sono morti, le loro, che hanno contribuito, emotivamente, a tirare fuori la collettività dal senso di assopimento moderno. Hanno fatto esplodere la necessità di ricostruire uno spazio comune in cui praticare il cordoglio collettivo. Questi eventi traumatici possono essere considerati, dunque, parte cruciale del climax del viaggio dell’eroe, di quel momento di trasformazione del protagonista della storia del rapporto con la morte, di cui si è trattato nel corso di tutta l’indagine. Il che potrebbe significare, di conseguenza, che è stato proprio perché questa esigenza emotiva era ormai matura, che l’avvento di Internet ha offerto l’occasione tecnica, mediologica, percettiva, giusta per la ricostruzione del cordoglio collettivo. Come dire che la morte tragica e improvvisa di questi personaggi, come Caronte, ci ha fatto imbarcare su un’arca ormeggiata sulla riva della tarda modernità, un’arca che poi, spinta dalle correnti dei new media, ci ha trasportato sulla riva dell’era elettrica. Da tutto questo si evince la seconda, fondamentale, risposta, che mette in risalto un nodo cruciale per questa indagine, ossia che nell’era elettrica si sta riconfigurando un nuovo spazio cerimoniale in cui è possibile celebrare, collettivamente, la morte dei defunti illustri. Tale spazio non è costruito gerarchicamente e non si fonda su dogmi istituzionali. Lo spazio collettivo-connettivo religioso non si sta riconfigurando come espressione tangibile di una grande e strutturata narrazione che segue un ordine superiore e impone delle regole disegnate dall’alto, come avvenuto con le istituzioni religiose. E non si sta fondando, allo stesso modo, su spiegazioni scientifiche, sulle logiche della razionalità, che, come visto, mal si sposano con le necessità rituali legate alla questione più inconscia dell’immaginario sociale: la morte. La collettività globale dell’infosfera sembrerebbe non aver bisogno, dunque, di prove empiriche e di spiegazioni scientifiche e neanche di grandi divinità trascendentali che ci governino dall’alto e ci indichino la via. Ha bisogno, piuttosto, di personaggi catalizzatori di emozioni. Ha bisogno di esperienze emotive, di quelle emozioni, come descritte da Heidegger (1927), che sono le uniche a poterci restituire la percezione del mondo e dell’esistenza. Lo spazio collettivo-connettivo prende a configurarsi, così, come un ambiente profondamente umano, incerto, fragile, uno spazio di ricerca, che somiglia più alle tombe della preistoria, ai primi luoghi cerimoniali pagani in cui i nostri antenati lasciavano segni sulle pareti delle caverne, segni che sono diventati, via via, sempre più sofisticati. È il frutto nascente della condivisione emotiva e della partecipazione collettiva, il frutto di una effervescenza, di una elettricità che circola a livello globale. È uno spazio di solidarietà, di gruppo, di vicinanza. La Rete diventa, così, la nuova caverna pagana in cui deporre i nostri defunti, ma non per liberarci di essi, non per tenerli lontano dalla vista, non perché possano, ancora, intraprendere un viaggio lontano, ma, piuttosto, perché restino a circolare nel gruppo e perché si possa continuare a comunicare con loro, quotidianamente. In tal senso, l’immaginario della morte che va riconfigurandosi, ci avvicina al momento in cui l’eroe è stato chiamato all’avventura e, istintivamente, abbiamo visto nella morte solo un cambiamento di comunicazione. Sembrerebbe che anche noi, abitanti dell’infosfera, stiamo guardando alla morte come ad un cambio di comunicazione, percependoci all’interno di un sistema connettivo privo di confini spazio-temporali e di limiti corporei, un ambiente in cui morti e vivi sono mescolati e i primi esercitano un’influenza sui secondi. Tutto questo nella consapevolezza, però, che se tutto ciò è vero, è vero anche che, rispetto alle origini del rapporto con la morte, noi siamo completamente mutati. Siamo stati cambiati da tutta la nostra, indimenticabile, storia, dalla consapevolezza di tutta la strada fatta dal momento in cui abbiamo scoperto la morte del prochain. Ma, soprattutto, siamo stati metamorfosati dalle tecniche di cui disponiamo oggi, come da lezione di McLuhan (1964). Noi non siamo i nostri antenati, le nostre possibilità tecniche e percettive sono diverse, ma ciò che emerge è che, come loro, stiamo rientrando in contatto con la tonalità emotiva dell’angoscia, così come descritta da Heidegger (1927), abbandonando quella della paura, tipica dell’era moderna. Stiamo lentamente cercando di non sfuggire più al rapporto con la morte e, per farlo, non stiamo aspirando ad una spiegazione e una soluzione ad essa, ma stiamo recuperando, innanzitutto, la rassicurazione emotiva del gruppo, il legame collettivo con il quale relazionarci alla morte e, da qui, alla vita. Sono questi i nodi che ci riavvicinano ai nostri antenati del mondo antico. Dopo tutto il viaggio dell’eroe, come da struttura proposta da Vogler (1992), torniamo al punto di inizio, al mondo ordinario, a quel momento in cui abbiamo scoperto la morte del prochain. Lo facciamo, però, muniti di strumenti diversi, forse più sofisticati. Di certo, siamo cambiati interiormente. Ora, dati questi risultati, è possibile spingersi gradualmente verso il cuore della riflessione in atto: cos’è che ci fa stringere, globalmente, gli uni agli altri? Intorno a cosa si ricrea l’incanto religioso dell’era elettrica? Quali sono i meccanismi che si innescano e consentono al gruppo di unirsi intorno alla fonte delle sue inquietudini più profonde? Tanto più se si considera che si ha a che fare, nel caso dell’era elettrica, con una collettività di dimensioni globali. Per unire un gruppo così esteso non può bastare il desiderio di condivisione, non basta la decisione di aderire ad una narrazione e di allestire uno spazio cerimoniale comune. Non basta una decisione fredda, non basta fornire una spiegazione collettiva alla morte e stabilire, di conseguenza, delle pratiche rituali che la rappresentino tangibilmente. E allora perché esistono fattori leganti e altri che non lo sono? Perché ci sono fattori che generano, di fronte alla morte, un’effervescenza collettiva e altri che non ci riescono? Perché solo la morte di alcuni personaggi diventa fonte di legame religioso? Ciò che è apparso evidente dall’intreccio di profondità tra i risultati del confronto con l’idealtipo del rapporto rituale collettivo con la morte e le biografie dei defunti illustri, è che il meccanismo che sembra innescarsi nella collettività globale è quello che sta alla base della struttura del mito indagata da Joseph Campbell (1949) e che si esprime nell’arco di trasformazione del personaggio disegnato da Christopher Vogler (1992). Evidentemente, per legare la collettività intorno ad un mito, deve esserci un eroe che inizia la sua storia con un fatal flow, con un difetto fatale, una mancanza, un’incompletezza, più o meno esplicita e più o meno grave, di cui non è neanche consapevole e che affronta solo quando riceve la chiamata all’avventura, quando viene messo di fronte alla necessità di cambiare. Quando accetta la chiamata, l’eroe inizia il suo viaggio in un mondo straordinario, diverso da quello da cui è partito, un mondo costellato di prove, che lo conduce al massimo delle sue possibilità, ad un vero e proprio momento di grazia, per poi, da qui, precipitare verso il punto di rottura. L’eroe deve conoscere la sua morte simbolica, nel senso che deve conoscere e praticare il sacrificio del sé a favore di un cambiamento interiore. Perché è questo cambiamento interiore, rispetto alle condizioni di partenza, a diventare un modello per tutti quelli che conosceranno questa storia, a diventare l’elemento grazie al quale gli spettatori empatizzeranno con l’eroe. Ora, le vicende dei defunti illustri sembrano rispettare proprio questo meccanismo: ciò che tocca le viscere della collettività, al punto da far nascere un profondo legame religioso, ha a che fare con la struttura del mito. Le storie dei personaggi divenuti defunti illustri rispondono alla struttura del mito e all’arco di trasformazione del personaggio, al viaggio dell’eroe. Anche senza la mano di uno sceneggiatore, le loro storie sono già mito. Siamo nella sfera degli archetipi del regime notturno dell’immaginario, siamo davanti a quelle fiabe dei fratelli Grimm che danno forma agli archetipi e alle correnti più inconsce dell’immaginario sociale. Non c’è una spiegazione razionale, c’è una storia straordinaria, leggendaria, che, allo stesso tempo, è profondamente umana, tragicamente sanguinante ed esemplare. Il defunto illustre è un corpo martoriabile che trascende dai suoi limiti e rende l’uomo un eroe, un riferimento ed un modello per la comunità. I defunti illustri sono l’elisir della società globale, un “qualche elisir capace di ristorare la società” (Campbell, 1949). Non può esistere divinità, oggi, che non sia, come nel mondo antico, un antenato speciale, ossia che non abbia, innanzitutto, un corpo umano, un corpo di carne e sangue, e che, con il suo sacrificio, non abbia favorito il mutamento sociale e culturale. Gli otto defunti illustri, con le personali vicende che hanno fatto di loro degli eroi tragici, hanno avuto la forza, nel pieno della modernità, di rigenerare la società toccandola nelle sue viscere assopite, disintegrate. Essi rappresentano i ruoli marginalizzati, di cui parla Gilbert Durand, che diventano fattori di sconvolgimenti (…), fermenti di contestazione, l’incarnazione delle risorgenze mitologiche (Durand, 1996) che si stagliano nell’ordine istituzionalizzato. La loro forza rigeneratrice si è unita all’occasione tecnica (Internet) e la miscela è diventata esplosiva. Questi personaggi sono diventati l’elisir che ha ristorato e che continua a ristorare la società globale, in un immenso abbraccio connettivo. I defunti illustri sono stati degli acceleratori del cambiamento sociale, immaginario, che ci ha condotto dall’era moderna e il suo silenzio rituale all’era elettrica e alla rinnovata possibilità dell’incanto. Una possibilità che vede nello spazio cerimoniale della Rete la sua realizzazione. La morte degli otto personaggi, più di altro, ha fatto riaffiorare, in maniera epidermica, la necessità condivisa a livello macro-sociale e globale, di ritorno al mito, come impresso nel pensiero di Gilbert Durand (1996). Questi eroi tragici hanno consentito alla collettività globale di stringersi nuovamente in una religione dell’incanto, in un sistema rituale che crede nelle emozioni tanto quanto nell’immortalità, nella ciclicità del tempo, nella condivisione. E, come un insegnamento ristoratore, hanno consentito alla collettività di trasferire tutto questo nella propria vita di tutti i giorni, per trovare conforto davanti alla perdita dei propri cari e per dare senso a tutta la sua esistenza. Infine, un altro risultato particolarmente interessante emerso dall’analisi dei contenuti e sul quale vale la pena soffermarsi, perché si presenta come indicativo della qualità del rapporto con la morte della nostra era elettrica, è il ruolo che la musica sembrerebbe ricoprire nella ritualità della Rete, un ruolo che va oltre la presenza di elementi melodici nei rituali descritti da Ernesto De Martino (1959). Rispetto all’idealtipo costruito, si è notata, cioè, una differenza del ruolo della musica. Come nel mondo antico analizzato da De Martino, la musica, intesa come elemento melodico, resta un elemento chiave del rito funebre, per la sua forza trascendentale e la sua capacità di insinuarsi nel notturno dell’animo umano. Mantiene il suo posto. Ma con una caratteristica in più rispetto al passato. Oggi, la digitalizzazione della musica consente un’ulteriore possibilità: la personalizzazione del brano funebre. Il che significa che, al posto di un repertorio collettivo, limitato ad alcuni canti ufficiali da usare in occasione delle ritualità funerarie, per esempio i canti liturgici della chiesa cattolica, si assiste oggi ad un processo in cui ogni defunto ha il suo brano, che diventa la preghiera a lui destinata. Nell’infosfera il patrimonio immane, nonché estremamente vario, di musica disponibile consente una sorta di personalizzazione commemorativa musicale. Non solo i defunti illustri sono ricordati per quello che hanno cantato o per un brano che a loro è stato pubblicamente dedicato, ma ognuno di noi, grazie alla digitalizzazione, alla reiterazione e alla diffusione massiccia di musica, ha il suo brano, quello che, quando verrà ascoltato, farà pensare a noi, quello che verrà suonato o cantato per pregare per noi, per commemorarci, per celebrarci. È così che, nell’era che noi conosciamo per l’inondazione di immagini in eccesso, che ci scorrono ormai indistintamente davanti, la maschera mortuaria, intesa come immagine visiva, in qualche modo perde forza e, laddove necessario, laddove, cioè, si voglia lasciare un segno, viene soppiantata, invece, dalle melodie. Più che le immagini che sono innumerevoli, si può dunque arrivare a notare che la vera icona dell’infosfera, l’imago dei defunti della nostra era, la nostra maschera mortuaria sembrerebbe essere racchiusa nel brano musicale. L’immagine sacra si smaterializza. Il che significa, che mentre le immagini scorrono perdendo, in qualche modo, di rappresentatività, mentre viviamo una invasione (…), un’inflazione dell’immagine (Durand, 1996), la maschera mortuaria sembra essere plasmata, oggi, dalla musica. 