Lex Berko writes in The Atlantic that although webcasting has been around since the mid-1990s, livestreamed funerals have only begun to go mainstream in the last few years and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) has only this year introduced a new funeral webcasting license that permits funeral homes to legally webcast funerals that include copyrighted music. The webcast service’s growing appeal is, by all accounts, a result of the increasing mobility of modern society. Remote participation is often the only option for those who live far away or have other barriers—financial, temporal, health-related—barring them from attending a funeral. “It’s not designed to replace folks attending funerals,” says Walker Posey. “A lot of folks just don’t live where their family grew up and it’s difficult to get back and forth.” But some funeral directors question if online funerals are helpful to the grieving process and eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one. What happens if there’s a technical problem with the webcast—will we grieve even more knowing we missed the service in person and online? Does webcasting bode well for the future of death acceptance or does it only promote of our further alienation from that inevitable moment? “The physical dead body is proof of death, tangible evidence that the person we love is gone, and that we will someday be gone as well,” says Caitlin Doughty, a death theorist and mortician. “To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?”
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @08:40AM
Do you like money? If you like money like I like money, you don't have any time to watch your family die out! You're too busy chasing that money! You gotta go where the money is, bro, and leave your family to rot. Rot and die and be a cheap funeral. Don't bother starting your own family, either. They'll just spend your money. And you like MONEY. Money is for WINNERS. Winners who aren't reproducing, no, and you know what happens when you don't reproduce, bro? You are EXTINCT. But the MONEY IS THE IMPORTANT THING. It's how you keep SCORE, bro, so EVERYBODY KNOWS you're a WINNER.