Lifestyles, Lifetables, and Lifelines: Media and Mortality Risk

We aren’t at risk of dying; we will die. Death is one of our few inevitabilities. Nevertheless, for at least 300 years Western Anglophone media have tracked lives, quantified mortality risks, and sought to predict the trajectory of a human life. Entire industries and habits of thought have been built and sustained through the mediation of mortality. But for the subject, the person who is being quantified, whose risk of death is being foretold as something other than just certain—what are the imagined benefits and costs? Who or what else can be read as a beneficiary of the age of risk and prediction? What relational structures are implied, created, or maintained by mediations of mortality risk and are the logics of protection the same as those of care?

Jacqueline Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College, where she runs the Digital Justice Lab. She specializes in mathematic and computational media and their histories, using humanistic and creative methods in her histories and analyses. Her books include Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media and the co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (with Elizabeth Losh). Her current projects include creative considerations of the energy consumption of data centers and twenty-first-century streaming, cloud computing, and data storage, as well as a book on the machines and systems of mortality in the United States. She and Elizabeth Losh are the series co-editors for MIT Press’s Media Origins series, which focuses on histories of our media through sociocultural lenses, including the practices and politics of digital labor.