2.6 Contributi alla letteratura esistente Si ritiene che il valore di questo lavoro, oltre che per i suoi risultati, risieda nella capacità di aver elaborato una metodologia utile all’osservazione di un tema estremamente complesso come quello del rapporto con la morte all’interno di un ambiente altrettanto complesso quale quello della Rete. Senza contare l’importante difficoltà di comprendere un passaggio epocale che è contemporaneo alla scrivente. Il che significa che questo studio si inserisce appieno nelle suggestioni e riflessioni in atto in ambito sociologico rispetto al digitale, alle sue implicazioni umani e sociali, ma, ciò che si è cercato di fare in più, per contribuire al progresso della conoscenza, è stato avvalersi di strumenti empirici modellati sulla base delle domande della ricerca. Tale metodologia non ha la pretesa di essere esaustiva, ma si ritiene che grazie ad essa si è potuto dare un fondamento empirico alle suggestioni e riflessioni che permeano il dibattito scientifico contemporaneo. 2.7 Conclusioni Concedendosi una riflessione conclusiva sulla nostra era e sulla nostra vita, si ritiene che, invertendo per un attimo lo sguardo e interpretando il pensiero di Émile Durkheim (1912), la presenza di una rinascente forma religiosa connettiva, di un reincanto elettrico, rappresenti, innanzitutto, una conferma dell’esistenza stessa dell’infosfera. Il legame religioso, nel pensiero di Durkheim, è alla base dell’esistenza sociale. Il che significa che, se esiste un’infosfera, se la si può intendere come ecosistema, come ambiente sociale globale, è anche perché, oltre agli stili di vita, condividiamo gli stessi morti. La presenza di defunti illustri celebrati globalmente nella Rete, insomma, conferma che è necessario ormai ragionare in termini globali di vita onlife, di infosfera, di immaginario connettivo. La Rete è, come da pensiero di Alberto Abruzzese, a cui si è già fatto riferimento, la vita che siamo, è una dimensione di esistenza in contaminazione e scambio continuo con quella fisica. Dato questo assunto, ciò che è emerso chiaramente dall’analisi dedicata ai defunti illustri dell’infosfera, è che la società globale torna a rivendicare il bisogno del mito, la necessità di elevarsi e dare senso cosmologico all’esistenza attraverso l’empatia generata da figure simboliche, da archetipi umani, da eroi, da modelli immortali di straordinarietà. È intorno ad essi che la collettività globale si stringe profondamente. Eppure la Rete finisce spesso nell’occhio del mirino, tanto da spingere illustri autori, come il filosofo coreano Byung-chul Han, a parlare di società senza dolore e di fine dei riti. Viene allora da chiedersi: cosa si nasconde nel fiume notturno di quello svago e di quel piacere? Sappiamo che ogni cambiamento epocale di immaginario avviene sempre in maniera non del tutto lineare e pacifica. In tal senso, la società globale sembra vivere, in realtà, una fase di drammatica transizione. Siamo tornati a rivendicare il rapporto emotivo con la morte nei territori della Rete. Su questo non sembra esserci dubbio. Ma questa esigenza di relazione e religione deve scontrarsi, ancora, con le tracce indelebili della modernità. L’emozione, l’angoscia, per usare ancora Heidegger (1927), a cui la società globale è pronta e che già esperisce nei territori della Rete, si scontra con un sistema sociale fortemente moderno, con una scienza, per esempio, che ancora cerca di spostare l’attenzione sulle intelligenze artificiali, come se il problema esistenziale dell’uomo fosse questo. Se l’emozione è pronta, burocraticamente e giuridicamente, invece, morire, ammalarsi, invecchiare, toccare una salma, sono ancora una vergogna. Emozione e corpo si ritrovano separati, al punto che la tanta violenza in atto sembra riportare chi la compie ad un imprevisto contatto con le ferite e un corpo che muore, quasi non lo avesse previsto. Perché di fatto la morte è, in lui, da tempo immemorabile, dimenticata. Bisognerebbe riuscire a restituire al corpo la sua dimensione originaria, accendere un faro su questo dilemma, perché si nota un grande smarrimento: il corpo si era quasi affrancato dai suoi limiti, grazie ai new media, ma proprio questi riportano la morte a dominare l’immaginario sociale. La confusione è enorme. Ci ritroviamo in una fase, di certo, in cui la nostra seconda natura, quella artificiale, è tanto evoluta da non avere quasi più bisogno del corpo. Ma ciò non fa altro che sottolineare con più forza l’ambiguità: noi abbiamo comunque un corpo. Ed esso muore. Questo è un fatto innegabile. Come lungamente visto. Mentre la nostra era elettrica ci lascia navigare, liberi, completamente, mentre ci fa credere che non abbiamo bisogno del corpo, mentre esso, in un certo senso, perde massa, di fatto, se pur metamorfosato, lui pesa, incredibilmente. Il dilemma è enorme. E sanguina. L’ambiguità è profonda, tanto che se da un lato commentiamo con like e faccine sorridenti, dall’altro ci spingiamo fino ai sucidi online, quasi inconsapevoli dell’implicazione fisica di un tale atto. Ciò che sembra mancare è l’equilibrio, la comprensione profonda di che trattamento dobbiamo, nell’era del simulacro, a questo corpo martoriabile. La narrazione è, attualmente, confusa, come in ogni passaggio epocale. Si dovrebbe meglio riflettere su questo, al fine di cogliere in che direzione vada il progresso dello spirito umano e l’evoluzione sociale, globale. L’avanzare del mondo artificiale umano, trascinerà con sé, sempre, senza potersi liberare di esso, il dilemma di un corpo che muore. Il punto è cercare di capire come tutto questo si coniughi all’era elettrica, all’era della smaterializzazione per eccellenza. 2.8 Limiti e traiettorie di ricerca futura Avendo a che fare con una questione antropologica che è alla base dell’essenza stessa dell’uomo, il rapporto con la morte, e muovendosi in un ecosistema, quello della Rete, privo di confini e difficilmente domabile, si ritiene che questa indagine abbia, con i propri strumenti, penetrato solo in alcuni dei meandri possibili. Sono innumerevoli le implicazioni e riflessioni potenziali. Nonostante questo, si ritiene di aver raggiunto dei risultati significativi e fedeli all’era elettrica, risultati che aprono lo scenario ad una possibile nuova ricerca che rappresenterebbe lo sviluppo di questa: cosa ne sarà dei corpi dei defunti? Quello che si è notato è che la commemorazione collettiva ha ormai perso, quasi del tutto, i suoi legami con la presenza fisica. In Rete ci sono moltissimi video di visite alle tombe dei defunti illustri, girati, per lo più, da anime solitarie che si aggirano in spazi semivuoti. Sembra che ormai siano sufficienti le iniziative di reporter occasionali che condividono tributi, gite alle tombe etc. E qui si arriva ad una domanda cruciale: e il funerale? Sarà lo stesso un giorno anche per il funerale? Fino ad oggi esso sembra mantenere ancora un legame con lo spazio fisico, in quanto resta salda la necessità di deposizione della salma. Si pensi alle file di ore e ore che i fedeli hanno sopportato per un ultimo saluto alla salma della Regina Elisabetta. Sembra legittimo chiedersi, però, se non sia possibile che l’evoluzione delle pratiche funerarie dell’infosfera ci condurranno alla perdita anche di quest’ultima connessione con lo spazio fisico. Ci si chiede, cioè, cosa accadrà se, insieme alla crescita dei numeri della commemorazione in Rete, dovessero continuare a crescere anche le pratiche della cremazione e dello spargimento di ceneri o quei traguardi di sepoltura a cui lavora la scienza, come la Capsula Mundi. Se i cimiteri e gli spazi fisici della deposizione dovessero perdere il motivo della loro stessa esistenza, mentre Internet continuerà a prendere spazio nell’esistenza quotidiana globale, è possibile che anche il funerale perderà la sua connessione alla salma e alla sua deposizione? Esisteranno ancora i cimiteri? Esisteranno ancora i funerali? O ci sarà semplicemente qualcuno che sarà istruito e pagato per occuparsi, in completa solitudine, dei nostri corpi, rimettendoli nel circolo della natura, mentre, nel frattempo, la comunità dei cari, dimentica del nostro corpo, ci starà celebrando in Rete? Magari basterà un unico reporter che riprenderà l’evento, mentre la cerimonia avviene online o chissà dove? O, addirittura, arriveremo al punto che la fine del corpo non ci interesserà più, perché tanto l’uomo non sarà più il suo corpo, ma tutta la mappa di sé che avrà costruito in Rete? È questa la direzione verso cui si sta andando? Per rispondere bisognerà riaggiornarsi tra qualche anno.
RE-INCANTO ELETTRICO L’immaginario della morte nell’era globale
Mininno, Lucilla
2024
Abstract
1. An introduction to research In this research, which is based on the idea that the relationship with death is the result of an anthropological necessity and that it occupies a decisive place in the social imaginary, the end is observed in its indissoluble and dichotomous relationship with life and its manifestations. Art, the meaning of community itself, ritual, all the practices that can be recognised as the signs of the spectacle of life and human beauty, have originated, first and foremost, from this common condition. It is the beauty and spectacularity of the collective journey, therefore, that one intends to observe. One observes death, in order to have a look at life. And that is why the reader is asked to abandon, just as the writer has done, the feeling that links the image of death to personal sorrows and memories, and to look at it, instead, as a source, even if harrowing, of beauty. 2. Summary 2.1 Introduction The object of study around which this research moves is how the relationship with death can be considered an anthropological human condition i.e. as a relationship with permanent, archetypal characteristics, which manifests itself in cultural forms. Such forms flow in the spirit and direction of the dominant imaginary and, as such, tell us about it. But that is not all. The quality of the relationship that collectivity entertains with death is considered determinant with respect to the shaping of the imaginary nature of social existence. Fully espousing the thought of one of the authoritative founding fathers of sociology, the German Georg Simmel, it is assumed that since 'death is placed with its very nature' (Simmel, 1918), man receives from death the form of his life. Social life and the relationship with death are considered the two decisive sides of the same collective coin and each tells of the other, in a relationship of absolute complementarity. It is believed, for all that, that as long as we have a body that dies, the relationship with death cannot be resolved and will always need frames of narration that give meaning to existence. Starting here, this research seeks, first of all, to reflect on how modernity has not, in fact, destroyed the necessity of the relationship with death. Referring to the illustrious vision of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1976), one of the characteristics of modernity consists, in fact, in having excluded death from the symbolic circulation of the group. At the macro-social dimension, it becomes a taboo, something not to be talked about, an accident that interrupts the progress of existence. Compared to the ancient world (De Martino, 1958), in modernity, the value that the subject, both individual and collective, assigns to death and the space it occupies in its representations changes. Death, on a macro-social dimension, disappears. At least from the physical and symbolic places that were consecrated to it. Collective rituals themselves are banned from social life. In this way, one plunges into that disenchantment of the world, amply observed by Max Weber (1919), which deprives the community of a cosmological narrative that gives meaning, in a convincing manner, to death and thus provides the enchantment necessary to face all of existence. What is intended to be reflected upon is how such disenchantment does not, however, mean the end of the necessity of the social relationship with death, of the need, that is, for the comfort of a collectively shared representation that touches the visceral senses. Modern social life has not ceased to be conditioned by the dilemmatic presence of the end. The point is that, resorting to the illustrious thought of Martin Heidegger (1927), a great reference of this investigation, fear has represented the emotional tonality that has permeated modernity. Consequently, symbolic estrangement and ritual isolation represent the forms that the relationship with death has taken in modernity, but not its resolution. On the basis of these considerations, the phenomenon that will be analysed in detail, empirically, is how today, in the electric age (McLuhan, 1964), the relationship with death finds both its place in the group's symbolic exchange and its ritual space. All this in the macro territories of the Net. That is, a new religious form seems to be reconfiguring itself that binds global society in the meanders of the Net, a global imaginary re-enchantment, which is defined by this study as electric reenchantment, precisely because it refers to the era that has built its identity on the immaterial force of electricity. It should be noted, in this regard, that the meaning of the word "religion", taken as structural in this investigation, is independent of the great traditional, monotheistic religious systems. It refers, instead, to the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1912), to the Latin derivation of religo-religere (lat. legare, to bind, to hold together) and, therefore, to the contagiousness of a spontaneous human force, of a common feeling made up of energy, that binds human beings. It is a force that stems from effervescence, from an "over-activity [that] has the effect of a general stimulation of individual consciences... It is thus in these effervescent social environments and from this very effervescence that the religious idea seems to have been born" (Durkheim, 1912). The observation of this global religious phenomenon, considered crucial for the very understanding of the contemporary imaginary and whose analysis finds support in the studies of Digital Death and contemporary philosophy, represents the object of study of the empirical part of the research. In order to elaborate this analysis, the theoretical framework of the entire investigation is constructed in advance. 2.2 Objectives and research questions Given the object of study introduced, the specific objective of this research is to observe the collective funeral rituals practised on the Net and aimed to celebrate and commemorate certain illustrious dead of the infosphere (Floridi, 2017), i.e. of the global environment generated by the continuous, and by now inevitable, contamination between the dimensions of digital devices and the dimensions of physical reality. Indeed, it is believed that such practices represent the tangible expression of the resurgent global religious form. From here, one will attempt to understand the new imaginary of death, the quality of the imaginary re-enchantment (Durand, 1996). One will try to understand around what it is generated, what animates it, what are its structuring principles, in order to better understand, in general, our world, our social imaginary. For this purpose, after the construction of the theoretical framework, the third part will identify some of those illustrious dead whose deaths have aroused global interest, constant over time and still relevant today. This means that an attempt will be made to understand whether the new saints of the electric age exist, the moral references of the global religious form that being constructed in the territories of the Net. Identifying the existence of illustrious dead in the infosphere, and understanding the collective forms of their celebration, is considered crucial. The funerary artefacts that have enabled the study of past imaginaries of death, and hence the understanding of civilisations themselves, are, in fact, mainly those linked to illustrious ancestors, religious leaders, saints and so on. In other words, the understanding of past civilisations has been made possible, above all, thanks to the existence of personages to whom, on a macro-social level, special care and collective attention has been devoted, during funerals and during moments of commemoration. They are the fulcrum of the religious bond, without them one could not even speak of religion. Likewise, such should be the illustrious dead of our era: the fulcrum of the global religious bond. An analysis of the collective ritual forms intended for the death of these globally famous figures, who still remain a moral reference point today, can reveal, in general, the characteristic elements of the quality of the global imaginary of death in the electric age, as well as the type of civilisation now existent. And so: does global society have its illustrious dead? And if so, what is the new ceremonial space? What is the new imaginary of death? And how does the reenchantment of the infosphere reconfigure, what enables an extended society such as the global one to hold itself in a religious bond? And what does all this tell us about the very nature of global society? These are the questions that drive the research. Going into the specifics, the investigation is thus divided into three parts. In the first part, intended for the construction of the theoretical framework, we first define the perspective of the investigation, which is that of the sociology of the imaginary. In order to better understand the main definitions of the imaginary that sociology has inherited from the minds of the French anthropologist Gilbert Durand (1960) and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2003), one starts, in advance, with the results achieved by the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler (1928), Arnold Gehlen (1940) and Helmuth Plessner (1928). Briefly summarising the thought of the three authors, it can be argued that, in general, from the viewpoint of philosophical anthropology, man is distinguished from other living beings by his ability to transcend himself, to emancipate himself from the natural world and to create the artificial environment most suited to him. He does it through reason and creative intelligence, with which he continually produces the techniques he needs, and he does it without ever finding peace, without ever being able to achieve ultimate satisfaction, the utopian place completely suited to him. He does this, fundamentally, through a crucial human endowment: imagination. It represents that peculiar and foundational human capacity, which affords everything that has been observed by philosophical anthropology. Which means that, interpreting the findings of philosophical anthropology, to speak of reason or intelligence is, in essence, to speak of imagination. Etymologically, in Latin, imago is figure, but also shadow, ghost, spectre, representation, idea, as well defined by the Italian sociologist Pier Luca Marzo (2022). One has to look at imagination as a human peculiarity and as the engine of action, of creation. Much of what we are and do is the result of the image, the representation we construct in our minds previously. It is, therefore, in grasping man's peculiar ability to create, over and over again, a nature suited to him, that philosophical anthropology has furnished the conceptual basis useful to the perspective of the sociology of the imaginary: since man possesses this endowment, there inevitably also exists a collective imagination that feeds a common worldview and which, from here, determines the construction of an artificial social environment and the related actions and practices. Without the vision of society as a collectively constructed artificial environment, thanks to imagination and through technology, one could not speak of the Imaginary. On the basis of these solid assumptions from philosophical anthropology, there are basically two general lines of thought regarding the definition of the imaginary. The first can be traced back to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2003), who defines the social imaginary as the set of ideologies, knowledge and shared images that give shape to social practices. In other words, the social imaginary is a form of tacit, implicit knowledge that is collectively shared and concerns mutual competences and intentions. It makes it possible to situate oneself in society and to foresee and know what to expect from the other. The second line of thought develops, on the other hand, from the complex socioanthropological analysis of the french Gilbert Durand (1960), for whom shared beliefs, ideologies and forms of knowledge, as they change, always rest on deep, unconscious and archaic substrates that remain fixed: the archetypes. These are the structuring principles of reality that change in their historical guise, but not in their essence. It is they that inspire the 'fundamental images of mythology, rituals and visions', writes essayist and historian of religions Joseph Campbell (1949). With Durand, we enter the sphere of the primordial images and vital forces present in the collective unconscious, we move into mythodology, thus defined by him, i.e. into that particular perspective, which this research fully espouses, that aims to penetrate the social imaginary in order to trace its structuring principles. Mythodology aims to recognise, that is, the archetypal matrix of the social imaginary in order to better understand its changes. Durand defines myth, in fact, as the deep structure (cf. Durand, 1996). The Imaginary is, therefore, a constellation of images, as Durand (1960) defines it, which as a coherent and dynamic whole constitute the substratum of mental life, of the inner life. Durand is also responsible for the distinction between the diurnal regime, the river in which flow all the symbols that have to do with selfassertion and the clear and rational understanding of the world, and the nocturnal regime where, instead, flow all the symbols that concern interiority, those symbols, in particular, with which 'men respond to the anguish of the decomposition of death, induced by the unpredictability of the changing faces of time, in a holistic and cyclical vision of the world' (Marzo, 2022). It is in the nocturnal regime, then, that the symbols relating to the relationship with death flow. Taking into account, thanks to Durand, the profound link that ties the question of death to the nocturnal currents of the social imaginary, the relationship with death is thus defined, by this research, as a total social fact (Mauss, 1925). The relationship with death is, that is, a fact dense with "rules of action recognisable on the basis of certain distinctive characteristics" (Durkheim, 1934), which has a binding and nonutilitarian function, which involves everyone and which permeates several dimensions and social institutions. A fact that, for all that, represents not only a tangible, but a particularly dense manifestation of the social imaginary. It belongs to man, in an indissoluble manner, since the moment he migrated from the condition of human animal to that of human being, a being, that is, imaginary, symbolic, technical and social. Which means, necessarily, that the relationship with death becomes increasingly complicated as social evolution becomes more complex. In this regard, this research identifies the main evolutions of the imaginary of death in connection, above all, with the macro changes that have occurred at the level of the occupation of social space and with regard to the collective perception of time. Space and time are, after all, two variables that have always affected the relationship with death and the meaning of existence more significantly than anything else. As we have expanded from the small community of tribes to the city-states and so on, not only has the space we occupy expanded and densified, but the temporal dimension, in parallel, has also changed its shape. Circular time gradually transfigured into a linearity made up of unique and unrepeatable moments, producing quite a few upheavals in the sense attributed to the relationship with death. This has required continuous updates, the incessant succession of new, socially shared frames, narratives and collective practices. The idea that the relationship with death is a total social fact becomes even more valid when one considers that the grave traces found in the course of time are those that have provided archaeology with useful elements for reconstructing the history of civilisations. The earliest human traces and evidence that have been found, and continue to be uncovered, are the images of funerary depositions and related rituals, just as the earliest constructions that have re-emerged are the burial sites. Which means that life has been, and continues to be, narrated by tombs. Then follows a recognition of the changes in the practices of the relationship with death (tombs and rituals) over the course of the evolution of social imaginaries, in order to verify how this relationship can actually be considered anthropological, albeit cultural in its evolutions and manifestations. The recognition thus highlights how, on the one hand, there is a reciprocal and continuous exchange link between social evolution and changes in the relationship with death and, on the other, there are certain recursive, permanent elements that are independent of cultural manifestations. With the important support of the work of the philosopher Jacques Choron (1971), the survey on the evolution of tombs and rituals starts from the primitive stages and ends with the advent of Christianity, gradually focusing on the Western dimension. In order to define the steps of the reconnaissance on the imaginaries of death, in addition to the anchors provided by the evolutions of the concepts of space and time, it was deemed useful to borrow the three-act structure of the hero's journey, proposed by the american screenwriter Christopher Vogler (1992). This structure, for use in creative writing, particularly film scripts, defines the arc of transformation of the protagonist of a story, who is referred to as the hero, and is based on the myth framework investigated by Joseph Campbell (1949). Taking the structure proposed by Vogler, one chooses to approach the reconnaissance of tombs and rituals and to observe the human history of the relationship with death as the development of a creative plot, which has as its protagonist an ideal hero who is the emblem of all humanity and who lives from prehistory to the present day. According to Vogler's model, the most significant steps in the history of the relationship between man and death are: ordinary world, triggering incident and call to adventure, rejection of the call, crossing the first threshold and entering the extraordinary world, approaching the cave, central trial, reward or state of grace, way back or fall, resurrection or inner change, resolution. In this sense, the story of the hero of the story we are about to write can be summarised as follows: the hero lives in an ordinary world in which, as he begins to move in a group, for purposes of defence and survival, he discovers the death of the other person. In this way, he comes into contact with a problem to be solved. To reach the resolution, the hero should embark on a journey, but, initially, he prefers to reject the call to adventure and look upon death as an accident. He considers death, that is, as an uncertain fact, which does not concern him. That is, until conditions around him change. As the tribes become larger and man becomes individualised, seeking shelter in small family groups, the hero begins to discover, in fact, the death of the prochain, of the loved one (Landsberg, 1933) and thus senses the certainty of the end. At this point he can no longer escape: he must face the problem and embark on his journey. He crosses the threshold and enters an extraordinary world in which, as the space around him widens and densifies and time takes on a linear form, he must confront, again and again, his serious problem. He must face various trials, waiting to find a solution that appears valid and resolving. This is how the hero arrives at the central test and finds the solution in the Abrahamic/monotheistic religions, in Christianity, in particular, as far as the West is concerned. This central trial brings him such a high reward that the hero, at this moment, is convinced that he has solved the problem and experiences a long state of grace. This is the midpoint, the moment of enlightenment. Once the state of grace has passed, however, the hero plummets vortically downwards. This is because, in fact, with the midpoint, the hero has not solved his real problem. He has not, in fact, faced an inner change, which is the real purpose of his journey. On the contrary, having unravelled the illusion of the state of grace, his problem and his condition get worse and worse (exasperations of religious dogma). The hero approaches the cave, comes into contact with the deepest areas of his shortcomings. The fall continues until the second turning point, or death experience, as Vogler defines it, i.e. the lowest point in his story, the moment, that is, when everything seems to be over, when it seems impossible to solve the problem (modernity). It is precisely this moment, however, that represents the only possible condition for true inner change. The hero, having let go of all resistance and having come into contact with the real problem, which is within himself, can experience a profound renewal, a transformation, which will lead him to true resolution (the electric age). In the first part, the hero's journey is interrupted, only to be resumed in the second part, with the advent of Christianity, because it is considered, in the history of the West, the breaking point of the system of funeral rituals practised, on a macro-social level, until its advent, as will be seen in the second part. Christianity is considered the beginning of the end of the enchantment, the beginning of that disenchantment of the world, treated by Max Weber (1919), which, in modernity, caused us to lose the order and comfort generated by the cosmology of the great collective narratives, of the total representations of the world in the face of death. Until the advent of Christianity, one can speak of that ancient world investigated, in depth, by the anthropologist and ethnologist Ernesto De Martino (1958), a world in which enchantment is based on the idea that superior and irrational forces and powers determine human existence, including death, restoring to man the meaning of his entire existence. It is a world in which collective rituality, the tangible expression of such narratives, shelters the group from that crisis of presence that undermines the social order and the survival of collective life. According to De Martino's investigations, the crisis of presence is, in fact, a crisis due to the psychic state of fascination, 'a psychic condition of impediment and inhibition, and at the same time a sense of domination, a being acted upon by a force as powerful as it is occult, which leaves the autonomy of the person, his capacity for decision and choice, with no margin' (De Martino, 1959). Fascination arises from a lack, which is not so much material as, above all, psychological and is to be avoided because it negatively affects active participation in group life. The group is the absolutely fundamental asset, to be safeguarded and protected. The rituality of the ancient world is, therefore, practised, collectively, for the rebirth of the individual within a group that must regain its order. It is with reference to the conditions of lability of presence that the protective function of magical ritual practices emerges. They are "socialised and traditionalised techniques" (De Martino, 1959) necessary to protect and reintegrate individual presence into the group. They are techniques made up of ceremonial gestures and words, as well as melodic themes, which together constitute a ritual. Gestures, words and melodic themes are, indeed, the fundamental elements of ritual in the ancient world. In De Martino's studies, funeral rites arise, therefore, like other practices, from the relationship that is established between the crisis of presence, generated by contact with the corpse, and the magical forms, precisely, typical of that cultural universe. What death does, fundamentally, is to wrest the presence of the deceased, both from his closest, the prochain, and from the community, profoundly modifying the shared space of collective experience and common life. With death, this collective space enters deeply into crisis. At this point, the community huddles together and stages, through actresses, prefects, a funeral lament in which both the individual mourning of the prochain and the collective mourning find convention and form. Still following the hero's journey of transformation and thanks to the scientific literature, the second section deals with the core from which the questions of this research were generated. By examining what has happened in modernity, in the West, starting with the exasperations of Catholicism, the intention is to dispel a certain illusion, consolidated by the modern perspective, that, with the achievements of science and medicine, it is possible to resolve the original dilemma of death. The chaos and devastation wrought by the exasperations of the Catholic Church's dominance, in particular by the Catholic Crusades first and the Wars of Religion later, greatly facilitated the process of secularisation that led us to the modern era. It is within Catholicism itself, that is, that there arises that rejection of a higher order dominating the human one and, with it, of collective rituals that will later be exasperated in modernity. After centuries of terror and wars, after centuries of the dominance of dogma and religious hierarchies, the modern subject ends up, in fact, by enclosing the concepts of Church and ritual in a single semantic weave, and then rejecting both. All the more so since, at the same time, the enlightened progress of science induces him to hope, at last, in the concrete possibility of finally freeing himself from the game that has always been open with death. The emblem of this turning point is represented by Napoleon's Edict of 12 June 1804, the Edict of Saunt Cloud, which sanctions and defines the process of moving cemeteries away from the centre of population and, with them, the symbolic presence of the dead in social life. However, within this general panorama, modern man, relegated to the individual sphere, does not in fact receive, from science, convincing answers about death, let alone practical indications of how to relate to it. Once the initial enthusiasm has passed, what modernity simply does with regard to death is to remove it from the symbolic exchange of the group, as widely observed by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1979), and to reject collective rituals. Confined within his individualism and deprived of the space of collective ritual, but unable, in fact, to rid himself of the dilemmatic relationship with death, modern man thus ends up falling into a dramatic void of narrative and meaning. He finds himself orphaned of the sources of every possible narrative: religion, science and magic. Deprived of the enchantment, he finds himself thrown into the dilemma of death in a far more dramatic way than any other moment in human history, because he finds himself alone. Bureaucratising the moment of the end and depriving the community of its rituals, modernity has not only failed to solve the dilemma of the end, it has exasperated it. It has led the hero to the fall, to the most dramatic moment in the character's transformation arc structured by Christopher Vogler (1992). If at the macro-social level we see this drift, at the micro-social level, however, we can observe how the relationship with death finds respite in that typology of topical common spaces, described by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, organised around 'intense shared emotion' (Taylor, 2003). The micro social spaces intended for the relationship with death, which are defined by the writer as ritual islands, represent a true form of modern resistance. An example of this is the doctrine of Spiritism, as well as the great famous funerals of modernity, those funerals that have remained in history for their great mass participation. One thinks, to name but one, of Abraham Lincoln, for whom, in 1865, a funeral tour was held that lasted two weeks. This is also reflected in all the spiritual movements that spread in the West after the end of the 19th century. Testifying to the impossibility of evading the collective relationship with death, there is, again, and certainly not in last place, Martin Heidegger, who right at the height of modernity, writes 'Sein und Zeit', a monumental work in which the philosopher links social existence to the emotional tonality with which the collective relates to death, arriving at defining man as being for death (Heidegger, 1927). Starting from the observation of such terrains of resistance, the fertile humus to begin to imagine how the symbolic exchange with death and the funeral rituality once again become protagonists of our electric age, thanks to the Web. It is the mass media first and the new media later, in fact, that offer the possibility of a new turning point, the most important one for the hero drawn by Vogler (1992), the one that leads him to the resolution of the problem. On the other hand, at this point in the investigation, having reached the height of modernity, one cannot fail to consider the influence that the advent of mass media has on modern collective life. All the more so when one considers the profound connections of mediology with the perspective of the sociology of the imaginary. One can grasp how the mass media, in general, and the Cinema, in particular, offer a useful opportunity for the rebirth of the symbolic exchange with death, on a macro-social level, far from the logics of religious dogma and those of science. In this sense, we choose to frame the evolution of media from the perspective of the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan, that is, understanding them as metaphors (McLuhan, 1964), as systems that act on perceptual structures. Metaphor comes, in fact, from the Greek metaphérein, and means to transport, where transport is a process of active translation that transforms everything it involves. Which is to say that mass media are metaphors that, by transporting the message, modify the experience of everything involved in the communication flow: the sender, the receiver and the message itself. In other words, mass media are not merely neutral means of passing on information, as is often the tendency in common sense, but have "sociological and psychological implications" (McLuhan, 1964). Communication is an active process of transformation, which does not depend so much on the content that is conveyed, but on the structural criteria with which the mass media organise it, acting on our perceptual and representational system, modifying it and being modified by it, in a continuous exchange. The media can be hot or cool. Hot are the media that give us a complete, fundamentally closed message, where there is a sender who acts and a receiver who reacts, i.e. media that envisage a one-way, high-definition participation (McLuhan, 1964); cool, on the other hand, refers to the freshness of those media that give us open messages, to that communication in which, instead of the high-definition relationship between sender and receiver, there is a reciprocal and continuous exchange of reactions, where an active participation of the subjects involved is necessary, which together complete the message. Since there are hot media and cool media, there are, accordingly, hot epochs and cool epochs, depending on the prevailing medium. According to this argument, the Internet becomes the emblem of a profound cooling of the world, a world in which the exchange of reciprocal and continuous relationships, of connections devoid of space and time boundaries and, above all, of manual rules, resurfaces. In the Internet, participation returns to give meaning to communication, as it was in ancient tribal villages dominated by orality. What changes between the two cool media, that of the Internet and that of the orality of tribal villages, lies in the physical nature of experience which, on the Net, dematerialises. And it is precisely on this knot of dematerialisation that McLuhan's discourse refers us to the analysis of the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin (1956), who observes the change in imagery produced by the new media precisely from the point of view of the dematerialisation of relationships and life. In his view, which is fully accepted here, the media evolution we have witnessed in the transition from modernity to the contemporary electric age lies precisely in the dematerialisation of space-time boundaries. And the watershed that made this process possible is represented, for Morin, by the advent of Cinema. Now, connecting this discourse to the objectives of the research, the Cinema becomes, from its inception, the new seat of the collective narrative of death, thus continuing the path begun in the first ceremonial chambers. Cinema boasts films that are undeniable and tangible evidence of the force with which the question of the relationship with limen, at the beginning of the 20th century, re-emerges in search of a new narrative and new collective practices. It is from Cinema, above all, that we have begun to witness, on a perceptual level, a rupture of the very, traditional sense of the real, a rupture that will help the evolution of the new relationship with death. It is here that the great epochal passage of the imaginary, from the modern to the contemporary, begins. In Morin's thought, the cinema is the medium that first generated an image projected on the screen that was completely impalpable and fleeting. The cinematic experience, moreover, resides in the collective spectacle, in the sharing of the experience in the theatre. But, above all, according to Morin, the hand of the film director generates, like a magical practice, a metamorphosis of reality, both in terms of time and in terms of space, the two variables that, once again, in their evolutions, contribute to the great changes of the imaginary. With Cinema, experience breaks free from the biological condition, from the bodily and spatial limit. And time, in turn, dilates, compresses, accelerates, all in the montage of shots. In this way, the spectator finds himself catapulted, affectively transferred, into a borderland where everything is possible, life and death, what is no longer and what is not yet. In line with McLuhan's thought, Morin observes how it is precisely the narrative techniques of Cinema and its conditions of fruition that induce in the spectator phenomena of projection and identification that bring him back into the dimension of myth, dream, magic, acting in this sense on his perceptive system. The spectator participates in the cinematic experience, in a process of magical, luminous, supernatural projection, beyond bodily limits. Continuing Morin's thought, if the advent of cinema breaks the clear division between reality and representation, making possible an interweaving and contamination of the two experiences, with Television the limit of the screen is definitively overcome. There is no longer an eye watching, rather the viewer finds himself immersed in the communicative environment, starting from his own individual, private space, as we would banally say, 'from home'. From here, the next step will be, with the reality show, to cross the boundary even physically. In this environment of membranes and transparent screens, the new media find fertile ground to take root and raise the stakes. In addition to the empathy that can be activated in front of the cinema screen, in addition to the immersion of the body in the communicative environment of reality television, the new media offer one more possibility: man no longer even needs his body to enter the screen. Man himself becomes immaterial, creates his own virtual simulacra and becomes the absolute protagonist of an ecosystem (Marzo, 2019) made up of experiences and relationships apparently separate from those of the corporeal dimension, but with which he actually has an intimate bond. It, the screen, becomes "the milieu that puts us in contact with the real, that makes experience visible in all its forms" (La Rocca, 2018). Life is completely contained in the medium. The Internet, digital platforms, and the new media thus become, in the words of the Italian sociologist and writer, Alberto Abruzzese, the life that we are (Abruzzese, 2009). It is no longer a problem of representing reality, as we have traditionally understood it up to this point, just as it is by no means enough to switch off the power to leave this new environment. Our perceptual system is modified by the mode of operation of the new media and it is with this connective type of perceptual system that we face our entire onlife (Floridi, 2017), a life that moves transversally and inevitably between digital and corporeal dimensions, without distinction, in a continuous flux. It is precisely in this framework that contemporary philosophy and Digital Death are moving. Experts in these fields have long been exploring the new forms of the relationship between humans and death on the Net. The studies of philosophers such as the Italian Davide Sisto (2018), who specialises in thanatology, digital culture and posthumanity, have in recent years highlighted how the territories of the Net, representing an existential dimension, offer themselves, almost spontaneously, also as the new site for the practice of mourning. Compared to modernity, death no longer appears as a private matter, mourning is no longer relegated to the intimacy of the individual and the small social group. Death becomes social: social networks are used to project individual sensitivities in the socialisation of mourning and to address discussions concerning death. Hence, as is the aim of this research, in the third part it will be attempted to understand whether this phenomenon takes on macro-social dimensions, whether it concerns, that is, global society and whether it is the sign of the reconfiguration of a global religious form, which has its own narratives and practices, as well as its new saints, its special ancestors. To this end, at the conclusion of the second part, by bringing together the constants of the relationship with death observed with the reconnaissance of death imaginaries and the evidence that emerged with modernity, drawing on the work of Max Weber and Ernesto De Martino's in-depth investigations, it is considered possible to construct an idealtype (Weber, 1922) of the collective ritual relationship with death. It will represent the conceptual beacon, the ideal model, with which to orient the observation of the empirical part, with which to move, that is, in the complex meanderings of our electric age. The idealtype of collective ritual relationship with death is defined as a set of collective practices intended for the rebirth of the deceased in the group and staged within a ceremonial space. The ultimate goal is the survival of the group itself. These practices involve a ritual script, socially instituted and traditionalised, comprising the verbal expression of collective emotions, certain codified gestures, which are nothing more than the mimic expression of the same emotions, words of praise that have the deceased as their object, and melodic elements. These idealtype funeral practices unfold in two main ritual moments, which are extremely interconnected. In the first ritual moment, the passage of the deceased, who migrates to his new condition, is accompanied collectively and emotionally. Once the rituality of passage is over, one proceeds with the construction of a horizon of crisis, through rituals of commemoration, which are nothing but the re-actualisation of the same rituals of the phase of passage, and which take place, usually, on the anniversary of the death or birth of the deceased. The rites of commemoration restore cyclicity to time, manage the horizon of crisis and re-establish, by renewing it, that bond between the living created at the moment of passage. It is for this reason that particular attention will be devoted, in the third part, to commemoration. Within these ritual moments, one can also observe the presence of certain recurring symbolic elements: the natural element (water, earth, fire), which symbolises regeneration and purification, in a pagan form; the death mask, which stops the sacred image of the deceased; the funeral trousseau, with which to allow the deceased to face his new existence and which is symptomatic of the idea of life continuing beyond death; the funeral banquet, a convivial moment during which the living celebrate the reintegration of the deceased into the group. If it is true that we are witnessing, today, a reconfiguration of the ritual relationship with death and of the symbolic exchange with it, such elements, mostly put into hibernation during modernity, should re-emerge with strength and macro-social scope within the global territories of the Net. At this point, the investigation shifts to the terrain of empirical observation. The third part is devoted to the experimental analysis of the reconfiguration of the funeral rites of global society, the leading subject of the electric age. The observation is conducted within the territories of the Net, the imaginary ecosystem that hosts our mediated lives (Bovalino, 2018) and focuses, in particular, on the celebration destined for the death of certain illustrious dead of the infosphere. Such dead, in fact, are comparable to those special ancestors who represented the cornerstone of every religious bond in the ancient world. This analysis takes place in the knowledge that the forms of celebration dedicated to them are reflected in the daily forms of celebration dedicated to the 'common' dead. The aim is to investigate how this celebration takes place, what forms it takes, and then, subsequently, to try to understand the nocturnal, unconscious motive that causes certain globally famous personalities to impose themselves as the illustrious dead in spite of other equally well-known and important celebrities. That is, we will try to understand what are the structuring principles of the new enchantment, of the new religion of the electric age, and, from there, understand something more about our global society. The empirical investigation is developed with a mixed approach, i.e. with two types of survey, one quantitative and one qualitative (details of the methodology are in the section dedicated to it). On the results of these surveys, an in-depth analysis will be based with which to answer the questions of this research. The quantitative analysis, made possible by the tools provided by the Net itself, Google and Google Trends in particular, identifies a number of celebrities whose death, as happened with the illustrious ancestors of antiquity and the saints of religions, shook the global community so deeply that it was compelled to gather en masse around them. They are personalities who have become the protagonists of cinema works and documentaries, and whose death, although it occurred before the appearance of the Internet, still occupies the first places of web searches, as well as collective spaces, including funeral videos and tribute videos (YouTube), dedicated sites and commemorative pages on social networks, especially Facebook, chosen for its versatility and particular binding factor. These are characters, in short, whose memory has transcended the temporal boundaries of mourning and transfigured itself into commemoration, characters who are not just fashions of the times, but are moral references. They are the new saints of our electric age. The illustrious deceased identified through the methodology and tools of this survey are: Marilyn Monroe (1962), Martin Luther King (1968), Bruce Lee (1973), Elvis Presley (1977), John Lennon (1980), Bob Marley (1981), Ayrton Senna (1994), Princess Diana (1997). And one cannot fail to notice immediately that these are celebrities who are known to have died at a young age and in a tragic and violent manner, in a total period between 1962 and 1997. Starting from this first, evident and tragic awareness, which already provides a reading perspective with which to go into the rest of the research, the qualitative survey phase focuses on a content analysis. The conceptual light that guides this observation is, as anticipated, the instrument of the idealtype. This analysis is developed among the comments to some of the funeral or tribute videos on YouTube, those with the most views and comments to be precise. The comments are considered, in fact, the most direct expression of the celebration of the illustrious dead by Net users. The content analysis was performed by creating, with the Comment Picker software, documents containing all the comments, one document for each video chosen. These documents were then analysed with the NVivo software. An overall Word Frequency, on all the documents of all the deceased, an individual Word Frequency, one for each deceased, and an analysis by Codes have been carried out. The Codes are obtained by identifying, among all the comments, the recurrent thematic nodes constructed through the categories of the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death: funeral mourning, made up of ritual words and gestures expressing emotions and feelings as well as words of praise addressed to the deceased, presence of at least one natural element indicative of regeneration/rebirth and circularity of time (water/fire/flowers), death mask, funeral outfit, funeral banquet (or convivial moment). Overall, it can be observed that both the outcomes of the Word Frequencies and the analysis for Codes confirm a close similarity between the collective ritual relationship with death on the Net and the categories of the idealtype. What emerges, undoubtedly, is the fact that there is a script, a funeral lament made up of the verbal expression of emotions, words of praise and ritual gestures represented according to the typical language of the Web (emoticons). A circular vision of time certainly dominates, a pagan vision, expressed as much in words as in visual signs, a vision that makes the illustrious dead into immortal heroes. What emerges, above all, is a religious bond that gives the group the feeling of sharing a common destiny and, in some way, of continuous rebirth. The group relocates the dead and reconstitutes its order, its balance, continuously. Given the necessary differences, the substantial closeness that has emerged between the results of the surveys carried out in the Network and the categories of the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death makes it possible to confirm, once again and in spite of modernity, that the essence and the purposes of the collective relationship with death conserve, in the course of the succession of imaginaries, a constant structural nucleus. That is to say, the objective of the collective relationship with death always remains the order and survival of the group, its cohesion. Even entering the meanderings of modern ritual islands, the structural core remains the same. And again, the very fact that, even in the territories of the Net, a ceremonial space intended for mourning is evidently being reconfigured, a place, that is, in which to share emotions, memories, references to an us, is evidence of the universal need to be part of a group that survives. Even today, we need to bring order to the tragic event of death, to the crisis of collective presence generated by it. There is a need to feel part of a common destiny, to unite through codified ritual funeral practices that, as fixed points, restore the feeling of making a highly thorny issue peaceful. The structural core of the relationship with death remains, therefore, the emotional sharing of the group, the participation in a collective mourning expressed through ritual practices. What clearly emerges from the empirical analysis is, therefore, how coparticipation, cum-being (Bovalino, 2018) and the collective practice of the relationship with death are the necessary apriori to the construction of any possible collective narrative. Herein lies, in fact, the defect of modernity. No collective representation can touch the viscera if it remains in conceptual isolation and lacks the emotional effervescence of a ritual form that expresses it. The modern individual, orphaned of the collective ritual, of the common space destined for mourning, has in fact seen his condition of fragility exacerbated before the darkest event of his nature and existence. He was deprived, that is, of the cultural death, of the second death, he remained a living corpse, without a defined destination (De Martino, 1958). No scientific explanation could take root in him, touch his innards and solve his dilemma. That is, until the possibility of a new ceremonial place for mourning appeared before his eyes, which happened the day the Internet entered our homes. From this moment onwards, modern man gradually approaches the practices of the relationship with death, but instead of a cave or a church, he has the Net. Thanks to the comparison with the idealtype, to the theoretical framework constructed in the first two parts and thanks to the biographies of the characters and everything that emerges from the documents dedicated to them, such as films and documentaries, going to observe, all of this, in depth, we can, therefore, outline the results of this investigation. In the next pages, in the section dedicated to the results, the answers to the questions of this research can thus be addressed. 2.3 Limitations of existing literature Before proceeding with the research, it was decided to verify the existence, in the field of the sociology of the imaginary and mediology, of a literature focused on the empirical analysis of the new forms of collective funeral rituals practised within the territories of the Net and seen as the expression of a new global religious form. Through the Dimensions database and the bibliometric maps obtained thanks to the VOSviewer software, it was found that, to date, no sufficiently in-depth literature has emerged in this regard. That is to say, according to the parameters of this research, no substantial literature has emerged that has focused empirically on the observation of collective, global funeral rituals practised on the Net, in order to interpret them as tangible expressions of a new global religious bond. Nor is there any literature in this sense that has focused, again empirically, on tracing the new saints of our era. If, in the construction of the theoretical framework, reference could be made to an extraordinary sociological literature on the relationship between man and death, in particular that of Georg Simmel, as well as to contemporary philosophical studies on the socialisation of mourning, there has not been an equally substantial sociological production, on the other hand, that deals in detail, on an empirical level, with the collective ritual relationship with death on the Net. Certainly there are important reflections on the relationship between man, death and the digital. Just as one cannot overlook those reflections, such as those of Michel Maffesoli (1988), on the rebirth of social structures and forms of rituality that bring us closer to those of the tribes of the past, of the ancient world, to use the parameters of this research. There is also an important and in-depth literature that addresses the issue of emotions in global society. Consider, for instance, the work of the Korean Byung-Chul Han (2021a/b) or that of the Italian Vincenzo Susca, in particular his Gioia tragica (2010). All of these reflections have been very useful for the conduct of the research and the understanding of its results, but no literature has been found that specifically takes the same empirical approach as this work and has the same objectives. The few studies that have emerged as most resonant with the object of this research, in the field of sociology, are those of the Italian Gianpiero Vincenzo, to whom is owed the work L'ordine rituale e la società digitale. Saggio sulla natura umana (2021), and those linked to the name of Bjørn Nansen, of the University of Melbourne, to whom are owed several publications in this direction. 2.4 Methododolgy In the first two parts of the research, the theoretical frame of reference was constructed using the existing literature. The third and last part, on the other hand, was devoted to the empirical investigation, developed with a mixed approach, within the territories of the Net. In more detail, two types of survey were carried out, a quantitative and a qualitative one. Finally, in order to answer the research questions, a depth analysis was carried out focusing on the results of the qualitative observation. The quantitative analysis, conducted with the tools provided by the Net itself, in particular Google and Google Trends, made it possible to identify some of the illustrious dead celebrated by the global infosphere community. The first names of the illustrious dead were identified by means of four variables: a) a famous funeral; b) global presence of the deceased's death in Net searches; c) continuous interest, until today, in his death, ever in Net searches; d) a consistent and continuous production of documents dedicated to him, including social pages, official sites, cinematographic works, documentaries and scientific articles. Other names were obtained, however, by retaining variables b, c, d and substituting, instead, the first, variable a. That is to say, it was also searched among the personalities who, although considered, from documents available on the Net, as the most influential of the 20th century, had not been celebrated with a majestic funeral, for reasons that tended to be related to their personal histories. Identified the illustrious deceased in the infosphere, the next step was the qualitative observation, developed into a content analysis. The funeral or tribute videos with the most views and comments were selected. With the Comment Picker software, documents were created containing all the comments of the selected videos. The documents were then analysed with the NVivo software. An overall Word Frequency, on all the documents of all the illustrious deceased, a single Word Frequency, one for each illustrious deceased, and an analysis by Codes were carried out. The latter was developed by identifying, among all the comments, recurrent thematic nodes, nodes that were defined through the categories of the idealtype constructed in the second part. The results of the comparison with the idealtype were interpreted and returned with the subsequent depth analysis, based on the mythodology of Gilbert Durand (1996). 2.5 Results Going into the details of the questions in this research, one can say that the answer is yes, the infosphere has its illustrious dead. There are deaths, as in the case of the eight personalities surveyed, that bind the global population of the Net around them, with a constant and still current interest over time. So much so that their celebration has extended to the present day. A veritable form of commemoration, a cult, has been generated. Like the sorcerers, the mythological characters of the ancient world, the saints of religious institutions (especially those from the dawn of time, such as Christ), the illustrious deceased of the infosphere are extraordinary and magical figures, characters who, in life, stood out for the enchantment they exercised over the community and who, precisely because of this enchantment, remain a reference even after their death. They are references so powerful that they survive even the ritual crisis of modernity. Which means that the death of these characters, as soon as the occasion (the Internet) arrived, broke through the barrier of symbolic and ritual silence of modernity, propagating itself to the infosphere. In this sense, one can raise the stakes and see, in the deaths of the illustrious dead, precisely one of the circumstances that favoured the ritual turning point under investigation. The sudden and tragic deaths of such popular figures can be included, that is, in that sphere of traumatic events, including the attack on the Twin Towers, which shook global collectivity precisely at the apex of that silence in the symbolic and ritual exchange with death found in the modern era. Where by apex is meant the moment that comes a moment before crisis and, therefore, change. They are deaths, theirs, that have contributed, emotionally, to pull the community out of its modern sense of slumber. They triggered the need to reconstruct a common space in which to practice collective mourning. These traumatic events can thus be considered a crucial part of the climax of the hero's journey, of that moment of transformation of the protagonist's relationship with death, which has been discussed throughout this research. Which could mean, consequently, that it was precisely because this emotional need was ripe, that the advent of the Internet provided the technical, mediological, perceptive opportunity for the reconstruction of collective grief. As if to say that the tragic and sudden death of these characters, like Charon, made us embark on an ark moored on the shore of late modernity, an ark that then, propelled by the currents of the new media, transported us to the shore of the electric age. The second, fundamental answer emerges from all this, which highlights a crucial crux for this investigation: in the electric age, a new ceremonial space is being reconfigured in which it is possible to celebrate, collectively, the death of the illustrious deceased. This space is not hierarchically constructed and is not based on institutional dogmas. The religious collective-connective space is not reconfiguring itself as a tangible expression of a grand and structured narrative that follows a superior order and imposes rules drawn from above, as has been the case with recent religious institutions. Nor is it basing itself, in the same way, on scientific explanations, on the logics of rationality, which, as we have seen, are ill-suited to the ritual necessities linked to the most unconscious issue of the social imaginary: death. The global collectivity of the infosphere would seem to need neither empirical evidence nor scientific explanations, nor even great transcendental gods to govern us from high above and show us the way. It needs, rather, emotionally catalysing characters. It needs emotional experiences, those emotions, as described by Heidegger (1927), which are the only ones that can restore our perception of the world and existence. The collective-connective space thus takes on the shape of a profoundly human, uncertain, fragile environment, a space of research, which resembles more the tombs of prehistory, the first pagan ceremonial places where our ancestors left marks on the cave walls, marks that have become, little by little, more and more sophisticated. It is the emerging fruit of emotional sharing and collective participation, the fruit of an effervescence, of an electricity that circulates globally. It is a space of solidarity, of group, of closeness. The Net thus becomes the new pagan cavern in which to lay our dead, but not to get rid of them, not to keep them out of sight, not so that they can, again, undertake a distant journey, but, rather, so that they remain circulating in the group and so that we can continue to communicate with them, on a daily basis. In this sense, the reconfiguring imagery of death brings us closer to the moment when the hero was called to adventure and, instinctively, we saw in death only a change in communication. It would seem that we, inhabitants of the infosphere, are also looking at death as a change in communication, perceiving ourselves within a connective system with no spatio-temporal boundaries or bodily limits, an environment in which the dead and the living are mixed and the former exert an influence over the latter. All this in the knowledge, however, that if all this is true, it is also true that, compared to the origins of the relationship with death, we have completely changed. We have been changed by our entire, unforgettable, history, by our awareness of all the distance we have come since we discovered the death of the prochain. But, above all, we have been metamorphosed by the techniques we have today, as per McLuhan's lesson (1964). We are not our ancestors, our technical and perceptive possibilities are different, but what emerges is that, like them, we are getting back in touch with the emotional tonality of anguish, as described by Heidegger (1927), abandoning that of fear, typical of the modern era. We are slowly trying to stop escaping our relationship with death and, in order to do so, we are not aspiring to an explanation and a solution to it, but are recovering, first and foremost, the emotional reassurance of the group, the collective bond with which we relate to death and, from there, to life. These are the knots that bring us closer to our ancestors in the ancient world. After the hero's journey, according to the structure proposed by Vogler (1992), we return to the starting point, to the ordinary world, to that moment when we discovered the death of the prochain. We do so, however, armed with different, perhaps more sophisticated tools. Certainly, we have changed inwardly. Now, given these results, it is possible to move gradually towards the heart of the current reflection: what is it that makes us cling, globally, to one another? Around what is the religious enchantment of the electric age recreated? What are the mechanisms that are triggered and allow the group to unite around the source of its deepest anxieties? All the more so when one considers that one is dealing, in the case of the electric age, with a community of global dimensions. To bond such a large group, the desire to share is not enough, the decision to adhere to a narrative and set up a common ceremonial space is not enough. A cold decision is not enough, it is not enough to provide a collective explanation for death and consequently establish ritual practices that tangibly represent it. So why are there binding factors and others that are not? Why are there factors that generate, in the face of death, a collective effervescence and others that do not? Why is it that only the death of certain characters becomes a source of religious bonding? What has become evident from the interweaving of depth between the results of the comparison with the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death and the biographies of the illustrious dead, is that the mechanism that seems to be triggered in the global collectivity is the one that underlies the structure of the myth investigated by Joseph Campbell (1949) and that is expressed in the arc of transformation of the character drawn by Christopher Vogler (1992). What has become evident from the interweaving of the depths between the idealtype of the collective ritual relationship with death, the content analysis and the biographies of the illustrious dead, is that the mechanism that seems to be triggered in the global collectivity is the one that underlies the construction of myth and fairy tales, that is, precisely the one that is expressed in the arc of transformation of the character drawn by Christopher Vogler (1992). Evidently, to bind the collectivity around a myth, there must be a hero who begins his story with a fatal flow, a lack, an incompleteness, more or less explicit and more or less serious, of which he is not even aware and which he only faces when he receives the call to adventure, when he is confronted with the need to change. When he accepts the call, the hero begins his journey into an extraordinary world, different from the one he started out in, a world studded with trials, which leads him to the peak of his possibilities, to a true moment of grace, only to plunge from there towards the breaking point. The hero must, in fact, know his symbolic death, in the sense that he must know and practise self-sacrifice in favour of an inner change. Because it is this inner change from the conditions of departure that becomes a model for all those who will know this story, that becomes the element thanks to which the spectators will empathise with the hero. The stories of the illustrious deceased seem to respect precisely this mechanism: that which touches the bowels of the community, to the point of giving rise to a deep religious bond, has to do with the structure of myth. The stories of characters who have become illustrious deceased respond to the structure of the myth and the character's arc of transformation, the hero's journey. Even without the hand of a scriptwriter, their stories are already myth. We are in the sphere of the archetypes of the nocturnal regime of the imaginary, we are in front of those fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm that shape the archetypes and the most unconscious currents of the social imaginary. There is no rational explanation, there is an extraordinary, legendary story, which, at the same time, is profoundly human, tragically bleeding and exemplary. The illustrious deceased is a martyred body that transcends its limits and makes the man a hero, a reference and a model for the community. The illustrious deceased is the elixir of global society, an 'elixir of some kind that can restore society' (Campbell, 1949). There can be no deity, today, who is not, as in the ancient world, a special ancestor, i.e. who does not, first and foremost, have a human body, a body of flesh and blood, and who, through his sacrifice, has not fostered social and cultural change. The eight illustrious deceased, with the personal vicissitudes that made them tragic heroes, had the power, in the midst of modernity, to regenerate society by touching it in its dormant, disintegrated bowels. They represent the marginalised roles, of which Gilbert Durand speaks, that become factors of upheaval (...), ferments of contestation, the embodiment of mythological resurgences (Durand, 1996) that stand out in the institutionalised order. Their regenerative force has combined with the technical occasion (Internet) and the mixture has become explosive. These celebrities have become the elixir that has refreshed and continues to refresh global society in an immense connective embrace. The illustrious deceased were accelerators of the social, imaginary change that led us from the modern era and its ritual silence to the electric age and the renewed possibility of enchantment. A possibility that sees its realisation in the ceremonial space of the Net. The death of the eight characters, more than anything else, has epidermically resurfaced the shared macro-social and global need for a return to myth, as imprinted in Gilbert Durand's (1996) thought. These tragic heroes have allowed the global collectivity to huddle again in a religion of enchantment, in a ritual system that believes in emotions as much as in immortality, in the cyclical nature of time, in the sharing. And, like a restorative teaching, they have allowed the collective to transfer all this into its everyday life, to find solace in the face of the loss of loved ones and to give meaning to its entire existence. Finally, another particularly interesting result that emerged from the content analysis and on which it is worth dwelling, because it presents itself as indicative of the quality of our electric age's relationship with death, is the role that music would seem to play in the rituality of the Net, a role that goes beyond the presence of melodic elements in the rituals described by Ernesto De Martino (1959). Compared to the idealtype that was constructed, a difference was noted in the role of music. As in the ancient world analysed by De Martino, music, seen as a melodic element, remains a key element of the funeral rite, due to its transcendental force and its ability to insinuate itself into the nocturnal of the human soul. It retains its place. But with one more feature than in the past. Today, the digitisation of music allows a further possibility: the personalisation of the funeral song. Which means that instead of a collective repertoire, limited to a few official songs to be used at funeral rituals, e.g. the liturgical songs of the Catholic Church, we are now witnessing a process in which each deceased person has his or her own song, which becomes the prayer intended for him or her. In the infosphere, the immense, as well as extremely varied, wealth of music available allows for a kind of musical memorialisation. Not only are the illustrious deceased remembered for what they sang or for a song that was publicly dedicated to them, but each of us, thanks to digitisation, reiteration and the massive dissemination of music, has his or her own song, the one that, when heard, will make people think of us, the one that will be played or sung to pray for us, to commemorate us, to celebrate us. It is thus that, in the era that we know from the flood of images in excess, which now flow indiscriminately in front of us, the death mask, understood as a visual image, somehow loses strength and, where necessary, where, that is, one wants to leave a mark, it is supplanted, instead, by melodies. More than the images that are innumerable, one may therefore come to note that the true icon of the infosphere, the imago of the dead of our era, our death mask, would seem to be encapsulated in the piece of music. The sacred image dematerialises. Which means, that as images flow by losing, somehow, their representativeness, as we experience an invasion (...), an inflation of the image (Durand, 1996), the death mask seems to be shaped, today, by music. 2.6 Contributions to existing literature It is believed that the value of this work, in addition to its results, lies in its ability to have elaborated a methodology useful for the observation of an extremely complex theme such as that of the relationship with death within an environment as complex as that of the Net. Not to mention the important difficulty of understanding an epochal passage that is contemporary to the writer. Which means that this study is fully in line with the suggestions and reflections taking place in the sociological sphere with respect to the digital, its human and social implications, but, what we have tried to do in addition, in order to contribute to the advancement of knowledge, has been to make use of empirical tools modelled on the basis of the research questions. This methodology does not claim to be exhaustive, but it is believed that thanks to it, it has been possible to give an empirical foundation to the suggestions and reflections that permeate the contemporary scientific debate. 2.7 Conclusions Granting a final reflection on our era and our life, it is believed that, reversing our gaze for a moment and interpreting the thought of Émile Durkheim (1912), the presence of a resurgent religious connective form, of an electric re-enchantment, represents, first and foremost, a confirmation of the very existence of the infosphere. Religious connection, in Durkheim's thought, is the basis of social existence. Which means that if there is an infosphere, if it may be understood as an ecosystem, as a global social environment, it is also because, in addition to lifestyles, we share the same deaths. The presence of illustrious deceased celebrated globally on the Net, in short, confirms that it is now necessary to think in global terms of onlife, of infosphere, of connective imaginary. The Net is, as Alberto Abruzzese thought, to which reference has already been made, the life that we are, it is a dimension of existence in continuous contamination and exchange with the physical one. Given this assumption, what emerged clearly from the analysis devoted to the illustrious deceased of the infosphere, is that global society once again claims the need for myth, the need to elevate itself and give cosmological meaning to existence through empathy generated by symbolic figures, human archetypes, heroes, immortal models of extraordinariness. It is around them that the global collectivity clings profoundly. Yet the Net often ends up in the eye of the crosshairs, so much so that it has prompted illustrious authors, such as the Korean philosopher Byung-chul Han, to speak of a society without pain and the end of rituals. The question then arises: what lies hidden in the nocturnal river of that leisure and pleasure? We know that any epochal change of imagery always takes place in a way that is not entirely linear and peaceful. In this sense, global society actually seems to be experiencing a phase of dramatic transition. We are back to claiming the emotional relationship with death in the territories of the Net. Of this there seems to be no doubt. But this need for relationship and religion must clash, again, with the indelible traces of modernity. The emotion, the anguish, to use Heidegger (1927) again, for which global society is ready and which it already experiences in the territories of the Net, clashes with a strongly modern social system, with a science, for example, which still tries to shift its attention to artificial intelligences, as if this were man's existential problem. If emotion is ready, dying, falling ill, growing old, touching a corpse, bureaucratically and legally, are still a shame. Emotion and body find themselves separated, to the point that the much violence taking place seems to bring the one committing it back into unexpected contact with wounds and a dying body, almost as if he had not foreseen it. Because, in fact, death has been forgotten in him since time immemorial. It should be possible to return the body to its original dimension, to light a beacon on this dilemma, because one can see a great bewilderment: the body had almost been freed from its limits, thanks to the new media, but it is these that bring death back to dominate the social imaginary. The confusion is enormous. We find ourselves in a phase, certainly, in which our second nature, the artificial one, has evolved so much that it hardly needs the body any more. But this only emphasises more strongly the ambiguity: we still have a body. And it dies. This is an undeniable fact. As we have long seen. While our electric age lets us navigate, free, completely, while it makes us believe that we do not need the body, while it, in a certain sense, loses mass, in fact, although metamorphosed, it weighs, incredibly. The dilemma is enormous. And it bleeds. The ambiguity is profound, so much so that while on the one hand we comment with likes and smiley faces, on the other we go so far as to sucide online, almost unaware of the physical implication of such an act. What seems to be missing is balance, a deep understanding of what treatment we owe, in the age of the simulacrum, to this martyred body. The narrative is, at present, confused, as in any epochal transition. One should better reflect on this, in order to grasp in which direction the progress of the human spirit and social, global evolution is going. As the artificial human world advances, it will always drag with it, without being able to get rid of it, the dilemma of a dying body. The point is to try to understand how all this fits in with the electric age, the age of dematerialisation par excellence. 2.8 Limitations and directions for future research Dealing with an anthropological question that underlies the very essence of mankind, the relationship with death, and moving in an ecosystem, that of the Net, which lacks boundaries and is difficult to tame, it is believed that this investigation has, with its own tools, penetrated only some of the possible meanderings. There are countless potential implications and reflections. In spite of this, it is believed that significant results have been achieved that are faithful to the electric age, results that open the scenario to a possible new research that would represent the development of this one: what will become of the bodies of the deceased? What has been noticed is that collective commemoration has now lost, almost completely, its ties with physical presence. On the Net there are plenty of videos of visits to the graves of the illustrious deceased, shot, for the most part, by lonely souls wandering around in semi-empty spaces. It seems that the initiatives of occasional reporters sharing tributes, trips to the graves, etc. are now sufficient. And here we come to a crucial question: what about the funeral? Will the funeral also be the same one day? So far, it still seems to maintain a connection with physical space, as the need for the body to be laid to rest remains firm. One thinks of the hours-long queues the faithful have endured for a final farewell to the body of Queen Elizabeth. It seems legitimate to ask, however, whether it is not possible that the evolution of infosphere funerary practices will lead us to the loss of this last connection with physical space as well. One wonders, that is, what will happen if, along with the growth in the numbers of web-based memorials, the practices of cremation and scattering of ashes or those burial goals on which science is working, such as the Capsule Mundi, continue to grow. Should cemeteries and physical spaces of deposition lose the reason for their very existence, while the Internet continues to take space in global everyday existence, is it possible that the funeral will also lose its connection to the body and its deposition? Will cemeteries still exist? Will funerals still exist? Or will there simply be someone who will be instructed and paid to take care, in complete solitude, of our bodies, putting them back into the circle of nature, while, in the meantime, the community of loved ones, oblivious of our bodies, will be celebrating us on the Net? Maybe a single reporter filming the event will suffice, while the ceremony takes place online or who knows where? Or will we even get to the point that the end of the body will no longer interest us, because man will no longer be his body, but the whole map of himself that he will have built on the Internet? Is this the direction he is going? To answer we will need to update again in a few years.| File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14242/183704
URN:NBN:IT:UNISTRADA-183704